if only i had social skills in my speedo

I promised myself that I wasn’t going to blog about this. It’s too embarrassing, I thought. I’ll look like an idiot, I worried. But then, I thought, when it comes to some things, I *am* an idiot. And it’s a funny story. And, as my friend Becky suggested, alliteration always makes things more funny, thus the cute title, which was aptly thought of by yours truly when telling the story for the first time. Seriously, if you were me, would you let this title go to waste? I think not.

So I’ve been working on re-vamping my workouts lately because I realized that after skipping consistent pool workouts and replacing them with entirely too many spin classes over the past four months has posed an interesting conundrum. Half of me is fit, the other half is not.I started this genius plan to add laps to my workout rotation a week ago today.

So I swam my laps. I felt so, I guess, uneven. I had no trouble breathing, my legs felt like they could go for miles, but my arms felt like thousand-pound jello. By the end of my last 500, I felt like they were just smacking the water. Like belly flops, but not. Arm flops? I guess? Either way, I finished my laps with sore arms and shoulders that felt like balled-up, wound-up rubber bands. It wasn’t pretty. P-a-i-n.

Obviously, there was no way I could go back to the locker room; I don’t think I had the strength left in my arms to even wash my hair. I stretched out really good and then decided to go sit in the hot tub for a while and stretch some more. I mosey on over and pick out a bench on the far end of the tub, as far away as I could get from this old guy who kept staring at me. I’m sitting there, sort of spacing out, looking around, trying to entertain myself while my muscles relaxed. Also, I was trying to avoid making eye contact with scary old guy.

Some guy walks out of the guys locker room. Normally I wouldn’t have thought twice about it or even noticed, but this guy had this tattoo. Some sort of cursive script on his chest. It was small, almost like a name tag or something. And immediately I think what’s that say? Maybe its his wife’s name or something, I look, no ring. Or not, really, dude, come on, stretch facing the other direction, I can’t see it. Omg, what if it says mommy? Does it?  No, I don’t think so. Whew. That’d be weird. What’s it say…

He must have felt me staring at him because he looked over right at that moment. Busted. So I just sort of half smiled at him and went back to looking around. I’m sure my face turned beet red though. Terrific. Pair the blush with the indentations left in my face from goggles and a swim cap, and the little bit of mascara that was no doubt smudged around my eyes, and….just…wow. I’m positive I looked like something out of a horror flick.

Anyway, so while I was vainly thinking about how fantastically gruesome I must have looked, I noticed that tattoo guy had picked a lane, settled his water bottle and goggles by the lane, and was stretching before his swim. Nice. Some things a girl just has to appreciate. His abs were one of them. He was a swimmer, I could tell. Granted, he obviously was no Michael Phelps, but the boy clearly wasn’t a newbie.

Uh oh, I started to feel someone’s eyes on me, so I tried to inconspicuously look over and see if it was him or the creepy old dude. It was him. And as he finished up stretching he walked straight over to the hot tub. The whole time I’m sitting there pretty much glued in place wishing and praying and hoping that I had some sort of social skills in my speedo to draw from. Small talk definitely isn’t my forte, especially not when I’m sporting goggle marks, runny mascara, and tangled hair. Confidence is hard for me when I don’t have, like, clothes to hide behind.

So despite setting up for a swim, tattoo guy gets in the hot tub and comes and sits right next to me at the far end. Seriously, the place he sat was the most difficult seat out of all of them for him to get to. Either creepy old dude who wouldn’t stop staring at me gave him the willies too, or he sat down next to me on purpose. Anyone who knows me well is probably dying of laughter because they know – and have experienced this on multiple occasions – I really, genuinely have no clue when a guy goes out of his way to talk to me. After hearing this story, one friend said, “he was totally trying to mac on you.” We should probably take her word for it over mine, because I am, apparently, clueless.

So anyway, he sits down and I immediately notice that he’s got this gorgeously cute crooked smile. Swoon. And then he starts talking to me. Small talk (remember, that thing I suck at). Fantastic. While I did manage to respond in a way that didn’t make me look like a spastic mute, I definitely wasn’t as chatty or cute or witty or charming or any of those things that I wish I was. And the whole time, the little devil on my shoulder kept whispering mean things in my ear about how as soon as I got out of the hot tub and the guy saw me in my suit, it’d all be over.

Terrific timing for the self esteem issues to come back, huh? I guess they aren’t dead and ground up and sitting in some landfill after all. In fact, little shoulder devil got to me so bad that I literally ended up just getting out of the hot tub and going to the locker room. I was a coward. And now I officially have no right to whine about being single after an episode like that. I just sort of stood in the middle of the showers for five minutes asking myself if I really just did that. I couldn’t believe it. Who does that?! I do, apparently.

~ by jenchall on April 29, 2009.