On Air Conditioning (click for link)
Air conditioners
Took away our porch chairs
And froze our lives
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k
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posted by rabbi neil fleischmann @ 11:59 PM
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Tuesday, August 11, 2009
9 Comments:
This made me laugh, shake my head, and think, all at the same time.
I love it. I hope your summer is allowing you to recharge your batteries for the school year.
No fair - you said "folding chairs" which made the thinking a little more crucial.
Thanks.
You mean you saw that I edited it from folding chairs to porch chairs and you liked folding chairs better? I also changed freezing our lives to froze our lives.
People ask wht I'm doing over the summer and apparantly for most people - blogging is not an acceptable answer. So then I add - and taking a poetry class and I legitimize my summer existence in their minds (a bit).
I love writing, it is great. Thank G-d.
Other teachers would throw me out of the union if we had one for what I'm about to say - but I'd rather have the summer vacation days spread out through the whole year.
I just meant that I got your meaning initially, before the visuals and the reference to the porch chairs, but now I like the porch chairs and the photo. I like the idea. Poetry is fluid and so is appreciation!
Blogging is thinking and writing and sharing, so as long as you feel good its all worthwhile. Would you like the days spread through the year because shabbos takes a day from the weekend to write during the school year?
No, it's not about Shabbos. It's about 10 months of building an intense world outof delicately stacked playing cards. And then knocking that palace down. Then hybernating for two months, where that world doesn't exist. Then rebuilding it again non-stop for ten months. I try to explain it here - http://rabbifleischmann.blogspot.com/2009/06/nothing-up-my-sleeves.html
I think a/c is one of the world's greatest inventions. It's right up there with sliced bread and indoor plumbing.
Kishke...i agree with you and i might add sodium pentathol...it's been a dentist week...and it's back again tomorrow...ugh.
I love air conditioning -- I'm not a hot/humid person by constitution -- but I also enjoy sitting outside on an Adirondack chair or "granny rocker" on the front porch, even on hot days. I have fond memories of my grandparents' front porch in Fairhaven, MA, when I was very little. Their neighbors would walk by and greet Grandma and Grandpa and get caught up on the town news. During the Hurricane of '54, I stood on that porch with Grandpa and watched firemen in rowboats paddling up and down the flooded streets. It was like a reverse stage, a balcony where we could watch things happen.
Not one of the five houses we've owned in 34 years of marriage has lacked a front porch or deck; it's one of those requirements I have for my living space. For two years while Michael finished his PhD we rented a really nice, big apartment on the second floor -- but there was no porch, and I felt trapped, hemmed-in, cut off from life at street level.
Thanks for bringing this up. I have many good memories of front porches on both sides of my family, and many an old photograph of great-great ancestors posing in rockers on porches decades and even a century and a half ago.
I enjoy air conditioning and appreciated your comments K & RR. I came not to bury air conditioning... I was looking at a specific angle, the nostalgic element of the porch/stoop, driveway/sidewalk hangout sessions that seem, mostly, a thing of the past. A - you really got this and I appreciate your memories and thoughts on topic. In a recent conversation with a friend this lost phenomenon came up and my friend suggested that AC (not the place, though that's a topic for another time) was, to some extent, responsible for the decrease in outside summer socialization. That's when I thought of the expression of air conditioning freezing our lives, which I liked, even though some of my best friends are air conditioners.
K - Your comment about AC reminded me of a cartoon in wich a guy first figures out how to slice bread and exclaims to his wife, "This is the greatest thing since... since... um..."
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