Sweat.

NO.

Oh man. Oh man oh man. Even just writing the word makes my teeth grit and my eyes crazy and my skin start to raise off my veins and muscles in little clots of fear, and that pricks up my adrenal glands and suddenly little beads are bursting out of my skin, and the back of my neck, and SWEAT IS HAPPENING and it’s just ironic and shit – it’s like the only cure for ‘fear of needles’ comes in a huge fat injection.

Ok let’s start from the beginning.

I hate sweating so much. At school we had a girl who was always MEGA sweaty and I vowed “I WILL NOT BE LIKE THAT” because I could see it, the shame of it, following her around like a ghost in an 80s film, all “You need to acknowledge me in order to move forward” and I thought “it’s so simple to prevent sweatiness, just a quick spritz or roll, and suddenly you’re socially acceptable and attractive and not disgusting to anyone, well at least not for the particular reasons outlined above.”

Dude is on top of things.

But you see, it’s not as easy as that. Sometimes sweat is just uncontrollable, despite all your best efforts to curb and avoid it, and I call this story “the time Jess went to the Northern Territory, in outback Australia.” (I am specifying the country here because my 2011 Blog Summary Stats just came in and turns out 3% of my readers are from Peru and another 5% from a country in Africa I’ve never even heard of, and so who am I to assume that they are down and familiar with all the states and territories of Australia?)

Anyway. Part of travelling around outback Australia, especially if you go in Summer like this dumb bitch, is eventually accepting the fact that you have sweat trickling down every single surface of your body. That the act of wiping it away will actually generate more sweat. So you get to a stage of such pathetic, helpless acceptance that you just sit back and slump into the indignity, you let those beats of salted bodily refuse crystallise on your skin, harden in moments of briefly snatched air conditioning, and it’s this state that we call DROWNING.

HE IS JUST NOT COPING

There are some people out there who go “pfft, sweat is just part of life” and “embrace all that dirty messy shit that’s part of being human” and to those people I say “obviously you have never bought what you thought was a 100% cotton shirt and it turned out to be poly-nylon and grey marle coloured, because you just have no idea” and “do you know what we call it when sweat trickles down your back and into your butt-crack? We call it SWAMP ARSE. We. Call. It. Swamp Arse.”

Sweat that one out. Just nowhere near me.