Pains of After-Swimming - Contains Schadenfreude

I love swimming. It's one of my favorite physical activities. Anyway, today I went to the leisure centre with my dad to do a few laps. He paid because he got a two for one voucher from the library. The swim was great. I did twenty laps of freestyle and twenty of breaststroke which equals a kilometre.

Nothing interesting happened with the actual swim. I say this because I'm guessing a few of you are thinking "This is it? Is there a form I can fill out to get those two minutes of my life back?" or something similar. Stay with me, it gets better.

After my swim I felt pretty good. Nothing like a bit of movement to clear the mind. I meandered to the showers to wash the chlorine off me. Now, anyone who has been to the Albany Creek Leisure Centre knows that there are no doors on the showers, which kinda sucks. I mean, why is it that only old men over the age of fifty feel inclined to strip completely naked in doorless showers? *Shudders* It should be illegal; there are kids wandering around.

Back to the point:

I'm in the shower, and start to undo the string tie on my board shorts. My boardies are a bit loose around the waist and I have to tie them pretty tight to prevent them from zooming straight off when I dive in. Just a single bow.

I pull on one string which, in theory, will undo the knot completely. I don't know what happened, but somehow, when I pulled that string it did not undo the knot. Like the fist of the God of badly tied knots, it grabbed a handful of hair that grows around the pubic region and yanked. Hard. I managed to keep myself from screaming but my pubic hair was now intricately interwoven into an elastic knot.

Feeling tears approaching, I searched for the second end of the string and pulled, which I hoped would result in the knot's undoing and freedom from hair-plucking pain and possible death.

No chance. I'm not that lucky.

The board short's string tie, in combination with hair of a sensitive area, had shrunk and tightened into one of those little annoying balls of material known to some naval cadets as an "impossible overhand knot." The "impossible overhand knot" is easily recognised as being similar in mass, size and density as a planet that has traveled through a black hole and has been crushed into a singularity. The attempted untying of such a knot often results in nothing but several broken fingernails and string of swear words.

And I had one attached to my privates. Oh, joy.

To put it nice and simply; it fucking hurt. This wouldn't have been so bad if the showers had doors on them, providing some privacy for me and my embarrassing agony. But the non-door-ness of the cubicles forced me to face the wall as I tried to undo the undo-able . Unfortunately this made me look like I was pissing in the shower. Thank-god there was no one else around.

Another problem that faced me was that my glasses were stuffed in my bag which I fully intended keeping dry.

So I stood in the shower wet, blind, and in pain. I decided there was nothing for it but to yank each hair individually from either the knot or my body; which ever came first. I prayed to several gods that the hair would come out of the knot first.

But then an inspiration! If I could gather enough slack from the string around my waist the knot might loosen. It could work, it had to work!

At this point I would like to point out that as an ex-navy cadet I would very much like to say that I am an expert on knots.

Hell no.

After nine or ten months without the need to tie so much as a clove hitch, one tends to forget absolutely everything about knots.

But, after several attempts I felt the knot loosen ever so slightly. I tried once again and this time managed to dig a thumbnail into the centre of the torturous ball of elastic. Gently and gradually I eased the knot apart. After some minutes the noose of pain came free, releasing me from it's grasp. The pain vanished, I raised my fists in victory, the string went loose, and my shorts fell down. I quickly pulled them back up, dried off, and got the hell out of there.

I have suffered no side effects; the swelling and redness has almost disappeared.

But I don't think I'll ever look at a knot in the same way ever again, however cliched that sounds.

PS: Schadenfreude is a German word that means "taking pleasure in someone else's pain."

There is a song about it on Youtube. Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtYzsRMaQpo

Enjoy