Holy Hell.

Either Dante miscounted, or hell is expanding.

Currently, hell has circles dedicated to gluttons, misers, and sodomites where they undergo punishments supposedly commensurate with their sins. But I'm here to tell you there are things worse than boiling blood, demon whipping, and marinating in human shit.

The tenth circle of hell is called Bikini Village.

The good news: I'm going to Punta Cana!
The bad news: I'm going to Punta Cana!

Luckily (or unluckily, maybe), I'm not going until March, so I either have 2 more months to search frantically for that which does not exist (ie, a bathing suit that doesn't make me want to "drop" radios in my bathwater) or I have 2 more months to cancel Punta Cana and book some sort of arctic vacation instead. Nobody every broke out in hives because of how they look in a parka.

And the thing is, I don't really mind how I look in bathing suit.
I just mind how I look in a bathing suit under fluorescent lighting in a dressing room when the only colour on my entire body is the little red lines from the elastic on my socks.

I think it's fairly popular to blame our own bodies for the fact that swimwear just doesn't do us justice, but I will pass the buck if there's a buck to be passed, and I blame the suits.

I'm not disputing the fact that nobody ever told my hips that I didn't want children, and so they grew thinking that I might one day give birth to a litter of small volkswagons and are thusly proportioned. That part is true. But am I the only hippy woman walking around? No, I am not. In fact, if you sit outside of Bikini Village for 10 minutes, you will see every shape and size imaginable walk by, some of which will mystify and stultify, but walk by they do. But 30 seconds inside Bikini Village, and you quickly realize that bathing suits are cut to one shape, and it ain't mine, and it may not be yours either. Four more minutes inside that store, and you will hear cursing from the dressing rooms, witness crying by the mirrors, and see reluctance at the cash register.

I'm too short to fill out the normal swim suit, so either I put my boobs into the cups and let the torso portion just pool around my stomach unflatteringly, or I tie the boob holes around my neck and smooth out the tummy part. It's not a choice I wish on my worst enemy.

And all bathing suits make it evident that the swimwear people and the Brazilian wax people got together and conspired against us. Your normal grooming just won't do. Bathing suits ride up into territory you didn't even know you had - and when that ultra-white strip of skin is inevitably newly hair-free and exposed to sunlight in the first time in forevah, it's going to burn like a motherfucker.

But going on vacation is fun!
It's just that next time, I'm going to save myself a little sanity for the beach and book myself into one of those nudist resorts.