2008 Woodie Awards
Sand in My Pants, No Beer in My Hand
Athena Fokaidis '09
Issue date: 10/2/08 Section: Portfolio
I do not always subscribe to the notion that an ice-cold brew(skie) ameliorates a situation, but today may just be one of them days. As I sit next to my parents watching my two younger brothers in the ocean at Misquamicut Beach, it occurs to me that a beer might not be so bad right about now. The sky is blue-ish and my mood is good-ish. That smell of salty water hangs in the air, and no matter what I do, I cannot get those 37 or so granules of sand off my hand long enough to scratch my nose. I look around me and something is so right about this mildly obscene sight.
A 60-something dame has coerced the sand into conforming to the shape of her voluptuous body, and when I sit up I can see her double D's fighting to keep their ground in their leopard-printed, two-piece home. They need some sort of settlement from the recent divorce. She asks for a cigarette from the man she married, whose chest is roaringly hairy except for two spots where he's been rubbing. The resulting pattern resembles two eyes creeping out from a bush in the Amazon. These two are oldies and goodies, but they are about 25 inches away and therefore 25 inches from me experiencing some serenity.
Maybe a beverage wouldn't be so bad right now, but it would take some time before I could boil the ocean water to get rid of the salt, and that certainly wouldn't cut it anyways.. While I am still considering just how distressed I am, something happens to push me over the edge.
My 12-year-old brother emerges from the water, cocks his head back, and spits on my leg. Then, about 13 seconds later, my 10-year-old brother approaches me with a ball of sand. He preciously practices his baseball pitch on my spit-free leg and then spreads the sand on my foot. I am seriously considering a colonic or a Corona. But there's a catch: If I walk up to the beach bar, my 12-year-old looks might score me a Kool-Aid. A bikini might help, but at this point I'm wearing black athletic shorts and a white t-shirt. This look could possibly bump me up to thirteen years old, but always with the undertone of just having been picked up from gymnastics.
A 60-something dame has coerced the sand into conforming to the shape of her voluptuous body, and when I sit up I can see her double D's fighting to keep their ground in their leopard-printed, two-piece home. They need some sort of settlement from the recent divorce. She asks for a cigarette from the man she married, whose chest is roaringly hairy except for two spots where he's been rubbing. The resulting pattern resembles two eyes creeping out from a bush in the Amazon. These two are oldies and goodies, but they are about 25 inches away and therefore 25 inches from me experiencing some serenity.
Maybe a beverage wouldn't be so bad right now, but it would take some time before I could boil the ocean water to get rid of the salt, and that certainly wouldn't cut it anyways.. While I am still considering just how distressed I am, something happens to push me over the edge.
My 12-year-old brother emerges from the water, cocks his head back, and spits on my leg. Then, about 13 seconds later, my 10-year-old brother approaches me with a ball of sand. He preciously practices his baseball pitch on my spit-free leg and then spreads the sand on my foot. I am seriously considering a colonic or a Corona. But there's a catch: If I walk up to the beach bar, my 12-year-old looks might score me a Kool-Aid. A bikini might help, but at this point I'm wearing black athletic shorts and a white t-shirt. This look could possibly bump me up to thirteen years old, but always with the undertone of just having been picked up from gymnastics.
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