Happy 4th of July

Happy Independence Day! This is the first time in a long time where I have not gotten up to go to a parade. Instead, I stayed up really late last night watching movies and playing video games (the Tiger Woods 4th of July Real Time Event, of course!) and slept in until 10:30 a.m. Normally, I would have seen most of the parade by this time!

For the past three or four years, I have gone to the parade in Northville, MI, with my aunt, uncle, cousins, and their kids. My aunt is the ultimate parade co-attendee because she wakes up at 5 a.m. and goes downtown to reserve our seats with towels and blankets. We roll in, well-rested, at 9 a.m. and we have the prime parade-watching real estate. She also usually brings drinks to keep us cool, hands out flags for us to wave, and she makes sure that her family is all decked out in coordinating red, white, and blue. What an auntie! It's also fun to go with the little kids in our family and see what they get excited about each year.

This year, I'm alone for 4th of July, and I didn't feel like going to a parade by myself. I might try to figure out if there are any fireworks tonight (vs. all of them being done already). I haven't been to a 4th of July fireworks display since I was in college. In the Detroit area, the local towns always seemed to do their fireworks on days other than July 4th, so it seemed like a lot of work to figure out where to go when. There's always next year. I didn't go to parades for about six years in a row and I don't look back on those years now as "the dark days of depression" or anything. It's okay to take a break from traditional holiday activities.

Although I have never mentioned this aloud to anyone, I like to think of July 4 as my own personal independence day. I make an effort to do something that I'm kind of afraid to do, and so it's my own day of freedom from fear or nervousness. I usually pick things that other people would find very tame, and don't go in for bungee-jumping or sky diving, but I guess when you're kind of a wuss about a lot of stuff, it's easy to find something you need an excuse to try.

Today, I'm going to the pool in my apartment complex. Yep, it's pretty tame, isn't it? But I have not been to the pool yet this season (and it's been hot enough, let me tell you!) for a couple of reasons: (1) I like to imagine that when I'm wearing clothes, I look pretty thin, and people don't know how it's all really going with my body. When you're wearing a bathing suit, there's no hiding, and I guess I enjoy a little more mystery than that. (2) I can't figure out what you actually DO at the pool. I'm not going to swim laps. I'm not planning to start diving for pennies. I don't have a game of water polo planned. If you're a kid, you splash around with other kids and swim back and forth across the pool and practice swimming underwater, amazed at where you surface in the pool. If you're a grown-up with kids you pull them around in the water, you float so that they can swim under you, you catch them when they jump in, and you do a lot of "no running around the pool" yelling. What do grown-ups do at the pool if they don't have kids? I plan to do a little sunbathing, but ultimately, it seems like the point of the pool is to be in the water and not be hot. And what do you do once you're in there? All this is what I hope to find out today.

I'll report back on how it goes. And I'll definitely wait two hours after eating before going in the water. I don't think muscle-cramping takes a holiday.