reflections on skinny dipping
i'm sitting here in this hot-ass, non-airconditioned apartment in washington heights, surfing all the apartment sights and being very disappointed by the selection. when i was too busy with the fellow's program to breathe, i saw a ton of great, available apartments. now that i have all day and all night free, there's nothing but $2000 manhattan studios and $1100 harlem studios and $1500 park slope studios. fuck NYC realty.
i hate being one of those girls who can't help but mention her boyfriend 24/7, but since my boyfriend is a cool guy and very good to me, i guess it's not so bad. anyhow - dave. his journal entries (elf needs food. badly. -- i'd attach a link but i'm too lazy) are so good, so filled with character and description, and mine are such self-indulgent, boring, whiny pieces of crap. i want to write something more interesting.
dave and i (there's his name again - dammit!) discussed skinny dipping the other night, and that's kind of an interesting story. let's give this a whirl, shall we?
*****
when i was growing up (and who'm i kidding - now, too, about 50% of the time) i had major, MAJOR self-image woes. not your usual "gee i wish my acne would go away" or "golly i wish i could lose 10 pounds" crap. mine was more like, "i'm so completely undesirable that when men see me they grow physically ill and the only reason they hang out with me at all is because i'm really nice and funny." fucked up.
i had this summer job at kentucky down under - an amusement park that combined the animal and cultural coolness of australia with the animal and geological coolness of kentucky - forming a park with a cave, some kangaroos, some australian story-telling, some bison and some fudge. fucked up, but a lot of fun. (visit it the next time you're in KY - just off I-65, the horse cave exit!)
anyway, almost everyone that worked there was of college age, and this summer in particular i was a ripe 20.
at age 20, i was a virgin who'd barely been french-kissed by my high school gay boyfriend, due not really to southern baptist restrictions (although that was part of it) but more to my hideous self-image. anytime a boy got close enough to kiss me, i felt bad for him, thinking he was just being nice, and i found a way to make the situation platonic. i usually did this by making a joke about how weird it would be for us to get together. i found out later, from really honest, cool guys, that they thought i was making fun of them. they had no clue how i really felt about myself.
ok - back to the story (sorry this is all over the place). so, by twenty, i was a sheltered, innocent (well, physically), VERY horny girl who was actually starting to feel good about herself. i guess i'd reached a point where i was beginning to realize how much self-confidence figures into the whole attraction thing. i realized this b/c a lot of the girls who were getting action were, i apologize for my rudeness, butt-ass ugly. but they BELIEVED they were gorgeous, and men, god-bless-'em, believed it, too. plus, there was one part of myself i was always kind of confident about, no matter how much i hated the rest of me. that's right, my tits. they were big and full, and i'd actually received compliments on them. lots of compliments.
which brings me to skinny dipping. we were at a party out in the boon-docks of KY, this great cabin on a lake. i can't remember if i was drinking or not, but if i was, i wasn't drunk. but i was really, ahem, randy.
i had a mad crush on two of my coworkers, i can't remember their names now, but they were so fucking hot. mmmmm.... plus, and this is sick so forgive me, my 3rd cousin, who's my age, is a little hotty, too. i never ever would have done anything with him, but the forbidden attraction was kind of fun.
was it my idea? perhaps it was. it was me and those three guys and another girl whom i liked a lot (as a friend - hornballs). perhaps it was my idea, because even though she was cute, she was flat-chested so i felt kind of confident. plus, it was pitch-black out there -- starless, moonless -- so i wasn't worried about the boys seeing my naked body and vomiting.
we stripped off our clothes, giggling and nervous, and ran into the pleasantly cool water. we waded out in the deeper end, cautiously keeping at least 6 feet between each of our naked bodies.
but as we settled in, wading and continuing our small-talk about KY down under, we got closer and closer. i got more comfortable, and more worked up. i was floating with the aid of those noodle-things, and sometimes, sometimes its boyancy pulled me so far out of the water that my nipples, every so quickly, would emerge into the night air. by this time, our eyes had settled so that i knew they would see. but it seemed accidental enough (or so i rationalized) that they wouldn't know i knew.
at some point, the girl left to go back to the party, and i think my cousin left, too. it was me and the two boys. my brain was overloaded. we began to talk more slowly, and our eyes were glazed over. i was so very worked up, so very excited, but also completely freaked out. i was a virgin, naked and alone with two hot, young, virile men.
if memory serves, i made some joking comment on the situation, some joke that, in my mind, meant "i'm too ugly for you guys to be into" but probably translated to them as "you're both too ugly for me to be into." we decided to go back to the party, nobody any less innocent than when this had started, and i KNOW i drank after that. oh well.
this scenario was repeated more times than i can explain in my life. finally, my junior year of college, i said fuck it and began exploring sexually with different guys. even then, though, i occassionally felt like this man with whom i was naked and making out, was kind of repulsed by me. how sick is that?
i'd like to say that's over, that i'm completely confident with myself now. i'd like to say that. anyway...
girls are weird.
uke: