How can it be August already? I don’t like August because there are too many birthdays for me to remember and because it means summer’s half over. Not that I’d mind it being over. It’s been so deathly hot lately in the city that I feel like I’m gonna, well, die. (”You just want to fly!”) While on a plane recently, there was an internal discussion that I’ve had many times before in a novel I was reading. This made me happy, then a little jealous. Here’s the internal discussion: Would you rather suffer from extreme heat, or extreme cold?

I remember asking myself this question during my preteen/teen years, specifically while walkng across the parking lot at Bernard’s Cafe and Deli in Willowbrook, IL, during the winter. It’d be well below zero and as I’d wait for Bill to unlock the car, I’d think about taking a steamy bath. Keep in mind I never thought about taking baths unless I was in the parking lot at Bernard’s. (That’s kind of creepy. I feel like I’m about to uncover something huge. But baths are beside the point.)

My mind would inevitably lead from baths to the question of which sort of extreme temperature I would rather suffer. The initial hypothetical just involved a sweltering summer day and a below-freezing winter night. No biggie. But then I’d take it a little further, make it more morbid. I’d wonder whether I’d rather freeze to death or burn to death, as if this was a legitimate offer of the sort typically made to junior-high girls in Illinois. What? I remember reasoning that it would take a lot longer to freeze to death, so I always leaned towards the burning.

I would later learn via ER, Chicago Hope, Scrubs, Strong Medicine, CSI, The Apprentice, and Grey’s Anatomy that burn victims no longer feel pain after their burns get to a certain degree. Okay, it actually wasn’t on The Apprentice but can’t you just picture Donald Trump announcing this fun fact in his choppy-sentence shouting voiceovers? It’d be like the scientific fun fact of each episode, brought to you by Domino’s. So it looks like I made the right choice of wanting to burn to death instead of freeze without even knowing it. (Very recently, I also learned the various stages of how the body freezes to death underwater in under ten minutes while watching a Discovery Channel show about crabbing called The Deadliest Catch at work. This reaffirmed how smart I was to go with the burning.)

Sidenote: I’m sitting at my desk, facing away from the coffe table. I have placed a large bag of Lay’s Kettle Cooked Mesquite Barbeque potato chips on the table behind me. I did this entirely on purpose, and I think I actually believed at the time that having to make the huge effort of turning around and rotating my arm to reach into the bag would make me not want to eat so many chips. Why did I think this would work? I have turned around at least 50 times by now, with some turns garnering more than one chip. What a horrible diet trick. Next time, I should try something really crazy — like, um, not buying chips.

Anyway, the book I was reading discussed how people always think the opposite season would be a lot better. So, if you were sweating profusely on a busy street in the summer, you’d imagine winter, which is nasty, treacherous, and induces depression, as a lovely, breezy, better-smelling way to go through life. You’d wish for winter quite desperately. But what people don’t realize is that it is truly impossible to accurately imagine the opposite season while suffering through the current one. The reason it’s impossible is that both extremes suck. We just delude ourselves into thinking anything’s better than what we have right at that time. (Look at me with the self-help-esque phrasing. WTF?)

Now I’m seriously concerned at why I seem to remember the Bernard’s parking lot as my childhood example of “cold.” Isn’t that weird?

And now I’m recalling all the really unfashionable winter outerwear I used to don in high school. The Cool Girls and I used to go around in these really thick solid-colored fleeces from J.Crew or Eddie Bauer. I actually remember really liking my forest green one from Lands’ End (a travesty!) and then feeling really inadequate after noticing how many kids had the “North Face” logo on their own fleeces. The Lands’ End ones never had a logo. Looking back, I’m proud of myself for not wearing a logo becuase now I despise them. At the time, though, I kind of felt left out. But it’s not like I couldn’t have acquired a North Face jacket if I’d found it truly necessary. Maybe something deep inside me was pre-rebelling to the idea of a logo. At any rate, I’m glad I “kept it real” with the Lands’ End fleece.

Wow, Lands’ End. Who even shops there? I’ve never even seen the catalog since I moved away from Illinois. This blast from the past has me thinking of a funny exchange in the second season of DR’s favorite show, The O.C. Lindsbree gushes over Marissa’s Marc Jacobs shoes, bag, skirt, shirt, sweater, lip gloss, etc., and instead of just saying thank you and keeping her mouth shut, Marissa finds it necessary to say, “Oh, thanks. I like your… backpack. Where’s it from?” Ha! Shut up, Marissa! Lindsbree cringes while stammering, “Um… L.L. Bean.” Can I just tell you guys I was rolling on the floor laughing at this point? Can I? Can I? ROFL people!!!

The best part about this profoundly embarrassing moment is that I started wincing for Lindsbree even before she started to answer. I knew it was going to be something typically Midwestern, something you could order from a big catalog, you know, because we don’t have any stores out there. Out there where the land just… ends. I was like “Oh, no, she’s gonna say Lands’ End.” But L.L. Bean is even funnier, because it’s basically the same thing as Lands’ End but the three syllables actually make saying it out loud more humorous and more embarrassing. It’s also just a dorky name. Bean. Hehe.

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And on a ridicuously high note, here’s a photo collage I just made, featuring my friend Peter, a bartender at Rose’s Turn, and Rob Corddry, a correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Enjoy.

Who dat?