My Cyborg Christmas in the Glass Castle

Look, I hate clutter. I didn’t buy any of this stuff.

I feel a pit in my stomach every time someone gives my partner and me an electronic appliance for use in our one-bedroom apartment. Not to seem ungrateful this time of year, but how can we not when a square foot of real estate in Vancouver costs about $1,000 and rents for $48 a year?

There’s the Frigidaire air fryer we received at the height of the pandemic craze. There are three waffle makers: one for pizzelles, one for bubble waffles, one for mini Eggos. There’s the President’s Choice two-slice glass toaster, which is admittedly pretty cool if you’re the kind of couple who likes to watch bread brown together. There’s the SoyQuick soymilk machine, which was a miracle until my partner developed a soy allergy. I could go on: the Thermos thermal cooker, the Cuisinart ice cream maker, the Magic Bullet with its multiple cups and blades.

The only thing worse than receiving a big hunk of metal is realizing you can’t live without it. Who among us does not know that universal feeling of craving fresh soymilk from the bean, a mini Eggo from the iron or the satisfying sight of the Maillard reaction working its magic on not one but two slices of bread through a pane of glass? These are primal, human stirrings.

Aside from electronic appliances, we have much more novelty kitchenware like heart-shaped skillet pans and dishware emblazoned with dated phrases like “Yasss.” I’m not sure what’s worse: the social terror of facing a guest inquiring about a gift that we Marie Kondo-ed or letting those objects take up valuable closet space.

But just as the Christ child had his trio of magi and Scrooge his trio of Christmas ghosts, this year-end story of mine also features a life-changing trinity: a trio of space-hogging machines that I can no longer live without in our age of climate crisis.

Gold

Danby 14,000 BTU Ultra Quiet Portable Air Conditioner with Voice Control and Rapid Cooling: This 14,000 BTU portable air conditioner by Danby is perfect for cooling living spaces up to 700 square feet. With Danby’s patented Silencer Technology™, your home will stay cool and comfortable without you noticing. The Ionizer function helps filter allergens and remove unwanted bacteria and odors. Its four castors make this unit easy to move from room to room and the quick-connect hose feature makes it easy to install...

We live in one of those Vancouver towers with big windows, so when the heat dome hit in the middle of a pandemic summer, we felt like we were roasting alive. The vinyl melted off our blinds with a chemical stink. The leaves fell off of our potted money tree. The leftover rice I was too lazy to remove from the rice cooker blossomed with mould. Zoom calls were off that week as I tapped away on the keyboard wearing only a pair of underwear, sprinting between the desk and the bathroom for cold showers when I overheated.

Among my friends that summer, only two questions were asked: “Did you get one?” and “How many BTUs does it have?” The finer points of choosing an air conditioner were lost to me as they sat around comparing BTUs and split-system units as if they were musing about sports cars or single-malt whiskey.

When the air conditioners returned to stock after that mad summer, my partner insisted that we use my father’s Costco card and nab a fancy one that was $200 off during a Black Friday sale to survive an unpredictable future in climate change.

I agreed, but was unprepared for the 81-pound monstrosity that showed up at our apartment one day: a sleek, shapeless machine that landed in our living room like the monolith from 2001. The highly technical manual boasted of features like voice control, as if I’d want to have a conversation with the machine, and patented Silencer Technology™, as if I had just purchased a firearm.

We rolled it out the following summer like a battering ram at the gates of hell. No more running around sweating in my underwear, but this particular model proved to be overkill. Our apartment became so chilly that I wore sweaters, took hot showers and slept with two blankets. The summer of our discontent, made glorious winter.

Frankincense

Levoit Air Purifier Core 300: QUICKLY BREATHE FRESH AIR: What can you do in 12 minutes? Open LEVOIT Air Purifiers Core 300 for home bedroom, after getting washed, then enjoy fresh air and fall asleep… GOOD LOOKING and GOOD GUARANTEE: Stylish design from California...

I woke up one morning with a terrible headache and a sore throat thinking I had finally caught COVID. But one look outside confirmed what it actually was: wildfire smoke.

While I love the smell of barbecue, I don’t love pain and nausea.

Come wildfire season, Vancouver makes it into rankings of the worst air in the world. Smoke during the pandemic felt especially cruel considering that the outdoors was one of the few places of solace during pandemic lockdown. Now, even that was taken away from us. Our outdoor strolls to stretch our work-from-home legs became indoor strolls while masked at Metrotown mall, flanked by new sneakers and discount jeans rather than trees and flowers.

Thankfully, my asthmatic brother had a spare air purifier. Like the air conditioner, it looked futuristic, a white cylinder with blue lights that operated with a gentle whirr.

Whenever I lie in bed under starless smoky skies, I think how strange it is that my health and comfort are tied to yet another gadget, purring peacefully as it purifies air for my lungs.

Myrrh

The HQ 1903 Fan Heater: ...a neat and stylish heater which adds a great boost of heat without standing out in the room. This heater is built with efficiency in mind. With its dark and silvery looks, and integrated carry handle and top-mounted control dials it has great form as well as function. It is tip-over safe and has overheat protection built-in and has a cool-touch exterior, making this heater highly user-friendly.

Just as our apartment’s big windows broil us in the summer, they also cause us to freeze in the winter. To survive we bought an HQ 1903 Fan Heater from the Best Shop at Lansdowne Mall. It’s a powerful little guy that spits out hot air. Every time I turn it on, my mind is on the energy bill because it costs about $2 a day to run.

I don’t know about the “dark and silvery looks” claimed in the product description, but even more dubious is the “overheat protection.” Once when attempting to unplug it, a shower of sparks burst into the air.

Back to the glass castle

I hate that these infernal contraptions and their ugly wires have moved into our living space, but I’ve come to a point where life at home has become inseparable with these machines.

It’s no secret that glassy apartments are maladapted environments for human habitation, with fierce debate in energy efficiency circles. BC Hydro calls them “glass castles,” “poor insulators” with an “energy disadvantage.” If a building does not have central cooling, a portable air conditioner like my Danby will guzzle 10 times more energy than if it did.

An engineering professor at the University of Waterloo has a harsher conclusion of this growing problem: these homes are “energy-consuming nightmares.”

In another way, these homes are well-adapted: they’re highly evolved financial organisms for stimulating quick transactions to maximize profit, so no wonder they’ve become the dominant new species in our housing ecosystem. And hey, those big windows are undeniably pretty, meeting the fantasies of presale pamphlets and 360-degree home tours. It’s just that we all need to adopt a family of machines to Band-Aid the dysfunctions they were designed with.

Science fiction tends to portray cyborgs as humans with brain implants or mechanical arms. But there is another definition with a lower requirement: a biosocial definition argues that any human whose life is augmented by technology is essentially a cyborg.

My three machines might as well be external organs considering how I regularly rouse them from slumber with the seasons to serve as my lungs and hypothalamus. With every disaster we’ve created for ourselves, we’ve turned not to a solution but exciting new purchases. Ray Bradbury is proving prophetic; one of his short stories describes a post-apocalyptic future in which nuclear war has wiped us out, but the gadgets in one suburban house carry on to cook breakfast and clean the floors.

It’s not lost on me that I do have a roof over my head and am in a position where I can even pay to participate in cyborg life to regulate my body. The race to augment our bodies and habitats in a worsening climate is already leaving people behind. The heat dome last year that killed 619 people prompted one Green politician to say that “telling British Columbians to purchase air conditioners, heat pumps, thermal blinds, fans and digital thermometers is out of touch with the cost of living in this province.”

Then there are the increasingly harsh winter storms, credited to climate change. With this year’s snow, warming centers are already maxed for those without homes. And on the Wednesday before Christmas at 5 p.m., British Columbians broke the record for most energy used in our history. For those who remember Jimmy Carter’s famous speech, our impending catastrophe isn’t one that putting on a sweater can solve.

Yes, it feels nice in the summer to revel in the cooling breeze of my Danby with Silencer Technology™ and to sleep breathing the clean air of my Levoit Core 300. With a white Christmas having already come to Vancouver this year, I’m warming my feet in the radiance of the HQ 1903 Fan Heater.

I just wish that capitalism and climate change didn’t have to make cyborgs of us all.

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