Gods, I love sweat.
I love to be dripping with it, soaked underneath my clothes, my shorts sticking to my legs as I stumble back to my appartment with an elephant's worth in weight of laundry.
Thirty kilograms to be precise if you count that it filled up three loads in the 10kg machine.
Oh yeah I'm butch.
Butch me stuffed the laundry into three machines, slung my pack over my shoulder, and tottered off to the nearest bar, took a spot in the sun, had a pint of white beer, and finished that book about the fifth ice age.
(for people who think that Paris is ludicrously expensive, you need to stop hanging out in American Paris. A pint of draft in the real places only costs a euro and a half)
When I felt the trickle from underneath my tightly braided hair start swimming down my back, I headed back to the laundromat for dryer duty.
Despite the row of predators leaning against the cars outside and staring in through the window, I had a blast. My new friend Syri-from-New-Delhi, this aging and suspicious woman was delighted when I offered to help fold her sheets. She's so tiny that she disappeared behind one as she tried to go it alone.
She eventually understood that the overly tattooed beast in the ratty clothes was NOT trying to steal her linens, and chattered away about how nobody helps each other anymore these days.
We were soon joined by an Algerian woman in a delightful yellow caftan, and the three of us mixed accents until one by one they left me to my socks and underwear and twenty seven other kilograms of miscellaneous wrinkled cloth.
Standing by those dryers, already soaked from the sun of the terasse and the wet heat of the afternoon, I gloried in my mess.
Mmmm, sweat. The only thing better than this much sweat is when two bodies go slipping and sliding around in it.
For the moment, it was just this one bloated pre-menstrual body and my heavy yellow laundry bag.
Nevertheless, I am sitting in my cool shady appartment, bemoaning the sudden lack of river.
I'm not a huge fan of heat or warm weather (give me a snow-covered field and a shovel to sweat with), and it'll be some time before I can swallow my disgust at the very nature of barren sand and revel in a day at a non-lake beach (although I'm not against practicing), but when I've worked up this much moisture, I have this strange impression that I've used my body for something.
It was only laundry, and hardly a strain, but I've got that exertion glow going anyway.
And despite my diminutive boobies and general girl-ness, I don't glow, or perspire, or shine with moisture.
I sweat.
Mmmm, sweat.