Withering Glance: How cold we are, even in summer

Rick Nelson and Claude Peck dispense unasked-for advice about clothing, etiquette, culture, relationships, grooming and more.

CP: Odd how cold I often am, even on summer's most sweltering days. At the office, I need a little slip-on upper-arm sweaterlet. Which might not look that ultra-masculine.

RN: Who cares? On the days when the temperature at our workplace is positively meat locker-like — basically May through October — I find myself daydreaming about afghans. And space heaters.

CP: We could have minor surgeries done here at the newspaper in July, without the burdensome expense of anesthesia. At home, meanwhile, Mr. Green Jeans has the thermo set at 79, so that I might wake up each night in a puddle of, well, perspiration.

RN: If we're talking puddles and sleep, for your sake I'm relieved to know that it's perspiration-driven.

CP: If I weren't shivering all winter or sweating away the summer weeks, I suppose I could pause to praise June, with its prime pleasure: open windows flooding one's sleeping chambers with temperate nighttime air. Air conditioning makes me feel mildly ill all the time.

RN: Same here. I'm grateful, yet its canned quality also tends to make me a little bit nuts.

RN: Ditto. My thin Nordic blood can barely manage our few weeks of punishing heat indexes. My childhood home was A/C-free until I was 17. How did we survive?

CP: For me, it was a cold compress and a fainting couch.

RN: Those who take universal A/C for granted will never understand this, but, when I was a kid, Brookdale marketed its A/C with signs that read, "Come on in, it's a cool 72 in here."

CP: I would have showed up with a cot and a chenille bedspread.

RN: The tough calls are movie theaters. You arrive dressed for July, but once inside you wish you were outfitted for January.

RN: At "Red 2" last week, I was shivering under my sunburn and using my bucket of popcorn as a handwarmer.

CP: Are you a leave-it-on household? Like my former neighbors, who hit the A/C on Memorial Day and let 'er rip till mid-September?

RN: We turn it off when we're not home. We're fortunate. Our A/C is the high-velocity variety, and it cools the entire house in five minutes flat. I worship it. You?

CP: With so many neighbors asleep in my basement, I don't dare turn it off.

RN: Bribing people with the A/C, eh? I suppose there are worse ways of making friends.