Sunbleacht

  • Confessions of a Lifeguard

    By Becky, (who is) still waiting for the Baywatch end credit

    The best job a girl could have is a beach lifeguard. I’d liken my experience to that of a cloistered nun – though instead of a habit and floor-length black garb, I’d don a red swimsuit and tan like Pam Anderson in Baywatch. 

    I’d ride five blocks on my baby blue beach cruiser bike to work, skid in at ten-fifteen on the dot, toy with my frayed Pura Vida bracelet as the lieutenant assigned lifeguards to our posts for the day. I’d immediately pipe up when they asked who wanted the bays – first and last word I’d say in the morning. Five past ten is too early of a wakeup time to spare any energy for chitchat, despite what Big Employment tells us. The bays were the easiest to guard: no waves and no one on the beach until lunchtime, except for a lone retiree and maybe a stray Brooklynite that thought they could sneak into Breezy Point. Those fools! I can spot them by their scowl and hideous man-buns! That’s not a friendly Breezy Pointer! 

    Couple minutes later, I’d scoop up a walkie-talkie from the basket and cruise three blocks to the lifeguard chair, throwing down my bike on the sand, rusted kickstand be damned. I’d clumsily set up the patriotic Cooperative-provided umbrella (an Irish girl’s got to have a barrier between her pale skin and enemy number one, sunlight) and tuck my legs to my chest, watching the little sailboats with white masts drift past the buoys, Brooklyn a mile-and-a-half in front of me, the Manhattan skyline just beyond, just a haze in midmorning. From my vantage point six feet from the ground, if I wished, I could survey the shores of New Jersey to my far left, Staten Island (didn’t particularly care to look much at those two entities, to be perfectly honest), Coney Island, Manhattan Beach (the kind with the nouveau-riche Russians, not the Californians) to my twelve-o-clock, the control tower at JFK, and the postcard-ready white-and-blue Breezy Point lighthouse to my right. What a joy to have all of New York City under my supervision! No crime, no death, no taxes under my watchful gaze! 

    I’d then turn my attention to the most important matter, the life-or-death duty of every tried-and-true lifeguard: considering the topic of philosophical thought for the day, my music choice for the hour. Now, don’t pretend like I wasn’t completely alert and ready to save lives at a moment’s notice – the horseshoe crab had moved six inches towards the shoreline since I’d set up my umbrella, actually, I’ll have you know. As for the music choice, sometimes Bob Marley would win out, and I’d pretend to be somewhere in the Caribbean sipping from a coconut. Maybe I’d put on the Doors and “Riders from the Storm” would become background noise for lofty sorts of ideas that ranged from religion to politics to whether I really agreed with Ayn Rand about the merits of form-follows-function architecture and professional success as (wo)man’s defining source of happiness. A girl’s got nothing else to do when staring at the sea. Also, I was unreasonably obsessed with Ayn Rand this summer, later vindicated by those 24-year-old AI startup Silicon Valley geniuses who probably cracked ten million in seed funding before I got up for my lunch break.

    At first thought, I sound irritatingly pretentious, but I’ve got a long history of hours spent staring at a pool, lifeguarding in Brooklyn that forced a level of boredom upon me that punished any want for instant gratification. If you were caught with your phone on the chair, you were sacked, and I didn’t dare risk a reprimand from my supervisor, a no-nonsense mother of three who ran the place like a warship. 

    Back on the sand. Can you imagine a New York City beach with absolutely nobody, yes, devoid of people, not a single soul as far as the eye can see? Can you imagine Billionaire’s Row and One World Trade within sight distance, sun beating down on your skin, and yet a silence so still you considered for a moment that you might be deaf? Can’t you see why I’d spend every single waking second for the rest of my life if I could, sitting here, day in, day out, 80 degrees, three little white sailboats within swimming distance, good music, and any little worries swallowed whole by the current in Jamaica Bay?

    Unfortunately and rather cynically, the lightning strike at the beginning of last August kind of took me out of my reverie. Apparently you’ve got a one in ten thousand chance of getting struck by a bolt. I don’t count myself as one of the (un)lucky, though, because I think only my umbrella was hit (who woulda thought, the tallest metal point around really does attract lightning, I just wanted to put good old Ben Franklin to the test!). I bought a lotto ticket the next day and didn’t win the Powerball. So there was really no point, I guess, except it’s a really killer icebreaker fact in an otherwise routine round-the-class introduction, and I got recognized once at the local pub. Maybe it was a much-needed jolt back to reality, a sign telling me that Ayn Rand was right: I need to take pride in my work and not just listen to reggae all day on the lifeguard chair. Or maybe it was just a great excuse to get a paid day off, which, complete no-brainer, I spent at the beach. Even got to wear a real bikini this time!

  • On Eccentricity

    A little old lady with purple tortoiseshell glasses, green acrylic nails and mild halitosis; an apartment covered floor-to-ceiling with jungle print and crocheted stuffed animals and hideously clashing shades of orange, purple and green; the lone woman in black paint and white straightjacket with long, stringy black hair that performs a nauseating sort of interpretive dance in front of Washington Square Arch. That right there is the spectrum of people and places I’ve always thought of when I hear the word “eccentric.”

    So when Alisia christened our magazine’s tagline as, “eccentric, for the eccentric, by the eccentric,” I had reservations. I obsessed over finding an alternative with an amount of neurotic determination that’s wildly inappropriate for three syllables. “Unconventional?” Too overused to be catchy. A word that’s been chewed up, spat out, and stepped on by lifestyle brands. “Bizarre?” Now that evokes impressions of a Moroccan bazaar, a two-headed goat, a bright green Ripley’s Believe It or Not! encyclopedia. It would be blasphemous to refer to ourselves as bizarre. We’re hard-working taxpayers (on paper), not circus animals. “Freaky?” Not quite the kind of thing I’d want my future employers to see in the search results. “FREAKY by FREAKS for FREAKS.” Yeah, this girl would be a great fit for our, uh, asset management division.

    But the die was cast. Eccentric’s hold on our brand had gone past the point of last return, sailed far past the strait of Gibraltar, had shot light-years beyond the Van Allen belt. I surrendered to Alisia’s vision – creative director knows best, creative director knows best. Eccentric, I decided, would be gifted a rebrand, free of charge. Merriam-Webster would be sent a rather demanding letter to see to the change. It was no longer the kind of word you’d get called by a fair-weather friend that attempts to explain the off-kilter sort of way about you to another friend while you’re getting yourself another drink at a house party. The eccentric subject would no longer cower under the weight of the connotation of “strange” or “uncool” in purple tortoiseshell glasses and a feather boa. 

    We had a radical new eccentric to define – had to be sharp, irreverent, witty, flirtatious, probably. A heavy burden for three girls who can count daytime naps under their top five favorite hobbies.

    How to start? I sought advice from Descartes’ basics – I think, therefore I am. Writers are eccentric, naturally. The good ones, certainly. Occasionally, even the bad ones (lucky me!). The sort of oddity that describes eccentricity really boils down to juxtaposition. Eccentricity is passion, obviously manifested; eccentricity is nonconformity, visually and cognitively. Eccentricity is a vision seen through a tunnel wide enough for only one head. 

    I’d like to think our magazine will define our own brand of eccentricity. I love to criticize a mission statement that misses the mark, so to allow myself to be a little lazy, and to retain a little wily feminine mystery, I’ll keep my examples close. I’ll let Sunbleacht speak for itself.