AC-Induced Existential Crises and the Self-Sufficient Single Lady: A Beginner's Guide

Pictured: Malevolence

Congratulations!  You're an Independent Single Lady!  You take care of business when there is such which has needs of which to be taken care!  Throw your hat up in the air.

At some point in your success-twirling dance, you will become very sweaty, and notice that your AC is broken.  Probably your first tip-off will be the screeching death throes of the motor.  So you set to cycling through fan speeds at different tempos to trick it, doing the turn-on-turn-off dance to see if maybe it's just exhausted? And then resort to violence, but only as a last resort because you want your security deposit back some day.

But you do it all nonchalantly because fixing problems self-sufficiently is all in the day's work of the Self-Sufficient Single Lady, and Success!  You've gotten the squealing to stop.  Oh that's because the motor is no longer running.

You will call your landlord, who says he'll come over soon to check it out.  Realizing that Check It Out does not equal Send Someone Over To Install A New Unit and that soon does not equal now, you begin to look for new apartments.  There's no way you're actually going to move, you're way too lazy and now, too sweaty, to put in the effort.  But you just want to send him some karmic energy rays to give him nightmares about having to find a new tenant.  You will discover that every other apartment in the city is way less space for way more money and no parking, and decide that while you can't afford to not be stuck here in this hothouse, you can afford this pint of Half Baked and this bottle of Merlot.

It will suddenly be one hundred degrees out every single day, because of course it will.

Your landlord will magically produce a spare AC unit, but he will not be able to install it in its alcove himself and it will OF COURSE be a holiday weekend when no one else will be around to install it, either.  But it functions so you both decide to set it on the coffee table, plug it in, and let 'er rip.

Not long after he leaves you will discover that while the three feet in front of the unit are cool, the entire rest of your apartment is scorching because the AC has been blowing out hot air in every other direction.  You immediately have a hallucination of dying all alone in your tiny AC-less apartment and being found only weeks later after you've been half-eaten by rats, and you decide that the unit is also spewing exhaust and the situation is now untenable.

But you're not beaten yet!  You're going to move that unit and prop it up in the only window that opens, the little one who's ledge is kinda halfway up the wall!  And it's going to work because you're a Self-Sufficient Single Lady and also an Engineer IRL!  AND you can totally lift it yourself because you work out!  Pat yourself on the back, and warm up your biceps.

At the same moment when the tidal wave of condensation soaks your jeans and the carpet, you will come to the realization that you have not opened the window wide enough.

It is in this moment of physical and emotional weakness, with the AC unit perched precariously between your leg and the window ledge but not in the window, trying to figure out which type of movement will get you and your apartment the least amount of wet (security deposit!) that you will be visited by a demon:

You couldn't just get a grown-up job.  If you weren't so stubborn about having ridiculous dreams and just made practical decisions.  Ha!  Weren't you the smarty-pants who was just telling schoolchildren that you didn't mind that your job didn't pay you anything because loving your work is more important to you?  You COULD be in a nice apartment right now; a bigger one, in Center City!  One with central air conditioning.  That works.  And why isn't there anyone here to open that window wider while you balance that unit?  Because you're sooooo picky about boys.  You threw away all those decent-enough boys because they weren't exciting enough for you, and now you're all alone, and even your half-baked solution to this problem isn't going to work because there's no one there to help.  This is your Self-Sufficient Single-Lady life? You're stuck in a tiny, hot apartment that you can't afford to move out of, all alone, holding an air-conditioner.

Remember, you have to speak the demon's name in order to compell it back to Hell:

Mother, I thought I told you not to call me.

 Like people who lift semi trucks off of their pinned children, you will not remember how you got the air-conditioner wedged into the window. But you will remember the feeling of smug satisfaction when you prop it up on your Complete Works of William Shakespeare so that it will drain out the window in the back and not into your house.

Because you are now held hostage by an air conditioning unit, confined to your apartment all weekend because your first-floor window is wide-open to the street, the early effects of Stockholm Syndrome will make you think the unit is laughing at you when it starts to drip condensation out its front.  Heavily.

You will thank god for the day your Ikea impulse-buying disease and your "there's no such thing as too many towels" philosophy collided, because all of those formerly-superfluous towels will soon be essential to your furniture's well-being. As will your bucket, which the unit will fill according to its own caprices and not according to any logic. So you will leave for work for ten hours and it will be halfway full, but take a two-hour trip to the grocery store and come back to find it overflowing.  Conveniently, it is overflowing down the wall right next to where the wall outlet is, so you will now possibly die in a fire.  Your Stockholm Syndrome will lead you to believe this is an Enhanced Interrogation Technique, and you will wonder what The Unit wants from you.

But after an entire week of isolation and living according to The Unit's needs, and with your recycling bin filled up by many, many empty bottles of wine, you will come to find the metaphorical cracks of light peaking through the curtains you shoved in the window to provide some insulation and theft-deterrence.  When you are awakened in the night by the special drip-sound that means the water level is close to the top of the bucket again even though it's only been two hours, you will feel like you have adopted a puppy and remind yourself, that, just like a puppy, The Unit will eventually relieve itself elsewhere than all over your apartment.

Then after a Google search you will finally figure out that the numbers on the display range from 19-31 because The Unit is in Celsius and not Fahrenheit, and you will simply say "of course it is." And for the first time in a week you will laugh.

You will sit in the cold, cold, air-conditioned dark, and you will laugh.