Last night after work I pocketed the money I receive for teaching the progeny of the various KC suburbanites who spend their "me time" hunkered down in the back seat of their Lexus SUVs with a grande half-caff marble macchiato and every mobile telecommunications and organization device legally available for purchase in the western hemisphere. Sometimes they fall asleep back there and it's darling when I have to escort little Chutney or Farnsworth out to the car so we can knock on the windows and rouse the parent to take them home. Seeing a member of the upwardly mobile wiping their drool off the tastefully beige leather seats of their luxury vehicle with a Kleenex hastily plucked from the depths of a Coach satchel makes all of this just a tiny bit more worth it.

I meandered over to the local sporting goods store to check out their swimsuit collection, where I was confronted with the reality that...duh...generally, retail athletics stores sell products for people who are ALREADY athletes. I pulled a size 18 exercise swimsuit off the rack and tried to pull it on over my thighs with absolutely no luck, and there simply weren't any bigger sizes available anywhere. I've always been under the impression that swimsuit sizing follows dress and pants sizing pretty closely, but apparently Nike and Speedo both cut theirs smaller. (Or else I'm really just that fat). I was a little disheartened, because I figured the only place that would probably have plus-size swimwear available for purchase off the rack was Wal-Mart, and Wal-Mart seems to specialize in being purveyors of the ugliest swimwear you could imagine, and I wonder if conception of their plus-size swimsuit collection began with a deal brokered with Omar the Tentmaker and his rejected fabrics from the Fall 2007 Tent Season.

Nevertheless, I was a determined to end up with a swimsuit, so I went to The Mart anyway and confirmed that they had absolutely nothing worth buying. It seems like they would profit from at least a small rack of suits that women who actually want to MOVE in the water would wear, but the entire display was nothing but suits with tiny straps, no straps, those skirts that are supposed to hide your fat but instead act like beacons of obesity because they're ORANGE! WITH RUFFLES!, and those weird tank suits made out of ribbed material that always look promising on the hanger but seem to lose elasticity the exact moment the fabric hits your body. I bought myself a pair of goggles as consolation and left otherwise empty handed.

Right before I went to bed last night, I remembered I had an old racer back tank suit left over from when we swam a lot during my honeymoon and I fished it out from the depths of my armoire to try it on. I was close to fifteen pounds smaller when I got married, and the suit was marked "Large", so I was really expecting disaster from this encounter with Spandex. Oddly, the suit seems to fit everywhere it counts...nothing is splooging out from the armholes, and my ass is entirely covered by the seat of the suit. I can definitely tell that my stomach is nowhere near as flat as it used to be, and my thighs look like two pale pink bratwursts exploding out of their navy blue encasings, but I can live with that for now.

I'm excited. I'm going to move my body...and with any luck, when I move it in and out of the pool, there will be absolutely no one there to see me do it.