Pool Party (or Talking to Strangers)

I have no idea how to be at a pool party anymore. 

I went to one this summer while visiting a friend upstate. She was all effortless hair flips and genuine laughter over easy conversation while sipping Kirkland sparkling lemon water. Meanwhile, I scoped out the groups to which I could potentially belong before ruling out every single one, rendering myself a mute party guest under an umbrella praying my Chanel sunglasses hid my social awkwardness while I kept reassuring myself that I SWEAR I USED TO BE COOL.

There is a large pile of kids in the pool who I could play Marco Polo with at the risk of accidental drowning by aggressive splashing. I consider it but Superdad is upstaging me by balancing eight kids standing on his shoulders simultaneously. And how can grown ass men do front flips? I throw up attempting a cartwheel these days. Fucking physics. 

The possibility of pool time comes to a grinding halt when a foam noodle appears and I high tail it out of there in sheer terror. The noodle and I have a history that exactly zero people can relate to. I was fifteen, rocking my brand new, slightly infected upper ear piercing. I didn’t even have my regular lobes pierced but went straight for the cartilage like a super cool alternative chick even though I was in Show Choir and had never kissed a boy. I was at a pool party flirting with some crush, doing a great job of giggling between little gasps of air while he flirted back/waterboarded me. Then the noodle appears. A couple of winky cat-and-mouse moves later, he lovingly smashes that noodle across my skull. My earring gets ripped out of my ear as blood spurts across the pool in slow motion (at least it does in my story because it was VERY DRAMATIC). Holding my throbbing, bloody ear to my head, I muster a cute one-liner as I scramble out of the pool, still flirting like the unstoppable romantic moron I was/am (I mean, drug cartel members do this kind of shit as torture and I’m all, Oh, Chad, you silly willy!). 

Cut to a week later and my ear has now become so infected that it touches the front of my face. Yes, the ear on the side of my head is so swollen that it grazes my cheek. My dad takes me to some kind of doc-in-a-box who slices and squeezes my ear with no anesthetic as I am screaming and dad is breaking down the door. I believe that “doctor” ended up losing his medical license although I can’t help but wonder if I could have gotten never-have-to-work-again rich from that incident if we had just filed a bit of paperwork.

A week later, my ear looks like I have old lasagna taped to the side of my head. Mom takes me to a surgeon who audibly gasps and explains that I must be rushed into emergency surgery right this very moment before this rancid infection spreads to my brain. MY BRAIN, y’all! I have surgery removing all the cartilage in my ear and am sent home with bandages wrapped around my entire head except peep holes for my eyes. All my friends go to summer camp to learn about Jesus and kiss boys while I have a nurse come to my house twice a day to give me antibiotics intravenously and change my drain tubes. In the end, I have a plethora of plastic surgery done on my ear to reshape it so it looks like a normal ear of a perfectly well-adjusted adult woman who harbors no PTSD whatsoever. 

So I’m fine, thank you. But you better GET YOUR F*CKING NOODLE AWAY FROM ME OR I’LL CUT YOU LIKE THEY CUT ME.   

I move onto the Moms.

I’m a mom. As in, I have a child. But I’m not a Mom. As in, these Moms at the pool party who legitimately care about 8-year-old soccer games and talk about HVAC systems for no reason at all.

Did the house come with a pool or did you put the pool in, Barb?

Well I’ll tell you, Lynda, but first let me tell you about our new HVAC and how many years it will last.  

Barb talks about never being able to adequately trim that small tree in the yard and all I think is how it looks like the tree from Bridgerton’s opening credits because I don’t know jack shit about trimming foliage but I do know about the angsty sex of young adult romance.

What’s odd is that I love people and am hard wired to connect with them more than most. I am an off-the-charts extrovert which usually translates into talking at length to anyone or anything. Humans, walls, bring it. I constantly crave connection. I open my eyes in the morning and it’s like WHERE ARE THE PEOPLE? I want to swim in an endless sea of community (hence, my recurring fantasy of living in a commune). 

And yet, all I can do while the women talk about peel-and-stick wallpaper (which, I admit, is annoyingly cool) is steal glances at the hot tattooed dad complete with man bun as water cascades off his muscles every time he launches into the air an obviously pre-pubescent girl who hasn’t yet swooned over a hot boy a day in her life. Dude looks like Adam Levine ate Adam Levine, in the best way possible. 

I hear the Mom conversation move into education, teacher shortages, and the startup one woman is beta testing. SHITBALLS. It’s not them…it’s ME. 

These are not mind-numbing people who only try to recruit you for their MLM or talk about why the trash truck didn’t come on the day the trash truck was supposed to come! They’re normal people talking about normal stuff. They’re somehow being both parents and human beings functioning in society AT THE SAME TIME. I’m the weirdo who doesn’t know how to interact anymore. 

What do normal people talk about to adults they haven’t known since they were holding each other’s hair back while puking and rallying at college? Every conversation starter I can think of outside of kids and home improvement gets weird real fast:  

What are you reading?
Who has time to read, weirdo? You judging me now? 

What are you into?
Bitch is a drug dealer or has a weird foot fetish. 

What can we do about these mass shootings in this country?
Downer! Or worse, I end up in a conversation with someone vehemently protecting the innocence of guns. Somebody hand me a noodle and look away. 

Isn’t online dating so weird? 
“I would have no idea. I met my husband in real life and one night he tried to take me to a fancy restaurant but I really wanted to go to Applebee’s so we went to Applebee’s and he proposed! Isn’t that sweet? Have you met my husband? This is my husband. Where is your husband? Oh, you don’t have a husband.”

I simply loathe surface level conversation. The only thing that makes me feel lonelier than being alone is having a surface level conversation with a stranger. I only want to talk about Deep Life Shit That Matters like the metaphysics of consciousness or the new season of Ted Lasso, yet small talk is the way of social acceptance so I’m the one who ends up saying shit like, “my daughter is four and she goes to preschool and we tried to get into the pre-K in our neighborhood but it’s a lottery and we don’t find out until June but we have to decide about daycare in May so she’s most likely going to go to preschool for one more year and then will go into elementary school in our neighborhood after that. How about your kids?”

KILL. ME. NOW.

Maybe we’re all thinking like this. Maybe every time a passerby says a methodical pleasantry, everyone is screaming inside, HUG ME NOW, STRANGER!!! Maybe it’s not just me who wants to interrupt my neighbor's monologue about lawn care by breaking into song and dance just to get some shock and awe up in here. 

Someone says to us, “Hi, how are you?” What do we say? We say we’re fine, we’re good, we’re enjoying the nice weather.

Bullshit. We are all way more complex and interesting than FINE. We may feel super EXCITED or really SAD, but we are ALIVE with changing emotions and shifting states of mind. I’m not saying we should be ruled by our emotions (I spend plenty of time in meditation practicing the art of Steady Eddie), but I guarantee there’s not a whole lot of enlightened beings walking around in pure states of peace. So when we speak to each other like we’re all in some common, bland state of FINE, all I see are people with impenetrable walls up who underneath desperately want to be seen and loved. 

Who gives a shit about the weather? It doesn’t matter. I just want something real. Don’t we all? 

Consider this my public service announcement for true human connection. And, of course, the catastrophic dangers of pool noodles.