The Rain

I was walking past a swimming complex yesterday when I saw a family of three kids with the dad walking on the pavement, towards the bus stop I think. They looked like they just had a swim 'cos all four sported semi-wet hair and two of the kids have doughnut swimming floats around them. I can usually tell whether you have swam in the public pool or not by looking at your chlorine infected eyes. I think these swimming pools' authorities or whatever pool inspectors need to put their faces into the water everyday to understand how much of that potential eyeball bleaching agent they are putting into the pool. I can understand the amount of pee they need to disguise in the pool, but sometimes I feel there are just too much chorine for comfort.

Anyway, as they were walking , it started to drizzle. Here's the interesting part. Almost instinctively and out of fatherly love, this man pull out a handkechief and put it over the youngest boy's head. Then for another, he took out a tissue and again spread it over the head, and for the third, he spread out his palm and like a jellyfish, covered the child's head. With the artificial helmets and a hand on top, they dashed towards the bus-stop like their heads just caught fire.

I am not too sure how much of the rain they have avoided but didn't they just came out of the swimming pool a while ago??? A pool by definition is full of water, where one can swim and float or float and not know how to swim or just do underwater stunts with one breath etc. You can dive, jump, somersault into the water and break your bones, nobody cares. But when you are in the pool, you are wet! And fully wet from hair to toe nail by H2O. The rain cannot be that different from the pool water right? ok, maybe one has more pee. If that's the case, the rain has to be better than the pool water. Then why do we spend so much effort to avoid the rain? I know there are many cultures who worship the rain and would dance for the rain. And if the rain is harmful for us, those swimming lifeguards, with nothing to do all day but suntan and look at chicks behind sunglasses, should pull out the giant canvas sheets and start covering the pool when it rains.

The reason why the umbrella was invented is so that most of our body are dry when it is suppose to. So you will never find people using the umbrella in the desert because there is usually no rain there. It is usually made of Nylon and not tissue paper, and if I am not wrong, it is bigger than the human palm when it is opened. It is also waterproof (has to be right?) and most of them are lightweight. So for those people who have a tendency to do like what that man did, I need to tell you it's totally pointless. Handkerchiefs are made of cloth and like tissue papers, they absorb moisture fast. As for the palm, your hands are still connected to the body when it rains, which means even if you managed to catch the rain away from your head, your hands would still be wet. I think you are better off holding a stopwatch and timing your dash to the bus stop. That way at least you accomplished something at the end of it.