Swimming With an Army of Me

One of my favorite pastimes is now the pool on campus. We generally go there a few times a week now, usually after work, sometimes in the middle of the day and every so often on the weekend too. The pool is quite good, in fact. It's not too cold for my standards and I'm getting used to 25 yard laps, as opposed to the 50 meter laps we used to do. It's rarely crowded and in that case it will at worst have 1-2 people per lane. And the dip in the hot tub afterwards really does it for me!

The rule is that we swim 800 meters, then hang out in the pot for five minutes. Kinda like we would do at home. (Ok, maybe we would spend a little longer at home, and listen in on conversations ...) Some things are somewhat unlike home though. The locker rooms, for one thing. Although showers are provided, I rarely spot anyone using them, so if they are they are doing it all the more discretely. In fact, aside from myself, I never saw anyone really naked in the locker rooms! It's a mystery to me. I mean, to dress or undress for the pool, at some time you should be forced to take your clothes off, right? Although, I have seen women come to the pool wearing their swimsuit under their clothes. However, you would hardly put your clothes on again over a wet swimsuit ...

Anyway, this is one of those cultural mysteries that baffle the intruder. I'm frankly intrigued. I am sure the showers are being used by somebody (other than me). They even put up soap dispensers recently, after I asked about them. So, I've come to the conclusion that this is a display of the American's contradictory feelings towards nudity. As comfortable are they are with naked/halfnaked women in the magazines, on the television, on the beach and in music videos, they abhor the sight of a naked body in a publid shower room, and they hardly want to expose their own nudity to a real person that's going for a swim like them and might possibly interact. So, on one hand I'm slightly amused by the hypocrisy, on the other hand I'm sometimes invaded by paranoia. As I shamelessly put on my bra without covering myself I sometimes suddenly get the notion I'm being watched by big brother and that tomorrow I'm gonna by sued for sexual harassment ...

The other thing that differs from the pool back home, well, that is the crowd. Obviously, a campus pool is mostly attended by young people in their prime. No seniors, no children, although the odd faculty professor can be spotted sometimes. And unlike the pool back home, there is constantly music on the loadspeekers. I doubt its function is to entertain the swimmers. I think it's rather to help the couple of lifeguards on duty battle their boredom. I find this music very anti-climactic or surreal lots of the time. It doesn't help that they mostly play awfully bad music, and they are in particular amazingly geared towards country. When they put on something familiar though, it can help you get through your laps: 550, 575, 600, 625 ...

Today as I was coming towards the end of my swim, they were playing Björk, and I thought: "Isn't this weird?" Would I have imagined 30 years ago when we were having a little christmas get-together in my choral group, that this funny dark eyed girl that ate so many cookies at the christmas party that she had to puke and couldn't sing carols anymore would be providing the background music to this scene: and in golden California, ten thousand miles from home, I shot through the shimmering water with "An Army of Me" in my ears ...