chlorine, jeepneys, and the manila skyline

tuesdays we have pe. when i heard that we were assigned swimming for our individual sport i started praying for some miracle to happen. the next week [actually two weeks ago] we were shifted to ballroom dancing so i was pretty much on a high... until the next week when we were shifted back to swimming. lesson: god is pilosopo.

and that brings me to today. what they tell you about the pool is that it's indoor and not heated so it's kinda cold. what they don't is that it's freezing and that the chlorine they use is industrial-strength [read: if you don't wear goggles, you'll be legally blind for the next 24 hours]. oh and did i mention that i even had to buy new trunks yesterday because the material has to be lycra, not polyester? right.

anyway the laps by themselves weren't that bad and all the moving around warms you up so you don't feel the cold after a while. what got me was that around the fourth or fifth lap i got a cramp in my left leg. then on the next lap i got one in my right. welcome to my life. the lousy thing about cramps is that while you're stretching out your legs [or foot or arm since all of them cramped eventually] you can't move around much so pretty soon you've got second stage hypothermia.

and did i forget to mention the chlorine? evidently because the pool is indoor, the chlorine can't evaporate so it hangs over the pool like some invisible fog of optic death. by 430 my left eye had shut down and my right was winking every half-second. it kinda feels like somebody with sandy fingers is playing mixmaster with your eyeballs. anyway our instructor ["call me 'mister' for short"] told us that if we'd lapped 20 times we could hit the showers. naturally i just up and went.

on the way in, one of my blockmates told me that if i got cramps, i should improve on my enduarance. tell me something i don't know. anyway pe was the only crappy thing that happened to me that day [aside from the results of my algtrig quiz] so it wasn't so bad really.

heading home, i rode the lrt then a jeepney and got off at bicutan. waiting for a jeep to sucat, i happened to glance at the lights on the skyway. they were glowing deep yellow in the rainy fog. it was really picturesque until i realized it was smog i was looking at, not mist. pollution sucks.

there were a lot of commuters at the jeepney stop so i chose to stay on the left-most side, thinking to grab a passing jeep as soon as it turned the corner. then i thought to move right so that when it stopped i would be nearer the 'door'. of course as soon as i moved away a jeep stopped where i had been standing and left just as fast. it's a lot like life really. you get so comfortable expecting some opportunity that when a slightly different one comes along you have to work to grab it and sometimes even end up losing both.

would you believe it took me longer to travel the half-kilometer distance from bicutan to my village than it took me getting from taft to bicutan? i fell asleep in the jeep and when i woke up were hadn't moved. i guess traffic is bad because school's started but i never thought i'd see the day that parañaque would have traffic on a regular basis. i'll take the suburbs over a metropolis any day.

i was on my street when i noticed that the streetlights were also foggy. that's when it hit me. it was that damn chlorine all along! and my legs are still crampy. luckily i don't have homework tonight. i'll just hit the hay and hope that my eyes recover by tomorrow morning. the good news is that next tuesday is manila day so i don't have classes. the bad news is that the week after it'll be cramps all over again. maybe i should start working out to develop 'endurance'.

whatever.

sige ingat.ü 
posted by stani at 11:15 PM