The one in which I get really patriotic about American hygiene.

Right now here in Evanston we're in that horrible last stretch of hot weather before the final plunge into Arctic temperatures that will see us through May. Sure, it may be sunny and 78 degrees, but no one can enjoy the weather because we all know that this is the end. This is it. When the temperature sinks back down on Wednesday, it ain't coming back up. It's like that horrible moment when you're at the top of a roller coaster about to plummet down a steep drop and you suddenly realize that you're terrified of roller coasters....but, of course, it's too late, and down you'll go.

What's really frustrating about this "nice" weather though isn't just that it's a sort of depressing last hurrah (it actually makes me think of the mass suicide at Masada). The really frustrating thing about it is that it turns my French classroom into a sauna. There's something funny with the building in general in that, even in the midst of a brutal Midwestern winter, it still manages to be warmer and wetter than a Tel Aviv armpit. Normally such armpitness can be countered with air conditioning, but the AC unit is so old that it rattles and makes a noise worse than a toddler banging pots and pans together, which is obviously not conducive to language learning. And so we have to sit in sweaty, sweaty silence. I'm not entirely sure why they can't update the AC units in the building. The university has billions of dollars in the endowment fund...just sitting there...not buying new AC units.

Anyway, when I say the room gets sweaty, that doesn't fully capture the awfulness. I mean that the room has a level of heat so oppressive that you can actually taste it. Imagine that: TASTING heat. You look around and everyone is dripping with sweat, and you can barely hear the teacher because you're so sweaty that your ears feel like they're underwater. You feel like you're in the boiler room of the Titanic (well, before it filled up with water and presumably got much, much colder). It reminds me of those times back in LA when the temperature would get over 100 degrees and my dad would still refuse to turn on the AC, and so I would just lie face down on the floor of my room, spread eagle in my khaki pants (my wardrobe was exclusively khaki pants until I went to college), and I'd just pray to die, just for the heat to end. It's the sort of heat that makes me understand why corseted women of previous eras would faint all the time, because for most of French class I silently wonder to myself if I could get away with simply ripping off all of my clothing in the middle of class and nonchalantly continuing to conjugate verbs in the subjunctive while completely bare-ass naked. On my better days I wonder if I could just go akimba (bra-less), just to have a fraction less warmth surrounding me. Then I think to myself, well, if I can't take off all of my clothing, if only I could just faint at will. Then they'd have to take me to the hospital and it'd be socially acceptable for me to just wear a dress made out of paper.

It reminded me of the oppressive heat I'd sometimes feel on crowded buses in Tel Aviv or Italy, or on the London Underground, or the Paris Metro. That trapped, suffocating heat. But wait. Where's the smell?

I took a momentary break from fantasizing about Hulk-ing out of all of my clothing and instead cautiously sniffed the air. Sure, it wasn't exactly a good smell...but when you considered how rapidly pits stains were growing in that class, it sure didn't smell so bad. It was nothing like the traumatizing smells I've experienced in other places. In Israel, for example, there's the lethal combination of a water shortage and high costs for deodorant, which makes getting on a crowded bus during the summer more dangerous than if there were suicide bombers on it. And that's not to pick on just Israel. In other places, such as France, there's simply "traditional"--yeah, we'll call it "traditional"--notions about bathing, such as the notion that anything more than three baths a year is an extravagance. But G-d bless us, here in America, environment be damned, I know several people who insist on two showers a day. We throw caution to the wind and use cancer-causing antiperspirants like it's our job. We might be destroying the environment and ourselves, but damn it, at least we're not going to smell like Europeans. And so, trapped in this room of stale sweat, at least it didn't smell like sweat.

So take a good, long whiff of that, kids. That's the smell of the Founding Fathers, Freedom, and Apple Pie. That's the BO of America, boys.