When I moved from South Texas – where even phone booths have air conditioning – to the good ol’ Marina here in L.A., people said, “You don’t need air conditioning. It’s never that hot here!” Apparently these people have been inbred with camels.

When my thermostat reads 90 degrees and that’s only because that’s as high as the little numbers go, I need air conditioning. Those mythical ocean breezes only blow if your windows face the actual ocean, and having windows that face the water will increase your monthly rent by the gross national product of Paraguay. So I sweat. I sweat, and I am forced to ponder my wardrobe.

What I really need are some new shorts, I think. I bought most of the shorts I still own and wear sometime between the ninth and tenth grades. Given that I’m now going to college reunions, that was some time ago. But buying new shorts is not as easy as it sounds.

Shorts come in two styles. Style No. 1 requires special underpants. Seriously. They are cut so short in the “legs” – I use the term loosely – and so low at the waistband, you must have special underpants to keep them from sticking out in all the places where fabric used to be. Victoria’s Secret is filling this niche, by the way. There you can purchase an extreme low-rise V-string. Basically this is six inches of elastic and a band-aid.

Style No. 2 is only available at stores that specialize in matching sweater sets. They’re what my mother used to call “walking shorts.” Basically they go down to your knees, up to your rib cage and involve elastic waistbands and enough fabric to serve as a parachute in an emergency.

This means that anyone not wishing to be mistaken for a hooker on her day off but who is still too young to qualify for AARP is just plain screwed. Screwed and sweating in their non-water-side, 90-degree apartments.

And then I saw it. It came like an angel of mercy in the mail. A catalogue. A catalogue that had amongst all the pairs of hooker shorts, one pair of mid-thigh length cargo shorts! No special underpants required! No elastic waistbands! I immediately logged onto the website and order two different colors. “Back ordered!” the website yelled at me and then laughed its Dr. Evil laugh.

I considered my options. I could find out where the manufacturer was located, get a passport, fly to what is surely a third world country and wrestle the newly finished shorts from the grasp of a small Asian seamstress making 3 cents an hour. Feasible, I decided, but it would greatly increase the end price of the shorts. Sigh. I went back to the website and authorized the back order. Mid-August, it said to me, if you’re lucky.

So in the meantime, I’ll be here, waiting for the UPS man and dreaming of air conditioning.