Bathing-suit advice to ladies

Recently I posted about the brain-dead tourists at Orange Beach, Alabama (of whom I was the ringleader). Today I want to share a bit of advice to the ladies who might be reading this little blog, based on some observations I made while at the beach:

Ladies: You're never going to be happy with how you look in a bathing suit, so stop worrying about it.

Before all you nice women out there mobilize NOW to come march outside my house, waving signs and pelting me with marshmallows when I walk to the mailbox, hear me out. It's not that women are the only ones who make poor choices in swimwear. Lord knows there were some guys at the beach who need to have what little fashion sense they possess dragged behind the barn and shot.

No, the problem here that women continue to search for That One Magical Bathing Suit That Is Comfortable, Stylish, and Makes The Wearer Look Sexy As All Get-Out (TOMBSTICSMTWLSAAGO). They're doomed to fail, of course, because the bathing-suit manufacturers use a special fabric that makes a woman like the way the suit looks in the store, but when she gets it home and puts it on, the fabric emits mind-control rays that cause her to see herself as Bertha the Wonder Hippo when she looks in the mirror. And so the woman goes back to the store and buys another bathing suit.

I have seen this play out in my own personal life. My lovely and talented wife Kristin has five or six bathing suits, and she looks fantastic in all of them. (You're going to have to take my word for this, because if I attempted to post a picture of her in a bathing suit, she would strangle me with my own uvula.) Regardless of how good she looks in her swimwear, though, she turns this way and that while frowning sternly at herself in the mirror, making the same noise she makes when she cleans out the refrigerator and opens a container of three-week-old chili that I was saving for a special occasion.

So the upshot of all this is that women buy swimsuits they like and then hate the way they look when they wear them. Then they go to the beach and wind up continually adjusting, pulling, tugging, sliding, maneuvering, fiddling with or otherwise changing the way the swimsuit sits on their body. Their goal is to cover every micrometer of skin that they believe doesn't look good in the swimsuit (which is all of it) while getting nice and brown over every micrometer of skin that they want to tan (which is all of it).

And of course, tugging on one part of the suit to cover that tiny micrometer of exposed hippo skin on the right side means that the suit is now showing the even worse micrometer of hippo skin on the left side. So now the poor woman has to work on the left side of the suit, which causes another part to move, and so on. Before you know it, the woman looks like a third-base coach with poison ivy trying to signal a hit-and-run play to the batter and a runner on second. There were lines and lines of women at the beach, laying on towels or reclining in lounge chairs, and the vast majority of them were twitching like worms on a hot griddle. The few who were still had passed out from exhaustion.

And God forbid they ever actually SWIM in their swimsuits.

So ladies, take it from us Men: You look just fine in your bathing suit. Beautiful, even.

Except for that little micrometer of skin right there.

(c) 2014 John Puckett