Panda Belly

This evening, I had what amounted to a minorly horrific incident involving guy sweat, my own sweat, and public transportation.

I had my usual 3 hour practice tonight, working extra hard because my poor sad little body could not comprehend working out after having had such a relaxing 10 days off doing nothing. When you spend three hours not only getting yourself really sweaty, but also rolling around in very close personal contact with various other people who are equally as sweaty as you, you end up smelling like something Osama bin Laden has not yet thought up as a weapon of mass destruction for the NYC subway system. Post-judo showers are what heaven is made of.

By the time I got out of the shower, the other girls had left. I started to get dressed, reveling in the awesome feel and smell of nice clean clothes once again gracing my body. Then I realized, to my horror, that I had forgotten my nice clean tshirt on my bed at home.

I paused, I swore, and then I panicked. It seemed that I had few options. I could put on my smelly sweaty wet tshirt from practice and wear that home, but I thought I might get arrested and thrown in the drunk tank with all the other smelly homeless people. I could wrap my damp towel around myself and pretend like it was normal, but I figured I would probably end up the same way a scenario A, or possibly with getting solicited on the streetcorner. Option C was simply to walk home wearing my jeans and clean sports bra. After all, I figured, I would be wearing more clothing than at least 30% of the women I would be walking past during my retardedly long late-night public transportation excursion. This is Montreal, after all.

I had pretty much decided on Option C, despite the extreme immodesty of such a getup. I went to the mirror to check it out one last time, and then I stopped short. I glanced again. And then I realized I would just have to wear my haz-mat tshirt home on the metro.

Standing there in my sports bra, with my oh-so-tanned arms and chest and my hasn't-seen-the-sun-since-I-hit-puberty belly, I realized, to my horror, that I greatly resembled a panda.


That's right, dear readers, I looked like this. But not nearly so cute, furry, or endangered.

I slipped on my wet, smelly tshirt, apologizing in my head the whole way home to any human being who passed within ten feet of me, and I meditated strongly on how comparing oneself to one's favorite childhood stuffed animal, especially inadvertently and unexpectedly, can be so, so different from loving the animal itself.

I have a panda belly. And that is why I was able to get home retaining my modesty (though not necessarily my dignity) this evening.