I went swimming last night, and it felt _oh_ so good to use my body again.
I had been thinking about doing some kind of exercise recently, I’ve beenspending way too much time on various computers. Basically, I’ve been escaping, from school here, papers, people, the whole yard of nine…


I received some real paper mail the day I returned from Thanksgiving, Aaron wrote that he felt like he was doing the same thing, and even cited me, not writing back to him. Oh, I feel terrible about that. We have been corresponding in some way for about four years, ever since we played together in the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra. Ever since my sophomore year in High School. We write to each other the burdens of our hearts, and somehow we always been there. He’s graduating college soon, that feels strange. He’s a real musician.


But, basically I’ve felt that I am under a good deal of stress. My back knots up all the way to the nape of my back, and down my trapezius, out to my shoulders, really, really painful. Finals coming up, I’m still behind from when my mother had surgery this fall, I’ve not been eating or sleeping well,and not exercising. And somehow I feel that I don’t have the right to feelthis way.

So I suggested to my roommate yesterday morning that we’d go swimming that night. About midway through the day I wasn’t so sure I even wanted to go. But my sweet roomie called me at work to tell me that she and another friend were not going to do their normal exercising, and that they’d just wait for me to go swimming.


The water sliding past me felt so nice, I’m not an Olympic swimmer but I love to swim. The best thing about swimming is that it makes you feel like you are almost weightless, flying. So I floated, swam a few laps, splashed around, andfelt generally ducky. Then after a couple warm showers(one in the locker room,one later in the dorm) I was still floating, free of stress, very mellow, warm and secure. My muscles thanked me because they had moved farther than keyboard or mouse, the tightness was gone, it had seeped out while I raced my roommate the length of the pool doing the backstroke.


I love floating