pools – hannah ananas

Love, love me do

Today, I have been angry and frustrated and annoyed with most of the world around me.

The simplest of things have sent me emotionally flying off the handle.

Though, I have maintained calm enough in my interactions so as not to have this be obvious and/or offensive to anyone today… the whole digital interaction certainly makes that easier to manage.

Nonetheless, I have felt myself ready to curse and throw things at people throughout the day, and have been borderline tears at almost any given moment.

For weeks, I have already been stressed as people ask me, “How are you?”

I already wrote and shared a song that declares ‘No, I’m not okay, so, please, stop asking… I’ll get there eventually, but just stop asking for right now, please.’

I have begun opting to decline answering the question and to move forward in the conversation… people find it odd, but they get over it, and I don’t have to be further stressed in attempting to answer the question.

(Because no, I will not lie and say that I’m fine, when I am not fine… period.)

Today, too many people were asking me about how I am, and in various ways… I wanted to yell and throw things at all of them…. and at the people who couldn’t get their s*** sorted when I explained how to do such-and-such for them…

It’s been rough and tough for me today, and on many levels…

And no, it is not premenstrual syndrome, aka PMS… wrong time of the month.

My closest friend here in town left today, moving to VA.

And I don’t miss her yet – nothing like that – but I have been presented more and more strongly with each passing day the question of whether I am living my life properly right now.

She’s not only my closest friend here, but the only one I see regularly… and I usually see her multiple times a week.

And it usually was just to hang out – nothing special (which made it all the more special as a friendship).

This now presents me with the fact that I have no close friends, and no daily friends here anymore.

I don’t have anyone to check in with or who will check in on me… I don’t have anyone just down the street anymore… I don’t have anyone to love me simply by spending time with me.

I’ve thought a lot about it today… what I want most right now is to have someone:

1) Tell me that I am loved,

2) Tell me, practically speaking, that what I am pursuing in my life right now gives value to the world around me, and will continue to do so the further I pursue it,

3) Tell me that I am on the right path for myself and my life right now – and that he/she has full faith in my ability to succeed profoundly with it all, and

4) Laugh with me… a lot… until my body hurts so much from the laughter, I don’t know if I can take it anymore.

For now, though, I will do my nighttime stretches and reading, and I will go to sleep.

The irony of this is that my daily reminder today is “Today, I remember to love and to be loved”… I still haven’t marked it as completed…

One fun plus to all of this stress and crying tonight – I managed not actually to cry until this evening for the first time, when a friend who knew I was struggling actually called me to check in for real on me – is that the slight bit of allergy edge to my nasal cavity right now makes it smell like a swimming pool whenever my nose starts to fill up with snot… and so, I am transported to sunny pool days of my childhood right after I blow my nose every time (from the crying)… and that makes me smile genuinely. 🙂

Post-a-day 2020

Just keep swimming…

I swam today! And I don’t mean just playing around in a pool. I swam laps. Half a mile did I swim, and, though this is nothing to what I once could accomplish in the same amount of time (a mile or more), I am incredibly proud of this half mile, because I have not swum a lap in at least four years. Not bad for starting out, I say!

In college, I discovered a love for swimming. Laps, that is. I spent about ten years on swim team as a kid, and I kind of hated most of it. I absolutely loved the social aspect and the fun of the meets on Monday nights, and even getting ribbons for my race efforts. But practice was something else entirely.

You see, I was never very good at swimming. I certainly was not bad by any means. However, put me against the kids on the team who were considered “good”, and I paled in comparison. I was better than the couple tubby kids, and I had decent speed, but my endurance just wasn’t there. Because of that, I was never at the front of the line in practice, and near the back was not where I wanted to be. I was also utterly exhausted before practice was ever even over. So, I didn’t much like swim practice, and even disliked it a bit…, which meant that I went less and less often as Ingrew older. This also meant that I get worse and worse, when compared to all the kids who actually attended every practice (and most kids had been on the team as long as I had).

All of that being said, I was truly surprised when I fell in love with swimming in college. I always respected and almost revered swimmers as glorious doers of beautiful sport. I always rather envied them (minus the really broad shoulders). But I also always disliked practice. It’s almost surprising that I did swim team longer than any other sport, but for the fact that my mom required us to do swim team. To this day, I do not know how I got out of swimming in Open (ages 15-18), but I was beyond delighted that my swim team days were finished before I had to be slower than everyone in my age group. 13/14’s were tough enough for my morale.

I wasn’t on the team in college or anything, but I did attend the meets that happened on campus, and I loved them. It wasn’t until my third (and final) year that I started swimming myself, though. I joined a water sports class and tennis class in order to fulfill my sport credits for school, and somehow also ended up going swimming in the pool during the nighttime opening hours. Perhaps my inspiring friend Genevieve got me to go with her one night to start, and then I kept going on my own after that.

In the water sports class, there were mostly non-athletic people in it, and so we often just had inner tube water polo on the schedule. I disagreed with the inner tubes on principal for the game, but the level of competitiveness actually got me quite irritated in class. This is not mean to be harsh, merely matter-of-fact: If you aren’t good at something, you aren’t allowed to be fiercely competitive in it. Some of these people were yelling and going crazy over this game that Inhad already passed as casual and fun, since almost no one was any good at it.

So, I eventually asked the coach if I could swim laps instead for class. He might have denied me at first, but then realized how desperately I wanted to do it instead of water polo, and so allowed me for any time we played that particular game (which was often). The first time he agreed to it, he told me that it was ‘okay, but only if you swim a mile.’ I honestly told him that I likely was incapable, but he chuckled and I realized that he was joking.

I trained at nights on the days we didn’t have class, and worked hard in my swimming. I still remember the excitement I had on the day I climbed out of the water near the end of class and told him, “Okay, done.” I had swum a mile during class, which was only a 45-minute class. I had barely done it in time, but I had done it. The coach was nearly baffled. He expressed that he had been merely joking about the mile. I told him how I knew that, but figured I’d go for it, anyway. He was impressed. He didn’t think he was capable of swimming a mile in any length of time. I had earned the recognition I had hoped in my silly endeavor, which only added to my joy of accomplishing the task itself. I was not a swimmer, but here I was, quickly swimming a mile, and able to rush off to tennis class immediately afterward.

One thing to add about that time swimming: My body was incredibly happy, and it looked great, too. Ever since then, I have been convinced that swimming is one of (if not the) the best full-body workouts around, with amazing results.

Here I am, years later, finally in a pool again. I have more to my body than I would like for there to be in certain areas, and not enough to satisfy my muscle goals for my body, so I truly hope I find a way to get this swimming to be a regular and often thing again, and that I do it. Because I really do love swimming.

Post-a-day 2017
P.S. A fellow ALT (assistant language teacher) recently mentioned how she had a student who was attempting to express that he was a swimmer, and so he wrote, “I am a breast stroker.” Gotta love things getting lost in translation. 😛

Diving boards and rains

I never appreciated rain so much as when I was a lifeguard. I enjoyed that I was wonderfully trained and fit, both mentally and physically, and I liked the honor of the job, as well as the decent pay and good tan. However, I felt like a bit of a nervous wreck when it came down to it. If there were only a handful of people at a pool, it was all right – it felt like just a normal day at a pool. When there were several people, a party, even, I was okay, actually. The only time I was actually a nervous wreck, now that I really think about it, was when we were waiting for people to show up. When the pool was empty, my imagination worked my anxiety to the roof and beyond. Even before I arrived for a shift, I would be a mess inside, somewhat terrified of what might come at my next shift. I knew I didn’t have near the likelihood of beach lifeguards of having to save someone or having to treat a swimmer with any First Aid skills (or dealing with a shark), but it only comforted so much to know that the chances were merely lower than likely, as opposed to being near zero.

Somehow, I made it through that summer, though. I never did go back to lifeguarding, riding on the excuse that the company for which I had worked had closed, and so all of my credentials and paperwork disappeared with their closing (ignoring the fact that the owners of the company were parents of a friend and schoolmate).

Speaking of that friend and schoolmate, we only really became friends after that summer, but we were in band together before then, and so were loose acquaintances. We had our first one-on-one that summer, lifeguarding. He was all about making money, and so he showed up to lifeguard what seemed like every time somebody had to cancel on a shift. We only worked together once, but I remember it clearly still. Well, I remember most of it clearly, anyway.

No one showed up to swim that day. (This is the part where I’m unclear. There might have been one or two small groups who did show up eventually, but it was only a short while, and somewhere near the middle or end of the day.). It sprinkled some during the day, warding off swimmers. We, however, did do some swimming of our own.
It was during this swimming that Inwas confronted with a fear of mine: diving boards. I really am uncertain as to how the fear developed, but it did somehow. When I was little, I would run and/or jump off of any diving board around, even the long, tall ones at public pools. But by this time, high school, I was terrified of a board that had too much spring. Most public pool diving boards would go down a good couple or even few feet when an adult sprang from them. And my faith in the boards not breaking, as well as the jumpers not slipping, was low. This applied to anyone as the jumper, even myself, and even the most advanced diver. I think I was just panicked that the board would break off, and smack the jumper in the head, knocking out him/her, and resulting in serious injury. I once attempted a cartwheel off a home diving board at the neighbors’ house, and I ended up grabbing on to the end of the board, and falling legs first into the water, scratching my stomach on the board as I held tight to it with my hands (think of jumping out of a pool in reverse, and scratching your stomach on the side as you do it). But that never had anything to do with the spring of the board; that one was rather solid and non-springy. Plus, I kept using boards for years after that specific incident, though I was aware of potential danger from there on out.

Anyway, on that particular day, working together, this fellow lifeguard and school mate convinced me to jump off the diving board. It took me a while, and I was really reasoning with him against doing it, even as I stood atop it, but I eventually did it. I might even have done it multiple times, actually. All I remember about that part was that I finally did jump off, and I was okay about it.

And, I believe, I have been ever since. I still have to go check how much bounce awaits me before I actually do whatever jump I do, but I can do it, and I don’t feel like I am going insane each time.

Post-a-day 2017