floaters not sinkers

are you a floater or a sinker?
do you consider yourself a floater?
i do -- consider myself a floater --in the water, except then maybe, i'm not as solid as i'd hoped.
we have, here, yet another existential oxymoron.

this transitions, ackwardly so, to the issue of dense expection.
when someone is denser than i'd hoped, i wonder: what is this source of visceral aversion?
both in mass and in thought, dense is not all that appealing to me.
light and airy are things that make me feel, well, more alive.

the topic, then becomes an issue of density.

we live in a dense society -- where the "per capita" far exceeds the reasonable need for personal space.
the morning commute on the N-Judah train is a perfect sample of said "case-in-point."
it's the density (pun intended) that makes me uneasy. it is the lack of consideration which also makes me -- uneasy.
still, i refuse to believe that 3 strong guys are so impolite that they to continue to sit while their pregnant co-riders remain standing: could they possibly BE that dense?!? one hopes they are simply oblivious...would this somehow make their "dense-ness," in our already overcrowded density, more tolerable?!?

from there, from that much too cramped sardine-line sample of humanity, i get off the train -- in a tunnel. as the escalator climbs to the surface, i experience a those few blocks of city air on the way to my office. there, i sit, in a scattering of cubes whose walls are much too close and not quite high enough. it is there that i lived for the better part of my past year -- amongst a density of schedules, tensions, and nervous energy.

by the noon-hour, i'm re-"fresh"-ed (if you can call it that) by the secondary 2 blocks of downtown SF city air. (while the weather is nice out, it is on those days that i am wishing the distance from my work to my pool were just a few more blocks. but, then i remember that i'm relieved because it is i, who has created a dense efficiency in my overcrowded schedule by working-out so close to work. (whew! these words are crowding my brain.)

it is at this point in my day, i climb into a cleverly groomed underground pool whose walls have no windows for natural light nor any views to the outside. once again, on this typical day, i'm confronted by a false dense pool population. i call it " false," because it's not dense at all: three swimmers per lane does not a crowded pool make, however, because of imploding sense of overwhelm, i feel crowded.

we contrast this with a mere 1.5 years ago, when i happily tolerated 15 in my public pool just for the freedom of a swim.

here, ladies and gentleman, we have a case of relativity.
the spoils compared to the other spoils.

but the issue of feeling overcrowding does not go away. i change lanes 3 times and still find that everyone wants to share MY lane. have i become a "crowd me" magnet?
perhaps this is somehow related to the fact that i'm physically a small-er person. could it be that because i take less physical space than others on this planet that i seem to feel that i "suffer" personal overcrowding -- on the bus, in the pool, in my life. we digress...

so after all this density, namely:
the pushing-and-shoving, the mental overcrowding, the self-imposed agenda crowding,
i find a desire to remain a floater.
one tangible theory could be that there's less tangible mass in doing so.
still, i prefer to think of it as a new campaign for "less density" -- in whatever we do.