soul log

There were only a few more days left before the swimming team ended, and a new swimming term started, and our coach decided to have some fun.

We were told to do a kick-board stacking relay. It sounded fun.

A kickboard is basically a flat piece of floating board. It helps with kicking, and you grasp it in your hands. But not all of them were flat. Some of them were curved, making stacking them up extremely hard.

A relay, on the other hand, works like this: half of the team are on the other end, and the other half on this end. The first person dives in, swims across the pool, and touches the wall. As soon as he touches the wall, a person on that side dives in. The process repeats until everyone has gone.

In all the relays I have done in my life, whether it be balancing a penny on my forehead, or even swimming all four strokes at the same time, this one was the most crazy.

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I treasure a lot of my things. Once, my mother bought me a tasty treat that I liked so much, I decided to save one to eat later. Every day I would look at it, wanting to eat it, but also wanting to save it. As time went by, I forgot about it. A month later, I looked in the refrigerator for the treat only to discover a horrible layer of mold had grown on it.

But not all things I have will go bad, but I might forget about them. But I wasn’t thinking about my moldy treat when my dad and I went out and bought running shoes for me. I was eager to use them.

Supposedly, I was supposed to keep them until school started, and wear my old sneakers during the summer, since I would have a lot of fun and possibly destroy my new shoes. So the shoes sat in the closet.

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On my birthday, I asked for and received a goldmine of goodies, and some that I didn’t ask for, like a graph-lined book.

I had never really understood the point of graph-lined notebooks and books. If you wanted to write something, you could hardly squeeze a letter into a tiny box. What was the use?

When one day a foundation inspector came to our house and began doodling a map of our house onto a graph-lined paper, I thought to myself, “I see the meaning of graph-lined notebooks. They are for people who make foundations.”

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Lines are usually a predictable affair. One can expect for a line to form in front of a checkout line, in front of a ticketing booth, or in a long line for an amusement ride. But when lines form in unexpected places, people get confused.

For example, if I had come back from school and found a line in front of my house, I would have undoubtedly be very confused. In the same way, I was very confused when there was a long line in front of the theater room reserved for Batman: The Dark Knight. It had just come out that morning, and I wanted to be one of the first to see it.

There was a long line. The tickets that we had bought were for the two o’clock showing, but by the time we had entered the theater, it was already full so they changed us to three o’clock. Bother.

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One of my favorite things to do with babies is freak them out. But only if they want to. It scares the baby’s parents so much, but they do get to find out whether the baby will want to go on roller coasters when they grow up.

It’s simple, really. Find a little cart. Get the baby to sit in the cart. And then push them at high speed backwards.

My uncle has two babies: one a boy, and one a girl. They hadn’t seen me for a year, but they still remembered me. They began laughing the moment I saw them.

My uncle had a little car for babies. It couldn’t drive, but the kid could sit in it and pretend to drive, all the time the car being pulled along on a rope. It was perfect for my little roller coaster. Virtual roller coaster.

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The fish swam in swarms,
Hugging like mama’s arms,
Enveloping me,
in a sphere of moving life.

All around me, fish swim.
Delighted, happy, and simply divine.
All hunkering for some of
the guide’s fish food.

The bottle is open,
The fish food is spread
The fish all crowd,
for a bite of food.

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My cousin was taking the SAT tests. It was not an easy affair, but years of studying and learning had done good. She had finished the test.

Entirely wore out, she left the testing area to find her mom so they could go and perhaps buy some kind of treat at McDonalds. As she passed, she saw a restroom and decided to go to it. She was, after all, done with the test.

There was another girl in the bathroom as she went in.

“Hi,” she said, “are you done with the test? It’s hard!”

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There is always a way if you look for it, the old saying says (I think). But my mom might have just proved it wrong. She found it all right, she just didn’t know what it was called.

Our resort was in Playa Del Carmen, a bit over an hour from Cancun, where she had gone shopping. She had spent a fun day, walking the long aisle of five-star hotels, seeing the splendor.

And now she wanted to come home.

But she couldn’t. She didn’t know where “home” was.

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My dad, my mom, and I were going snorkeling. How fun would that be? I didn’t know, but I found myself looking over the pictures hung up in the snorkeling office.

In thirty minutes, we had been hoarded aboard a huge boat. We had been instructed to pile all our bags right in front of the captain’s view of the ocean, which made me extremely scared. How could they see?

Maybe they don’t care, I reassured myself. Maybe they memorized the route. Maybe that was what they did in Mexico. But I forgot all about it when the captain stopped the boat. It was time to go snorkeling.

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I really don’t like anything that could possibly hurt me, even remotely, even if a loved one (like an annoyed Dad) is urging me to do it. I was extremely scared when I was told to swing a rope that looked as if it was going to crash straight into the wall, just for fun. Not even life or death.

So maybe when the dive instructor told me to flip straight backwards, tumble out of the boat, and possibly bonk my head on the vessel and possibly get my arm broken in the motor, I tried to think that it wasn’t half as bad as the situation where I was crashing into the wall.

The dive instructor went first. He put his hand over his regulator (mouthpiece), and his feet gave a mighty kick. He flew straight in backwards. For a second, I thought he was gone, but then he popped up onto the surface and gave us a thumbs up.

“You comin’?”

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