Posts Tagged ‘swimming pool’

My Navel 4-18-11

When I was thin, I used to keep my navel clean.  Lint from my t-shirts accumulates over time and gets stuck in there. I gave up cleaning my navel years ago when I joined the fat and sloppy nation. I remember the frustration of not being able to get that junk out of there. I hoped my inability to clean my navel would prod me to stop eating so much. It didn’t help, and I got used to not cleaning my navel.

It had been years since I thought about my navel and that I was once thin enough to clean it; until yesterday.

I’m on vacation with my family and I have been swimming with my daughter every day for a week. After we got out of the pool, I was laying on the chase lounge and my daughter looks over at my stomach and says “Daddy, what’s that in your belly button?”  I hadn’t seen inside my navel in years.  It was stuffed with junk.

I told my daughter what it was and she immediately volunteered to clean it herself.  She wanted to dig her finger in there and clean it out like a nostril.  My navel isn’t like a nostril, its way bigger, and it has to be cleaned gently and carefully.  Not only am I fat and sloppy, I’m also a delicate flower.  I tell her “I’ll get it.”  Still, she insists, and I tell her “no” again.  I have to quickly find a way to clean it before I lose this great viewing angle.  This will require a potentially embarrassing public naval cleaning; something I have never done before.  But since I’m married and fat already, I’m going for it.

The only cleaning implement I had handy was hotel room key card.  I was making some cleaning progress with the edge of the card when (and this is where the embarrassing part comes in) I look up, and the beautiful 23 year old bikini clad waitress is standing over me.  She announces that our lunch is ready.

I ate my grilled chicken and french fries quickly.  I couldn’t wait to get back to my room to clean my navel.  There were no tweezers around, so I used the hook from my nail clippers and began dislodging years of accumulated, forgotten, hardened lint.  It took a while, but finally I got it all.

Freezing 3-27-11

Being fat and sloppy is often the main topic of conversation with my friends; even when we are at a restaurant.  Listening to my friends talk about diet, one would believe them to be diet and weight loss experts.  No one couldn’t tell by looking at them though.  I eagerly listen to their diet theories with rapt attention, drinking in the wisdom of my buddies. 

Most of the diet talk centers on eliminating carbs and sugars from the diet.  They tell me that magical thinning that happens when we eliminate those items.  These things even I have heard about before.  Last Saturday night, I spent an hour in a car with three slob friends listening to their best current strategies for losing weight. 

Turns out that my friends, while not eating sugary, fried and high calorie foods, are at the cutting edge of the science of calorie loss, and stay up to date on scientific literature about the best weight loss theories.  They inform me that the best diet is cold water.  Not drinking it; but taking long showers in it.  I know real men take cold showers and Navy Seals do too, but I’m not stupid.  They can’t convince me to do that. 

Losing weight can be done in only 10 minutes a day twice a week they insist.  They presented a compelling case that the energy required while shivering in freezing water will cause me to lose weight.  This is what my buddies say and I believe them. 

Since I told them I wouldn’t take cold showers, they recomended I stand in a swimming pool and let the pounds roll off me.  That advice struck me as reasonable.  So, I’ll ask my neighbor if I can stand in his unheated pool for 10 minutes a couple times a week.  

I can picture myself in the pool, shivering and losing weight.  How easy!  I then imagine total strangers coming up to me and ask me how is it that I look so good.  I’ll beam with pride and smile.   I won’t tell them anything, I’ll keep my little secret to myself. 

Before I get started, I have to ask my friends how to get the courage to jump into and sit in someone’s freezing pool for 10 minutes.