How I Made Peace With That Glazed Feeling of Summer

Telling people you live in Los Angeles is like showing up at a party with a hooker. People feel free to leer and ask inappropriate questions: Isn’t everyone there stupid? How can you stand all that fakeness? Are your breasts real?

Americans love to despise Los Angeles even more than they love to despise New York, and I say this as a New Yorker. While the rest of the world hates America for being shallow, juvenile and self-indulgent, America turns to Los Angeles and hates it for those same reasons. You could say that Los Angeles is the America of America.

Summer is at the heart of this irrational loathing. Not actual summer, so much as the ethos of summer that L.A., supposedly, represents. The logic goes something like this: Summer, in moderation, is good. It’s OK to read Jackie Collins and go to non-Oscar-caliber movies in the summer. It’s fine to start drinking at 2 in the afternoon if it’s a Saturday in summer and you’re firing up the barbecue. Go ahead and wear those short shorts, if it’s June and you’ve got the legs for them. Summer is meant to be as lightweight and airy as a beach ball; God planned it that way to reward us for suffering through winter.

But then there’s Los Angeles, the city that takes summer too far. It’s summer here all the time, as the rest of the country sees it, and that seasonal imbalance has addled Angelenos’ brains and thrown our values out of whack. We think in blond. We can’t help it. Does anyone doubt that the reason Los Angeles is a godless place that produces movies in which no one suffers real consequences for their actions is because the people who live here have been deluded into thinking that they can stay young and beautiful forever, and they think that because they live in a city where it’s always summer and they never experience the rhythm of life where things die in winter and are reborn in spring, and that’s the problem with Los Angeles?

All of that is true, of course, except the premise. There are seasons in Los Angeles--mild ones, but they do exist. Summer is the worst one. The first summer after I moved here, I spent two weeks in July driving my 1984 Volvo with no air-conditioning around Los Angeles looking for doughnut shops, doing a radio story about why there are so many doughnut shops in L.A. I was panting from the heat. I felt woozy.

In between stops--King Donut, Jubilee Donut, Best Donut, Yum Yum Donut, Mom’s Donuts and Chinese Food to Go--I ranted to myself that this was not what I signed up for when I moved to Los Angeles. This was not temperate; this was almost as bad as summers in Chicago or New York. Worse, in fact, because in other cities you can get places in summer by walking or riding a bike but in L.A. you have to drive, and the one place you don’t want to be in summer is stuck in a car.

But I didn’t leave Los Angeles after that summer, even though I’d planned on living here only six months--just long enough to be able to make fun of it knowledgeably when I moved to New York. I got a car with air-conditioning and settled in. I liked Los Angeles.

The truth is, summer is lame everywhere. It’s the most over-hyped season of the year, not a vacation so much as the expectation of a vacation, basically three months of New Year’s Eves where the only possible reason you wouldn’t be enjoying yourself to the fullest is that you’re not thin enough, outdoorsy enough or drunk enough.

The perpetrators of this myth of summer being the best time of year are not, I would argue, Angelenos, but rather the residents of other cities, where the rest of the year is so cold, damp and dark that any glimpse of sunshine sends them scurrying to the beach and dragging out the barbecue, whether they want to do those things or not. Bathing suits are donned by people who clearly hate wearing them. Volleyball is played by people who would rather be at a cafe drinking iced coffee but who have convinced themselves that they will never find love if they don’t get some sand in their toes. Summer has become one long, dreary exhortation to “Go for it!”

Los Angeles is a good place to get over all that. It’s not summer here all the time, but it is sunny most of the year, and that luxury gives us the chance to free ourselves from the tyranny of summer. Los Angeles is where I finally faced summer, saw it for what it was--and wasn’t--and learned to enjoy it on my own terms, which are: I will work every day during summer and not feel like a drone for doing so, because I like my work and because I usually find it unpleasantly hot during the day in summer. I will go running around the Silver Lake reservoir at 7:30 p.m. and be glad that it’s still light out, but I will not expect myself to do this every night. I will invite friends over for drinks or a barbecue in the backyard only as often as seems fun and easy. I will encourage myself to go for a walk in the Angeles National Forest one day because it’s cool there even in summer and the woods remind me of New England. I will not hide my eagerness to wear my tiny, clingy-but-gauzy pink dress to any party I am invited to. I will read inside all day on a sunny Saturday if that’s what I want to do, or go to a movie in the middle of the afternoon, or go shopping if I can afford it.

And if I spend every day for two weeks driving around to mini strip-malls, finding out that a doughnut empire was created in Southern California by Cambodians fleeing the Khmer Rouge, I will not spend one second of that time believing I should be at the beach.

Nancy Updike is a writer and independent radio producer in Los Angeles.