That Time I Clogged the Public Pool....

I drank coffee at hour 1600 yesterday. I was cold, and it sounded cozy. After three sips, I deemed it unwise to continue, as caffeine in the late afternoon tends to rouse me quite early. I come to you at the ungodly hour of 0500, chipper as a foxhound on a summer's eve.* As is normally the case after a particularly personal post, I will make myself chuckle. When we first met, I promised humorous anecdotes of my ridiculously awkward life, even if that meant retreating to the archives. Let's dive into the deep end...

As with most of my mortifying experiences, we can trace this to a few root causes:

1) The back of the bus
2) A slightly extreme level of youthful curiosity
3) A childhood ailment

1) Sitting in the back of the bus always gave us elementary schoolers a sense of maturity. During one such ride, a classmate demonstrated this as she regaled us with stories of skinny-dipping in her parents' pond.

2) In the days prior to children's total inundation with technology, you had to create your own, unique experiences. That often included activities stemming from thoughts such as, "I wonder how the dog's electric fence collar feels on my neck at full voltage. For five seconds. How about on my tongue?"*

3) Self-diagnosis: I have over productive facial fluids. Though this may not sound scientific, it explains constant sniffling, occasional drooling, and most pertinent to this story, ear wax accumulation. I was twelve the first time I experienced this inconvenient phenomenon, and when the doctor shined the flashlight into my canal, he gasped at the yellow blockade. It was too intense to irrigate at the moment*, so I was instructed to dissolve the malady with a daily dose of warm water and baking soda. Each night, I lay with one side of my head on the table while the little bubbles went to work, breaking down months of build up. Sadly, this is not the most humiliating aspect of this story.

Only days later, with my head half clogged, I traveled with my sisters and mother to visit my oldest sister, Julie. A recent college graduate, she was enjoying the small luxuries of adulthood, one of which was an apartment complex pool, soon to become infamous in my life annals.

In between shopping and eating copious amounts of ice cream, we spent an afternoon poolside. I had not yet reached the point of adolescence where I could bask for hours, so after a short while, I turned off my walkman and ventured into the hot tub, located in a small area on the way to the locker rooms. It was not entirely public, but it was certainly not private.

And so we reach the point of factor convergence. My mind wandered to the conversation on the bus, and as I sat alone, curiosity led me down the path: "I wonder how skinny dipping feels." My mental faculties may not have been functioning at a balanced level, i.e., the common sense neurons were flailing in an attempt to swim through wax. Instead of firing and telling me this was a terrible idea, I heard, "You should try it. Five seconds." I listened. Five seconds later, and not a millisecond more, I reached for my bathing suit top, but it was nowhere to be found. Mind you, the bubbles were not even running, so the absolute disappearance of the top was quite improbable. Yet, I turned and turned only to grasp at water.

So there I was. Aghast. Dumbfounded. Topless. And although I was quite young and mostly undeveloped, I could not meander to the outdoor pool to gather my clothes or towel. People would notice. A few people passed the hot tub area, and I held my breath, thanking all of the things that they did not enter. When traffic broke, I scurried to the women's locker room, curled up in a shower, and sat.

After what seemed like an eternity, Julie came to ask if I was alright. I quickly requested she bring my clothes and promised myself to never speak of the incident.* Hours later, however, I weighed the pros and cons, and decided I increased the odds of solving the lost bathing suit top mystery by employing their aid. After all, it was a super cute tankini from Venus, and I had spent hard earned money to buy it. Swallowing my dignity, I confessed. After a couple blank stares and some confused laughs, my mother was on the case. The following morning, she stopped by the pool desk to ask if they happened upon a rogue bathing suit top. The attendant confirmed that indeed, they had. It had been suctioned into the filter, causing it to clog and the entire pool to overflow. Apparently, they had been dealing with the issue since five o'clock in the morning. After returning the garment, he told my mother that "her daughter had some explaining to do."

Here it is. Fifteen years later, a robust explanation. It was the first and last time I went skinny dipping, and I think it is best that age has severely curbed my extreme sense of curiosity. As with all my stories, there is a lesson to be learned. Apart from the obvious, make sure you put your bathing suit top outside the hot tub if you decide to take it off*, it reinforces one of my favorite lessons: if you can't laugh at yourself, life is going to be a whole lot longer than you'd like. I hope it made you laugh as well.


* I've decided to create my own idiomatic expressions.
* That game may have had a greater lasting affect than I credit it.
* For those of you unfamiliar with this, irrigation is the process of flushing out the wax via an industrial grade syringe.
* We all know that wasn't going to happen.
* Or maybe don't take it off in the first place.