Scuba

When I told a friend I went hiking up a mountain the other day, he couldn't stop laughing. "You went hiking?? You did physical activity? Please."

I guess I can't blame him for being incredulous. Growing up, I was a pretty relaxed kid (my mom's euphemism for "lazy"). I enjoyed the monkey bars, swings, the occasional jog, but by the time I hit about 10 or 11, I was pretty much over with that stage of my life and ready to move on to something else. And while I've never been that girly, I found myself more like the title character in The Story of Ferdinand, the book about the Spanish bull who doesn't want to fight. He just wants to lay on the grass and sniff flowers and enjoy the finer things. Of course, middle schoolers don't take too kindly to kids who just want to read and watch old films. Because when you're picking teams for dodgeball, who cares how much Steinbeck you read last summer or that you can still recite the preamble to the Constitution? Um, like no one.

Being skinny, I was initially picked fairly early, but by the time my team saw how far I could throw a ball, things changed. There's nothing quite like being the last one picked for teams, because it's like an announcement: you're literally the bottom of the barrel. Yes, even after the kid in the wheelchair. "Just wait until I'm a pro athlete," I'd think, knowing that there was no possible way this would ever happen, and wishing I were better at deluding myself. "That'll show 'em."

And seven years later, I'm still not a pro athlete. But I'm sure there's still time.

But enough of that -- I've gone hiking, there's some sort of trip to the Cape of Good Hope to see penguins this weekend and I'm taking scuba lessons. Perhaps it's my lack of sporting ability that makes me so clueless, but I honestly thought scuba looked like a fairly harmless activity. I can swim. Breathe under water? Not so much. But scuba=swimming+breathing underwater=awesome. (Instead of doing sports, I worked out complicated mathematical formulas like this when I was growing up.) You put on one of those cute little suits, fix your goggles and facepiece and dive in. Easy as pie.

"Don't forget to breathe." This is uttered every session by Hannes, our cute South African scuba instructor. Nevermind that his accent is a little hard to understand at times; as long as I pick up the basics, I'll be fine. But apparently, breathing is pretty important. We saw a lovely educational video, The Science of Scuba (which surprisingly hasn't yet won an Academy Award) that showed us pictures of lungs exploding (this is what happens when you hold your breath and shoot up to the top too fast), faces bleeding (this is what happens when you go swimming with swollen sinuses; blood leaks out of every orifice on your face) and air embolisms (another reaction to coming up too fast; this one causes brain damage, strokes and death. The man in the video claimed this was one of the "more serious" diving issues; what could be more serious than death?, I thought. Eternal damnation? Do they do that in scuba, too?).

Bottom line? I'm now terrified to scuba. I might die. Also, I don't remember what SCUBA stands for. Shouldn't I know that already? Snorkeling is tomorrow, but maybe that'll be manageable. I'm crossing my fingers.