beach body

i am an Aquarius. and even though that's an earth sign (i know! i was shocked to hear it, too) i sometimes think swampy lake sludge or overly-chlorinated pool water is running through my veins. because i love the water. i can't get enough of it.

one of my can't sleep at night, go-to-a-happy-place memories is floating on my back in the ocean right off San Juan, Puerto Rico. life doesn't get better than this, i remember thinking, and purposely tried to store the feeling of the warm water, gentle waves and salt in my eyes for later memoric use.

suffice to say, invite me to the beach, i'm at your door a day early, caked in sunscreen, ready to eat and drink all your beach snacks. clearly, i am very fun to take places. perhaps unawares of all these factors, yesterday i received an invite to spend the day waterside. my first of the year.

friends and i went to Jones Beach:

for the record. i did not take the above photo. and this was not my experience of Jones Beach (but hellooo man in the orange shirt). my experience was a few surfers and empty sand and water as far as my eyes could see. it was a damn good day. sun baked and sand flea bitten, as we drove back to Brooklyn i felt at peace and rested the way that only being near water makes me feel.

did it matter that i had to trek through beach scrub to get back to the car and my favorite loungey time pants were coated in ticks only seconds after i said "I hate walking through scrubby brush like this I'm always afraid I'm going to be covered in ticks."

heck no! i was by water.

did it matter that as soon as we got 5 minutes away from the beach we met a wall of traffic more impervious than 100 block sunscreen? heck no, i was water-induced relaxed. (and wasn't the one stuck driving it in).

and did it matter that i forgot to properly sunscreen my derriere so that now there is a perfect outline around my rump of where my swimsuit wasn't (unnecessarily and poorly illustrated below - and for the record, black parts denote sunburn, not fur)?

surely not! this is what makes every beach experience unique and i hope it's the first of many many more yet to come. except hopefully without all those ticks.

blech.