dry grass singing

bimbonic bitching

The world is made up of two types of people - those who give way when swimming towards you in the same lane in the swimming pool, and those who don't.

There is nothing more annoying than having to give way, time after time, to some hirsute hulk of a man with his beer-belly spilling out of his swim trunks who refuses to even acknowledge that fellow pool-users may just possibly have the same right to the unobstructed use of the lane as he does. i have yet to decide whether similar situations involving the cute yuppie-types with the well-toned muscles and chiselled cheekbones are any less irksome. My gut feeling is that if anything, they are more galling, not less, because one expects that all that culture and refinement ought to have made some kind of difference - and i am not talking about skincare and manicures.

i hate to generalise, but the truth is that nine times out of ten, these inconsiderate people are men. Now my friends will attest that usually, i like men: i find them easier to relate to than women, more open-hearted and less petty, more willing to just let things slide when you want to let them slide. At work, the people i most enjoy hanging out with are all men. Yet for some mysterious reason, swimming pools seem to bring out the worst in the male species. My current theory is that the watery environs of the swimming pool evoke memories of that epic first battle that every human male has to go through to even get a shot at life: put a man in a swimming pool and everyone else morphs magically into a rival sperm competing in The Great Darwinian Race for survival. He cannot help but be a boor.

Assuming that there is a biological basis for such boorish behaviour, the natural question is: can it be corrected by education, or is it just one of those things that we pray to have the serenity to accept? Can nature be improved by nurture?

Well, there is only one way to find out. i propose that all schools should mount a comprehensive educational programme to teach swimming-pool etiquette to all students, girls as well as boys. This should of course include a full-scale longitudinal study that tracks these students well into their adult years, preferably to the point at which they would have developed the said beer-bellies (or in the case of the women, thunder thighs). Such research would be, i believe, a first for our local schools, and would doubtless earn us glowing accolades from educational psychologists the world over.

In the meantime, though, i'd better find me a sugar-daddy to fund a private lap-pool for my exclusive personal use.

posted by eothen @ 9:46 PM