Nov
11
I was in Hawaii, snorkeling. The water was clear and warm and every time I dipped my face in the water I could barely believe where I was, what I was doing: peering, in intervals, into an entirely different world, one that teemed with color and life and darting movements. I felt like I was in some sort of dream where I was flying. I floated gently over complicated coral structures and when the seabed dropped away in a startling slope — curving downward into a dark impenetrable blue, where barely-seen white rocks spelled out US NAVY — I was dizzy, and held my arms out like a falling skydiver.
I let myself follow the current over a rocky outcropping, watching a sea turtle swoop birdlike just ahead of me. The waves broke and swirled over my head and the sudden influx of white bubbling foam made me lift my head and peer back at the shore, which was an unexpectedly long distance away. I didn’t know how I’d gotten out so far. In an instant the water stopped being a friendly, magical embrace, and I was frightened.
The noise came from nowhere and everywhere at once: it was a long, spiraling scream that dipped and rose. I’d heard it in a million war movies, a million documentaries; the sound that always signals approaching danger. Death. It traveled through the water and it rushed through the air, it was in my ears, in the waves, it felt like a physical thing that was going to rise up and press me under the ocean’s surface.
My body was panicked. I was cold, and terrified. My brain couldn’t make sense of it: a shark? Did someone see a shark? Was it (I flashed confusedly on the Navy rocks) a submarine?
I started swimming, and it was exactly like a nightmare. I moved my arms and legs as fast as I could but I was going nowhere, my progress was being pulled sideways by the now-angry, now-hungry waters. I raised my head to stare wildly around me, I plunged my face back in the water to peer underneath. My snorkel dipped below a wave and I sucked in warm wet salt, coughing and gagging as I swam.
Never before or since have I been that scared. The noise, it kept going, it was so loud.
Then in a rush I was near shore and my feet could scrape the shell-studded sand, and I was staggering out of the water gasping, my hair plastered across the goggles.
Families sat on towels, children playing happily with plastic buckets. Girls broiled their already-tanned skin; everything smelled of coconut oil. No one glanced at me. The air was silent, the noise was gone.
Later, I learned that it was an air raid siren. Just a test of the emergency system, in case of tsunami.
I felt stupid as hell.
So, what’s the scariest non-scary thing that’s ever happened to YOU?
Nov
10
At the end of my kickboxing class last week we did a bunch of exercises using a stability ball — or fitness ball, or exercise ball, or Swiss ball, or big-ass rubber inflatable round whatsit — and I was kind of amazed at the workout you can get with those things. I mean, just the effort of not rolling comically off the top of it is a fair challenge, and once you master that, you can do all these crazy moves that isolate various muscle groups.
Plus, you can bounce on it, which is wicked fun.
So I bought my own exer-sphere, and let me tell you, I never would have guessed that there could be so many entertaining uses for a giant rubber ball. In addition to the exercises you can do with it, you can totally re-enact that classic boulder scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. You can freak out your household pets by rolling it at them. You can drape yourself over it backwards in order to stretch your spine, then use it as a weapon to fend off your advancing husband, who insists that your pose was a deliberate provocation for him to “get up ON that”.
Also, toddlers love giant rubber balls:
Babies, however, find them confusing:
Have I mentioned how much I am loving this kickboxing class, by the way? There’s something immensely satisfying about strapping on a pair of gloves and punching the bejesus out of a heavy object, and I am always weirdly thrilled when my knuckles are bruised afterwards. When I’m in class and the music’s blaring and everyone around me is panting and sweating and the sound of the bags being struck is like a drumbeat, I feel a savage kind of giddiness. It’s this clean, cathartic, positive method of experiencing aggression and violence, if that makes any kind of sense. Like I’m just forcefully pouring every frustration out of my body, and filling up that space with strength. Sure, sometimes I am more than a little convinced I’m going to barf a lung straight out my eyesocket, but man, there’s nothing like it.
Plus, you never know when the ability to shatter someone’s kneecap with a well-aimed back kick might come in handy. Otherwise you’re just watching Spencer Pratt strut by unharmed and thinking of what might have been.
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