before the jump

Clad in nothing but a pair of blue shorts, I stood there, awkward and apprehensive, watching the chlorine-green water lick the glossy tiles of the pool side.

It was almost empty, except for a handful of white-haired seniors performing water exercises (which relieves their arthritic joints, apparently). And yet I felt so uneasy, so uncomfortable, so... naked. So I half-tried to tuck in my enormous belly and looked down. It still bulged out like a baby bump, so I hastily crossed my arms and retreated to the seats close to the exit.

Just the day before, I mustered enough willpower to drag myself into a sports club in McAllen to enroll for membership. My weight, apparently, had ballooned to a hundred and seventy pounds because of three-night-stand with Lady Gluttony in Houston. Ohhh.. my legs still get shaky when I think of those Vietnamese noodles.

Upon arriving home after my, erm, affair, it took less than a moment for me to hear the singular, screeching, jeering condemnation from my mother's weighing scale and all my nursing textbooks: "YOU'RE A BIG FAT WHALE!"

Maybe what drove me was the unhappy realization of my own sheer hypocrisy. Here I was, supposedly a health-educator/advocate, being trained to save the vast herd of hypertensive and heart-attack prone patients that will be under my care in the next few years, from the evils of those irresistibly yummy and oil-drenched burgers and fries from McDonald's, only to realize that I was slowly becoming one of them.

Or maybe it was the growing discomfort I have when I wear my blue jeans. Four years ago (yes, I've been wearing the same pair all this time and I'm still glowingly happy with it, thank you very much) I had to wear a belt to keep it from falling to my feet. Now, every time, just to keep the button from popping off, I have to do the tummy-tuck maneuver that I so gracefully performed as I described above and then wiggle myself into my increasingly tight pants.

I don't know. Whatever it was, it was enough to convince me sign a contract that entailed me shelling out 45 dollars a month for the next school year.

After warily scanning their wrinkled faces, I realized that the aquatic seniors weren't looking at me. Heck, I thought, they don't even know that I'm here. Throwing all inhibitions aside, I breathed and sighed -- with the air going out of me like a deflating old tire -- and leaped into the shimmering hope that flapping my legs and feet in smelly pool-water for enough number of times would make me physically fit.