A Hot Flash is a feeling of sudden warmth, flushing, sweating and dizziness. This is generally a sign of menopause in older women, but anyone can get a hot flash every so often. My partner gets them daily, though I think he’s a weird superhuman robot type creature who runs about 10-15 degrees warmer than all other humans. Seriously. He insists on having the window wide open AND a fan running all night, no matter what the season or temperature. It could be minus forty outside and there’s a fan blasting delicious cold air onto our bodies. Of course, he sleeps naked and I sleep with about fifty layers of clothing on, including a winter jacket and snow pants. Sometimes I swear I can see my breath in the room. I suppose this bedtime ritual may come in handy in the future when I eventually do go through menopause and end up getting hot flashes. Probably by then his core temperature will have changed and he’ll stop being so warm and insist that we keep the fan off and the window sealed shut. I’ll be steaming hot and ready to faint from heatstroke churning within my own body and he’ll be comfortably warm and cozy under our nice duvet.
Sometimes I want to punch my partner in the junk.
Hot flashes are apparently one of the hardest things to deal with. A friend of mine used to work in an office with a Crazy Christian woman who had hot flashes. I don’t know if she ever confused them with the second coming of Christ, but she was definitely super homophobic and my friend is a lesbian so that situation didn’t bode well for either of them. This woman insisted on keeping the window to the room wide open where five other employees sat at their cubicles shivering and practically hypothermic from the cold, their fingers hardly able to type anymore, while Crazy got to wear those comfy cardigans that Crazy Christians always like to wear in winter. She didn’t consider that if she just took off her fucking cardigan, maybe she could close the window, even half-way, so as not to totally freeze out her co-workers. Oh, and once she took a long weekend specifically to fly to Ottawa to protest the same-sex marriage law that, of course, ended up passing back in 2005. Yup. Total douche-canoe. So while it may be important to try to be considerate of those who suffer from hot flashes, Crazy Christians and Selfish Partners need not apply for the sympathy get-out-of-hot-flash free card. You guys suck.
1. My mother gets hot flashes and sometimes she starts hallucinating about her times at burning man. She gets all crazy and high and starts chanting to the goddess about free love. It makes me not want to invite friends over. Once she tried to make out with my boyfriend because she thought he was the lover who got her pregnant, the one who told her he’d stay with her but ended up bumping uglies with Sheila from the tent across the road.
2. Hot flashes aren’t the same as love, but sometimes they feel similar.
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