Adjustment by Osmosis

When I first moved to Hawaii, I was always uncomfortably warm.  It was not an over the top kind of discomfort, but rather an insidious sort.  In fact, I often didn't know I was uncomfortable until I would enter the local grocery store, Foodland.  Foodland is the only building I entered on a regular basis in my first month in Hawaii that was air conditioned.

In short, that means that Foodland was my only refuge from the warm, wet, tropical air of the islands.  The humidity here seeps into everything.  Within a matter of hours of our arrival, everything we own that had any metal in it began to rust.  Water is the one inescapable force on the island.  It surrounds us.  It penetrates us.  It makes us slightly damp no matter how strenuously we avoid exercise.

But not Foodland.  Foodland was cool and dry and inviting.  Foodland was air conditioning nirvana.

The funny thing was, the humidity was not really as annoying as I had anticipated.  On an annoying scale that ranges from swinging on a hammock while listening to lapping waves (least annoying) to having that cell phone guy constantly repeating "Can you hear me now?  Can you hear me now?  Can you hear me now?" right in your face (most annoying), I would say that the humidity ranked right around a TV playing in the background while you are reading.  Sure it is annoying, but only if you stop and think about it.  Otherwise it fades into the background so that it hardly even registers.  You really only notice it is annoying when someone turns it off and you feel the part of your brain that registers minuscule amounts of annoyance switch off.  It is a sigh of relief you didn't know you were holding in.

That is how the humidity was to me.  I would leave my house to walk over to Foodland, thinking about important things like soup or cookies or apartheid.  I wouldn't even notice that my 200 meter, 3 minute walk had caused a slight sheen of perspiration, or that my body temperature was ever so slightly elevated.  Until I walked into Foodland.  As soon as I walked out of the humidity into the air conditioning it was like someone had turned off the TV in the background.  I hadn't really been paying attention to it, but now that it was gone I felt more at ease.

Eventually, after purchasing soup and cookies, I would leave Foodland and the weight of the air as I walked through the door would settle down on to me.  It was uncomfortable at first, but by the time I got to my house I had forgotten all about it.

That was a year ago.

Just a few weeks ago I saw a movie.  It must not have been a very good movie, because I don't even remember what it was.  What I do remember is this.  After spending two hours in the movie theater, I stepped outside and the heavy Hawaiian air settled on to me.  And I realized that the TV had been on in the background the whole time I was in the air conditioned movie theater.  But once I stepped outside ... it stopped.