Red Cedar

in the past six weeks of swimming at the ywca during my lunch-hour, i have figured out a number of things about bathing suits and regular swimming. the first of these, is those bathing suits designed to “flatter” certain parts of the body are not really suitable for distance swimming as they tend to do the “flattering” with an extra cloth layer and built-in support. this makes for more drag in the water, and both elasticity of the material itself and swimmer speed-agility suffer for the ego unecessarily. now that i am swimming many laps, several times a week, this annoyance has not been lost on me.

but if it’s true that flattering suits are not conducive to efficient swimming, the converse is also true: “speed” suits are without a doubt, the most unflattering thing i have ever encountered. low backed, cut into the breastline on the side, and with no support lining, it is as though they are designed to display every bulge and stretchmark. ack!

today, i bit the bullet though, as my older swimsuit has finally lost any semblance of elasticity – and bought myself one of those hideously revealing suits for “swimming” (as opposed to lolling, splashing, or frolicking). as with all things i had to remind myself that indeed i am not going to the ywca to impress anyone, and besides which being a “fast” swimmer is perhaps more impressive than being a skinny one – right?

at least, that’s what i told myself.

i realized this morning that the hunter (you know, the exaggerating date from saturday night) doesn’t even know my name. i have corrected him in the past twice (somewhere along the way he picked up this tendency to call me “nancy” which is pretty far off from my actual name). this morning he called me “nancy drew” as a joke (which at first i couldn’t figure out, and would be annoying if my name really was nancy), and then later used the name again while talking to me. because there were other people around, i didn’t correct him this time. i’ll try to be discreet about that one, it’s sorta ridiculous at this point.

i’ve decided to do nanowrimo this year – which is a curiosity even to me. i wasn’t even sure until last night at 12:01 (couldn’t sleep – fireworks), when i started penning my novel, to reach 50,000 words by month’s end.

no doubt – it seems really stupid, but the premise behind nanowrimo is actually sound – which is to get the first shitty draft of a book done without thinking about it too much – to suspend the internal editor in a fit of deadline-panic – and to just force the self to sit down every day to write. so far i have 2406 words between last night’s short burst, the ferry this morning and a mid-morning wait for file transfers that gave me another 40 minutes of writing space.

will i actually make the rest of the 47 594 words? that i’m really not sure about. so far i’m amazed i have got some sort of a story on the go, with characters and a plot direction and everything, and i didn’t start with much more than a general idea – but we’ll see. i’m sure my enthusiasm will wane somewhere in the first few days.

i will not be posting my nanowrimo work to this blog, though i will post my word count occasionally (or perhaps even daily) for those of you who want to cheer me on (and please do, cheer me on that is).

besides that, my swimming routine seems to have increased to 30 freestyle laps from 22, which i’m quite pleased about. whoooo! tuesday.