Recalibrating the aggresso-meter

Just because you live on the beach doesn't mean you don't need to get away sometimes! To another beach, of course...

I was in need of some mothering, the reason for the roadtrip mentioned in my previous post, an eight hour trip. I was headed to visit my friend who lives on the shore of Lake Ontario. Talk about one cool grandma...(after all I'm not really a grandma yet and she is)...I will write about her sometime, she's a true inspiration and role model for any middle-aged woman who isn't sure how to handle getting old.

So I hung out in her teeny town which is as far north as you can go before getting to Canada, and swam in Lake Ontario, where I had the whole damn lake to myself (as least as far as I could see).

And then I got back to my beach (there really isn't anything deserving of the name beach on Lake Ontario, a sad disappointment) and, more importantly, to the water. And it was crowded. Packed.

It wasn't easy to recalibrate from the solitude of Lake Ontario to the packed lineup. In fact I wasn't sure I even wanted to.

There seemed to be a lot of aggression going on in the water today; either there was more than usual or I was more sensitive to it than usual because of having been away. Most of the people out were men and the water was seething with testosterone. Did I mention I'd spent the past week entirely in female company?

The waves weren't big or beyond my ability and I had to give myself a stiff talking to, about how I needed to recalibrate my aggresso-meter now that I was back in the city if I wanted to get any waves. It's hard to be aggressive when you're wearing a bikini and worrying about various things hanging out. Know what I mean? I've seen some things hanging out that I never wanted to see and hope never to see again, and it ain't pretty. Like how do you tell a female friend that her tampon string is hanging out and how do you ever look at her again without seeing that image? But enough said.

I was feeling so intimidated that when I saw a friendly female surfer paddle out I nearly said something like, "Watch out, there's a lot of testosterone out here."

But then I watched her paddle out right into the thick of the lineup, tiny string bikini and all, take her place amidst the boys and surf just as aggressively (or perhaps I should say confidently) as any of them, get wave after wave and just kill it. (And nothing hung out.)

Let's hear it for estrogen. After that my aggresso-meter was successfully recalibrated, I stopped thinking silly things about women not being as aggressive as men, and I did fine.