2000-06-26

Pool Trauma

Summer is here. I'm sitting here in front of my computer wearing a pair of olive drab plaid old guy shorts and a sports bra, sweating like a pig and drinking a margarita, my little-boy bowl-cut pulled back in a bandana, horn-rims sliding off my nose. So attractive. Kev is quite the Lucky Stud, is he not?

I plan on keeping cool in a number of ways this summer. For one thing, I have decided that sleeveless shirts are my friends, and for the first time since 1981, I will wear them, as I have finally accepted the irrefutable fact that my upper arms look like hoagie rolls.

One thing I will not do, however, is swim in a pool.

Over the years, I have become quite pool-phobic. The chlorine fries my hair; pool water smells funny and hurts like fuck when it goes up your nose. I have very rarely had a good experience in a swimming pool.

It wasn't always this way. Growing up, my sister and I were obsessed with pools, since we lived on the beach and had no real need for one. On our family's frequent "camping" trips ("camping," for the ever-rugged McColgans, meant loading up Aunt Joan's Winnebago with Pringles, Tupperware and Archie Comic Digests, stopping at every Stuckey's from Raleigh to Orlando so Dad could load up on pecan logs and $3 t-shirts.), the evening's resting place was entirely based on Pool Factor. Do they have a pool? Dad, do they got a pool? Maaaa - do they got a pool?!

Pools were exciting, exotic. Friends with pools were wildly envied.

I think I really stopped being into pools after what has become known in my immediate family as (cleverly enough) "The Pool Incident." We were at Aunt Joan's. Aunt Joan's was a favorite destination by virtue of her in-ground pool, complete with wobbly pre-assembled cabana and jokey "signs" on the surrounding chain-link fence ("Welcome to Our Ool! Notice that there is no 'P' in our pool; we'd like it to stay that way!!!" Ha, ha, ha.) I and my eight billion cousins spent the afternoon playing Marco Polo and attempting zany dives off the diving board.

I was crazily splashing around in the shallow end when a Random Cousin spake thus: "There's a crap floatin' in the watahhhh!!!"

The pool was immediately evacuated, all the cousins pulled aside and interrogated. Dripping suits and trunks were stripped off and examined. Nobody would admit to doing it.

Later that evening, A Council of the Cousins convened, without my knowledge, and came to the conclusion that I did it, which they dutifully, and happily, reported to the Higher Assembly of Aunts & Uncles. I was mercilessly taunted, by my own pasty-skinned, snaggle-toothed kind, for the rest of that summer. True story.

Innit sad? I mean, it makes for a good excuse, no? Pool Traumatic Stress Disorder. The simple truth of the matter is that I sunburn like nobody's business.

lisamcc at 23:38:35

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