Swimming in the Rain

I decided to swim every day this week, but yesterday it was raining and the only bit of time I had free was before 9.

So, I got all bundled up in my rainboots to go swimming. I got really wet on the walk over.

and I was going to take a picture of the pool or whatever but when I have my glasses off the world and all my plans recede and I can only do what is immediate, which was swimming. And yesterday I swam 3/4 of a mile, all different strokes and slowly. I am going to build to a mile and then work to a mile of freestyle. And then after that I went to welding and used bolt cutters to cut infinity many pieces of thin steel rod and by the end of the day my arms hurt sooooo much and the muscles in my armpits and neck hurt also. I was worried I wouldn't be able to go swimming today but of course I was, I just did a little swim since I only had an hour including taking the bus. Tommorow, though, I have all morning and the metal shop is closed so I have nothing else physical to do so I am going to swim until I can't move and then ask someone to help me out of the pool. Or maybe swim until I can't move and then float until I have the strength to get out. Yeah. I am going to swim 1600m freestyle tomorrow because there's no reason not to. It's not like I'll drown, there are like 3 lifeguards.

I went to a mall

Not to buy anything. I think malls are so interesting, how carefully designed to encourage buying they are, how stupendously banal purchasing something from a mall is, and also the architecture. And the creation of a third sphere or whatever it's called that isn't work or home. (or school or home). But I never think to go to them, because they don't have anything there for me, but my friend had to get her phone looked at so I drove her to Capitola Mall and I really, really liked it. It was raining outside, but not in the mall. I felt like an explorer.




these are so people can see what the clothes would look like, for if they ever need to stand barefoot and immobile in a store window.

Swimming

I have wanted to learn to surf for more than a year now but the only way to do it in my price range (besides making surfing friends, i must know every single non surfer in this town) is the school swim class which is very cheap (the price of one regular surf lesson for 6 lessons or 6 weeks of lessons or something) and always fills up immediately. So right now my plan is to get much stronger at swimming (I think I would be all right with a surfboard on an ankle leash at the beginner beach but definitely if I got swept away I would just have to go with it, and if I lost my board it is very unlikely I could catch up with it unless it went toward shore) in the pool and then in summer when I don't have pool access I will swim in the ocean for short times and build my endurance.

I have been swimming at the pool twice a week since the start of the quarter (about a month) and it has been great, but last week I went swimming in the ocean and it was discouraging. I didn't have a way of keeping track of time but I played in the waist-chest high water for maybe a half hour and then went swimming where the waves swell (deeper out than where they break) but in water i could easily bob off the bottom for air instead of having to tread water, and I swam for about 10 minutes or 15 at the very most and it was so tiring. I was trying to work against the water (for the exercise, I know that is a slow way to get anywhere) just to get up the beach to where my friend was, and it was impossible. So I swam back to shore, and I was panting and everything, and very cold. So obviously I need to swim a lot more so surfing can be a safer undertaking.

I usually try to swim for 600m in freestyle, breaststroke, and backstroke and then I am pretty tired and alternate using aids for my arms or legs so each has a turn to rest for another 100m and then I am too tired to climb out of the pool and have to encroach on the lane of whoever has the ladder. Today I had brand new goggles (thanks so much mom!) and a whole lane to myself because I went late but after 500m the pool closed because it closes at 7:30 and not 8 like I thought. But it opens tomorrow at 8:30 and I don't have any obligations until 10 so I am going swimming tomorow morning. Then I have errands, learning to weld at the metalshop, volunteer at the co-op for 2 hours, and hopefully more time in the metalshop if it is still open, plus also a one page paper and a really solid painting and a proposal packet, all due wednesday. So I have a bit of a busy day but I think I might need a swim at the end of it, especially if I don't make it over there in the morning as I am planning to.

So I made a goal of going swimming every day this week (going twice tomorrow is only one day of course) which is not a huge goal because it is right on the other side of campus and there is a bus I can take (which I plan to always take on the way back because I am all sodden) but at the same time it means getting out of bed on a weekend to go exercise, and also I will almost certainly have a sunburn by then. (sunscreen doesn't even pretend to last through an hour of swimming, it says on the label to reapply after 15 minutes or something, and then wait half an hour before going in the sun.) But maybe not because I have a bit of a tan (I love tans!) and that might keep me from burning.

Now I am looking up things to do while swimming, like drills, because I got a little bored today.

Yesterday I went to the 4/20 celebration my school is apparently famous for. I don't know what the crowd was estimated at yesterday, but last years' was estimated at 5,000. My bay area friends often ask whether I've been, whether I recommend it, and I've never gone so I decided to go even though I don't smoke and the university sent us an email asking us to make positive choices about how to spend our time.

Anyway, it is a very short walk from my house, and I could here a drum circle going all day from the time I woke up. I had my first day staffing the condom co op so I didn't want to go in the morning in case I smelled like smoke, and I had a shift from 2-4 so I headed over after and got there at 4:07. (the co op is in the building next to my dorm, it was all very convenient) It was neat, and very crowded. I smelled a lot of kinds of smoke, which was interesting but my eyes started stinging. I found a drum circle one of my friends was performing in, and settled in to watch. It was very celebratory, with people sharing and taking photos and dancing and stuff. The drum circle was chanting a call and response countdown, which I liked but was too shy to join, I just danced a little. Then shortly before 4:20 everyone got really excited and set up their smoking, which I thought was a little silly because they had a whole minute to work with, but everyone was making sure their bowl was packed and repacked just right, or something.

Then it started getting too smoky for me. I did not know you can hotbox the outdoors, because it is so big, but you can. It was very nice that several strangers offered their smoking tools to me, but I declined. I thought it was very friendly though. Anyway, in addition to the stinging in my eyes I felt uncomfortable trying to breathe, like if instead of a bonfire everyone wanted to have 500 little fires in every direction. I was looking for a way to be comfortable and I thought crouching down would help, but people would think i was sick and try to help. Then I figured out it might have been smart for everyone to start off sitting, then stand up, so they could reuse the smoke. I wished strongly for a pair of stilts, to be away from the smoke and fit in with the performative atmosphere. So I hiked back home. I was glad I went, and I was glad I went alone (my friend was supposed to come down but he had to stay at his dispensary past midnight on the 19th preparing stock for the 20th so he was too tired to come down.) because I ended up needing to leave very quickly.

I heard one boy saying "Someone should have a bong or something" thus demonstrating a really poor level of attention to his surroundings. I still don't know what he meant, other than that he doesn't plan for his needs well.

So I went to the dining hall, and I went back for more food 4 times (on my 3rd trip they were playing "Smoke Two Joints" on the loudspeaker) and then I put 2 slices of bread, an orange, 2 cookies, and 1-2 servings of chicken into my purse, wrapped separately and carefully in napkins.(we are allowed a dessert or a fruit to carry away) I am not sure why but I think it was the placebo effect.

Condom Co-op

Since I am only taking 13 units this quarter (12 is the minimum to be full time but a usual course load is 15) I have time to volunteer a few hours a week at the Condom Co-op/Student Health Outreach and Promotion office. It's a very important program that buys condoms in bulk (like, really bulk) and resells them cheaply to students, plus also has loads of pamphlets and info to direct students to the campus resources they need for like health and counseling. We have an indoor office that's permanent, and also set up tables outside the bookstore and dining halls. About 15 girls were at the training, and 6 were in sororities with sorority pins. This is a really high proportion at Santa Cruz, so maybe it was for their community service. Idk. It reminded me of when a girl in my econ class had to wear an outfit of condoms (I don't remember what because I didn't pay close attention because she didn't seem to want any attention, which imo is not the way to wear a condom outfit, but I think it was inflated condoms on a large hat) because she was pledging, which I did not bring up.

My 3 hour training was yesterday, mostly about sex dangers with only a short portion about setting up the booth, rates, and dealing with students. It was good to learn because I haven't had to learn about that stuff since my freshman seminar, and the group was positive and we laughed a lot, and it was all girls except one of the guys running it. But it was also worrying, because lots of volunteers were pretty mis/uninformed. I mean, we sell condoms 2 for a quarter, we're not health counselors. But still, people will ask us things and we should know the answers. The U in IUD stands for Uterine, not Urinary. And sex toys for anal play need a flared base. And so on.

Also when we put expired condoms on the wooden demo model (as we are supposed to be able to show if people ask) lots of people didn't follow the directions. I think it's because we were all girls, and people are usually only in charge of putting on only the things they personally are wearing, but still, there are only like 3 steps, so just learn them. Actually from all the help we needed, there might be like 7 steps, starting with "make sure it's like a sombrero, not like a beanie." To me that is help that makes it harder, because you have a sentence to memorize instead of just thinking "I bet the part I unroll should be on the outside so I can unroll it." Also, opening the condoms was really hard

They were this kind but I think the old kind (which these were, since they were expired) had notches in the middle instead of one on the end. Tricky, especially for those of us with lube on our hands from investigating the Female Condom.

I was one of the last to sign up for a shift, and yet the shift I wanted (at the SHOP office so I don't have to carry the giant totes of condoms and store them overnight until the SHOP office opens, nor set up a table or anything), late in the day on a Tuesday, was open! And I got a shirt!

I'm so angsty in the morning.

So one girl on my facebook is actually frightened that in 2012 the world will end. Every week (ish) she posts about this concern in her status, and not in like a contemplative way. And a different girl on my facebook posted that she watched 2012, the first girl posted that it was scary, and a different girl who I don't know posted "If it happens, it happens. What can we do? If it's our time to go how can we stop it from happening? The only thing we can do is make sure we know who is lord :)" so I didn't respond because I don't know her and it's not on my wall or status. But it's 7am on a saturday so I don't have anyone to gripe to, so here you go, internet: the concern over a 2012 apocalypse is based on a misinterpretation of the ancient mayan long calendar so it's nothing to do with your faith and it's really weird to conflate those two things.

Racism got on me. :(

I was reading a sort of racist article online about Leonard Jeffries and one of the ideas described as bigotry was his theory of sun people (from Africa) and ice people (from europe). I thought the article was being too critical of Jeffries so I googled "sun people africa ice people europe" to find out who thought that was wrong and who thought it was reasonable and why, but instead I found the racistest website I have ever seen, excluding forums. It was so racist. It made me angry. It was sooooo racist. It had an article, about ethics and where ethics come from and stages of ethics, used to show white people are the best, and black people are the worst.

And I kind of felt like it was making me racist, because even though I thought it was wrong, I was not telling the author that, I did not want to talk on facebook to my friends about it because I did not want them to be upset, and I did not even make a blog about it because it was so obviously wrong, so I was not actively disagreeing with it in any way. Parts of it got filed into my brain as facts ("did you know that average IQ is 95*? I didn't, because I thought 100 was developed as the average.")

So, after reading one or two articles on the site I did the implicit.harvard test- they are pretty neat, basic tests of your preference between 2 categories, like fat and thin, or in this case I did the black and white. It would definitely be totally possible to skew results, it is not like reading your brain to see if you are racist; you just press keys to sort: good/bad, black/white, good&white/bad&black, good&black/bad&white. But in this case I did not deliberately skew my result. It showed "a moderate automatic preference to European American compared to African American." Alright. I want to defensively consider that not a real baseline because I already read an article. I might not be racist! Or okay, it might be close enough to a real baseline. Something to work on. Anyway, then I read like 6 more articles (kind of, I scrolled past a lot of parts incredulously but I also reread a lot of parts to see if there was a disclaimer like "i am totally lying", like one part said that no one knew slavery was wrong until white people taught them it was wrong.) So I read this racist stuff, by a white guy, and I kind of thought it was making me racister because reading is a passive activity but I also thought it was making me horrified with white people because it had a white author so I thought it might change my score in either direction. And it changed my score in the direction of being racist.

So, the guy who wrote those articles got closer to his weird goal by me reading them. There's a bit more net racism in the world. I don't know what to do, but I am starting with not linking to the articles in this post, and I guess I will google for "how to stop being racist."

*actually the article said 95 as the average for white people, with lower numbers for black and hispanic people, but my brain rejected that part and stored the first part. Thanks, brain. Racism