Feeling: better
Listening to: The Mother Hips - Singing Seems to Ease Me
Reading/Watching: many, many things. Too much spare time.

I am rapidly returning to my nocturnal state.

Tonight, I cooked dinner and Bri came over to watch Smallville and Angel with us (I knew what Angel was up to all along... Nimsay and Bri have no faith! no faith!), after which Bri avoided going home, and we spent a couple hours on the couch, talking (that couch is rapidly becoming a first-class location for psychoanalysis and confession- I should sell it to a shrink or a priest).

Then, when the mood got entirely too serious, I suggested we go swimming. I'd been itching to do some form of physical activity all day, but the steamy hot-sponge consistency of the weather had quelled any such idea. So I loaned her a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, put on my swimsuit, and we headed out to the pool at the center of the complex (which, incidentally, had been "closed" for an hour and a half by then, but we were quiet and there was no drowning whatsoever, so it turned out well).

It took five minutes to get fully in the water (finally I just took a deep breath and did a backflop off the second stair, to get it over with... came up, threw my hair out of my eyes and whispered fiercely, "Holy ffff... crap, that's cold."), but once in, it was heavenly.

I practiced every type of stroke I knew from swim team back in junior high, including a few I made up. Bri and I attempted to race, and I realized that some time in the last ten years, I'd learned to swim a straight line (I used to cut across the lanes like a drunken trout). We had handstand contests. We tried to find out how far we could walk on our knees before we completely submerged under the surface (the pool is only up to four feet deep, so doing it flat-footed is not an option for me, and it never was for Bri, obviously, with her prosthetics next to the towels on the side of the pool).

For some reason, we could never get our knees to sink to the bottom after a certain point- once the water got to our noses, we'd be hovering a few inches off the bottom of the pool, forced to swim downward to touch knees to the concrete. We were trying to figure out whether it had something to do with the water jets at the corners of the pool (because we're that kind of dweeby), when I said, "Um, it might have something to do with... a natural buoyancy."

She glanced down at our twin pairs of flotation devices (which were doing their job admirably), and we burst out laughing, until someone looked out their patio doors at us and we had to duck underwater to stop.

Then, of course, there were reminisces about The Little Mermaid, and playing Ariel in the community pool in third and fourth grade, until I showed her my "mermaid swim" (a graceless full-body undulation that can only be painful to watch), ending in the patented moment when Ariel rises head and shoulders out of the water, and tosses her hair in a magnificent arc over her head. Except mine didn't quite fall as fetchingly as hers- the chlorine stuck it into a mass on top of my head, the ends slapping against my neck, and I wound up with an odd roll around my face, in the timeless style of George Washington.

Then, of course, we had to sing the entire cave song from beginning to end "Look at this stuff, isn't it neat..." (girls, I know you're thinking of the next line; don't try to lie), and discuss who our favorite Disney princess was (mine's Belle, in case you care... Beauty and the Beast just seems to suit me, especially with the bookish heroine and the French accents) until it got too cold and we headed back inside for hot tea.

Walking back, the two of us completely swaddled in just about every towel I own, I couldn't help grinning. She hasn't laughed like that in a while. Almost a week.

All in all, nothing happened today save that. But that alone makes it a good day.

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