Welcome to Summertime! Population: The Northern Hemisphere! Maybe you’re lucky enough to have an air conditioner (and thus probably a 401K, and diamond-encrusted sink fixtures, and a collection of trained monkeys in your closet that come out and dance for you whenever your whims desire). Alternatively, maybe you aren’t awesome/powerful/rich enough for any of these things. How can you survive without some sort of artificially cooled air circulating machine device?

1. Clothes are for aristocrats and debutants. Ditch them. Yes, all the available seating in your abode will become coated in a thin film of your sweat, but it’s a small price to pay for relative comfort. I suggest at least keeping on a pair of undawarez (NO NOT A BRA ARE YOU STUPID WHO WEARS THOSE AT HOME), lest your delectables get the itchy chafey sweaty nasties. If I find out you chose a thong over a sensible pair of cotton panties I’m going to come over there and punch you in the back of the head; nobody wears thongs because they’re comfortable, because they’re not. Especially not when your house is a balmy 85 (Fahrenheit; about 302 degrees Kelvin for those of you who have some concept of absolute zero) and that shit’s chilling out between your already subtropical butt cheeks.

2. Feel free to molest all the cool surfaces in your house. Lay your bed pillows cool-side-up on the floor and heft your weight onto them. G’head, press your groin in. Feels good, right? Once you’ve infected them with your body heat, find a non-window facing wall. Plaster yourself against it, arms and legs splayed. Open your freezer, dump all the food on the floor (two birds, one stone; you can lay on all this frozen food later), and stuff as much of yourself in it as will go. Any stray limbs you can’t fit in you can dangle in front of the open fridge.

3. None of your extremities should ever touch any of your other extremities. Based on the Property of Osmosisized Transitory Thermodynamic Multiplicatitude, the temperature of one of your body parts gets added to the temperature of whatever body part it’s touching, doubling the internal temperature of both. Is your arm a cozy 98.6 degrees and your stomach perhaps a slightly toastier 100.3 (because you just ate a bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos)? Put ‘em together and you’re at a sweltering 198.9 degrees! [1] Abandon all modesty, ye who enter your home. Legs spread at all times to aerate your genitalia. If your mother performed a series of sexual favors for the Powers that Be before you were born and thus earned you a set of breasts that naturally touch each other without you having to push them together with the insides if your elbows, you might want to wedge those guys apart with a bag of frozen hash browns.[2] Know that stupid game you played when you were little where you’d stick a finger in your sister’s face and taunt, “I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!” Yeah, play that with yourself.

4. Drink all of the water. You’re lucky enough to live in a first world country where your access to water is virtually limitless, and who are you to look a gift horse in the mouth? The problem here is that because your body is literally gushing sweat all over, you’ve pretty much depleted the giant tumbler of water you just downed before you even have time to walk out of the kitchen. I suggest leaving yourself a Hansel and Gretel-esque trail of water glasses throughout your house. Laying on the couch with a grocery bag of ice on your stomach? Look, there’s some water, right there on the side table! Crouched down on the floor, straining your arm and wiggling your fingers as you try to finagle the last Swedish Fish out from beneath the bed that you dropped back there a week ago and are now intensely craving? Hey, a glass of water is there on the floor right next to you! If you really want to up the badassery of your cooling regiment, just snake a garden hose in through your window and drag it around with you. Just remember to put a kink in that shit, or else you’ll…no…on second thought, maybe flooding your apartment with freezing hose water is exactly what you want to do.

–Katie Sisneros