The Walrus 'n' Budgie Show [friends only]

[andygates]

A while back I bought a pair of speedos, partly because big swimmies are awkward under wetsuits, and partly as a "yay, I iz buff n stuff" indulgence.  One look later and they went to the bottom of the kitbox never to come out.  Yeesh, boy, what were you thinking? 

This month, TriTalk have an easy training challenge: 20 swims in 30 days.  After day one, all psyched to get down and do this, a kit malfunction took my regular swimmies, bike-shorts (ie, modest, unscary) jammers out of use.  It was default on day two or brave the budgie smugglers.  If you don't grok bodyimagehorror, (1) you lucky git and (2) this will seem dumb.  We're talking the Fear, and summoning up invisible friends to pep-talk me into the pool, the works.

Irony is, the early-morning crowd are all lane-core hard cases who don't even notice, let alone give a damn, and budgie smugglers are actually really good to swim in.  Bah.  

Aristotle believed that moral character was imbued by performing character-building actions: fake it til you make it.  I think the old Greek was close to the mark, especially for stuff like this.  Bodyimagehorror (there's got to be a huge German word for it) is a seeping thing that grows under introspection but can be bludgeoned out of the way by repeated ballsy stuff.  So, head down, and fuck 'em if they can't cope with the walrus 'n' budgie show. 

Comments

[ravenbait.livejournal.com]

Dude, you're fit.

Compared to some of the horrors I've seen in the pool (I'm having to spend a lot of time watching my entry position on the stroke to retrain prior bad habits, so I'm looking sideways underwater a lot) I suspect you in your budgie smugglers would be a welcome relief.

Today's sideshow included a guy whose breastroke pull caused a cascade of wobble that rippled in a tidal wave all the way down to his thighs, completely visible even under the baggy knee-length shorts he was wearing, where it bounced and returned the other way, only to meet the next wave and cause interference patterns in the cellulite.

Good on him for getting out there and getting some exercise, but I swallowed a whole chunk of water because I was so mesmerised I forgot to breathe.

You look a helluva lot better than you think you do, darling.

But I grok the bodyimage courage thing. If it were not for my superpowers including the ability to split my personality so that half of me thinks I'm shit hot and the best thing this world has ever seen, EVAR (and an invisible friend who insists on turning up when I'm nekkid to tell me I'm gorgeous, but he's biased), that Victorian erotica shoot would have had me puking with fear.

So I use one of the pics as an avatar just so I don't get to go puke in horror at what I did.

[ravenbait.livejournal.com]

And before you go thinking that interference patterns happen in your flesh: they don't. I've seen. You're good and solid.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Yay avatar. And yay brainsplit, 'tis a marvellous thing (though mine fails when exposed to mirrors). And *slap* *wobble* hmm... *slap slap* *wobble* Nah, you're right. ;)