Feel the Burn

With the advent of summer in California are the ever looming reminders to the apparently seasonally unaware residents that beach season is coming. The fact that winters here are generally two week periods of mist and drizzle a few times in the beginning of the year are of no consequences to advertisers, something I note when I see tank top and shorts clad people walking by the Macy's billboard with a girl shedding her heavy parka to reveal layers of sweaters. Her "light" clothing.

Personally I've stopped caring for the summer tan brigade, a heretical action in the general mindset of Southern California residents. There are two things in particular that have shaped me to make this Sophie's Choice.

At one point I was at the beach nearly every day, due to a bizarre and unsaid competition between my friend Connie and I. We never said out loud that we were trying to out-tan each other, it was just implied. So we spent days at a time stretched out at the beach, our long sessions punctuated by the inconvenient and inevitable earth rotations blocking the sun. Once, while we were laying there, I fell asleep on my back with my head resting on my hands. I woke up looking like a cartoon character with white gloves due to my newly acquired tan lines. While Connie sat there laughing at me, I took comfort in the fact that I had earlier given her a friendly pat on the back with a handful of sunscreen, so while I was aware of my new fashion accessory, she was not of the small, but very noticeable, white handprint in the middle of her back. It wasn't until I got home that the extent of the problem was realized. Generally, when someone puts sunscreen on, they put it on any part of the body that's going to be facing the sun. Let's face it, no one is going to put any on any part they don't plan on exposing, unless of course it involves some sort of kinky sex game. Another place people have a tendency to skip is the armpit, including myself. When I got home to shower, I noticed an itchy burn there, and upon investigation realized that I had suffered one of my worst sunburns under my armpit. I slathered the area with aloe vera, but what more could I do? The next few days proved to be a chore. Walking became a hassle as I tried to hold out my arms without being noticed, something which only compounded the attention when my hands kept brushing against people's butts. Putting on deodorant I might as well have just rubbed alcohol all over the burn, but shaving was an entirely different kind of hell. It didn't feel so much as shaving as it felt like running rusty knife blades under my armpit, sobbing in the shower the entire time I forced myself to go through this punishment worthy of Dante. Of course, the more reasonable thing to do would be to go without shaving or deodorant for a t least a few days, just to let the skin heal.  However, this incident occurred during my years in high school, where logic and rationale has yet to triumph over emotion. Today if I did that, I would just explain the situation to my friends and no one would hold it against me. In school though, not wearing deodorant or shaving is the exact kind of thing that leads to traumatic high school experiences that movies with Sissy Spacek are made. While I was never popular, I was at least determined to be unpopular, and shaving was the way to do it. After that incident, the tanning was reduced to only weekends, and I haven't since lifted up my arms at the beach.

Certain things that I do on a regular basis tan me anyway, like driving. I consider myself a fairly good driver, but I'm not the best. In fact, my motions may not look erratic, but the pattern of my driving is. I can be overly safe, when waiting to cross a busy street, and sometimes the time between cars passing is enough to make a simple sandwich before I decide to cross the street. Today I was staring at my arm. I've noticed that there's a new mark on my arm. I've been trying to determine whether it's just a particularly stuck fleck of dirt, or if it's a new mole. When I don't feel sonething's right with my body, my mind immediately thinks the worst, and the worst usually ends in death, of which I'm terrified. The thing about driving is that it allows me an unobstructed view of my arms, so I can squirm for lengths of time about my new body marks. I even keep paper in my glove compartment for the documentation of such things, so that I can take my shoebox of new freckles for my doctor to look over and then tell me that I'm being paranoid. I put on sunscreen everytime I leave the house, but I can't obstruct the sun from my car without completely obscuring my vision and turning my car into my own portable sauna. I've written some ideas, but they all seem to have some sort of safetly issue that would keep me off the road. While I was in my car, staring at my arms, I looked up for some reason when I realized that I had driven for nearly twenty minutes with my eyes glued on my arms. I must have seen the road as well, but I didn't remember any of it. All I remember is the small dark spot just above my left elbow. I told my mom about this, and after a "What the hell were you thinking?" and a few "I can't believe you's" she questioned why I had given up on tanning because of this. Clearly, she had no idea the problem that tanning posed for me. Tanning had made me into a reckless driver. She may not understand, but tanning for me has proven dangerous not only to my life, but my social life as well. 

Grand Theft Auto

I think it's safe to say that I haven't washed my car for a solid year. Going back and forth between school and home all the time, I never really wanted to waste any of my precious few months at home doing anything that I needed to do. What I'm really hoping for is someone to steal my car. The thing is, if we didn't have all this regulation and registration that keeps my personal vehicular history on file, I's probably be little more than screwed. I do love my car/travelling trash can, but he only thing that really seems to set it apart from other cars of the same make and color is its extreme filth. At this point, the actual color of the car isn't all that relevant, and the grime sticking to the car may actually be structurally integral to the vehicle at this point. However, I do feel kind of bad for my car. So my hope is that thieves will steal my car and in their infinite wisdom take it to a car wash and therefore strip if of its sole unique quality. I'm sure that it would be a smart move, because then you wouldn't be able to tell it apart, especially if it happened to be in a sea of red Escapes. Of course though, since it would be so well documented, my car would soon be returned to me after its wash and condition, making my life just a bit easier. At least a lot easier than going out and getting it washed myself.

It's been too long, chubbs.

It's been just over a month since my break up, and I'll admit that I've been really shaken by it. No longer though, as I've since taken up that grand ol' sport of boxing. 

Now, I've never been attracted to the sport, but there are a couple of what I seem very sound reasons why I've decide that it's my new obsession:

1) The next time I want to see my ex-boyfriend, not only do I want to be satisfied that I'm in better shape than him, but I want to know that if need be I'll be able to beat the crap out of him as well.

2) My sister and I have a pact. We've promised not to let each other get fat. While I wasn't really getting fat, I had gained about five pounds in the course of the relationship. The parameters of the pact are this: if either of us gets to be a size six or over (we're very short, so a size six really is large for our height) then the other will proceed to verbally abuse the other until we feel bad enough about ourselves to drop the pounds.

We haven't had to resort to our promise yet, we've decided to hope that if it comes to that, we can avoid any psychological damage. But no promises there.

T.G.I.F.

I should have figured that the course of the day wouldn't run very smoothly as soon as I woke up. My alarm woke me up as usual, but instead of my usual routine of spending half an hour to get up and sit with my head in my hands before dragging myself out, I instead spent a few minutes asking myself, "What the hell is this? Why am I getting up? And what is this electric box that keeps beeping at me?" 

It wouldn't get better, as while I was walking to work, I rode the escalator, and on the way up, I leaned my head back to yawn. I miscalculated the angle of my head, and I started to lose my balance. I didn't fall, but instead I executed that all too obvious move of waving my arms about in wide circles. I've always wondered why people have this tendency to try to learn to fly once they start to fall. Anyway, as luck would have it my attractive boss caught my mishap and went to ask me later if I was okay.

Of course I was.

As I was leaving at the end of the day, I went to throw my garbage away in one of the trash cans outside of the office, when I noticed too late that I didn't throw it in the trash. Instead I threw it in one of those receptacles that look like trash cans but are actually those hospital bins that your thow coins into and they go to fight children's diseases, or what have you. I looked around and noticed to my relief that no one had seen me. But I didn't want to leave it in there for it to be collected. I could only imagine that the people who collected these coins would refer to me as an asshole, and even though it would be anonymous, I didn't think would be fair without my defense present. So I leaned into it to fish it out. Soon, I felt like there were eyes upon me, and I turned to see several people staring at me, some with their mouths wide open, and another which happened to be my aforementioned boss. I should have explained myself and show them my wrapper to prove it, but instead my first instinct was to turn and run. 

Later, I was dumped by my boyfriend. All in all, one of my more interesting Fridays, I believe.

Nick Jonas: The E! True Hollywood Story

Today, on my last day of being at home, my mother and I decided to spend some quality time together and watch E! Entertainment Television. At some point a special called "Young Hollywood: A to Zac" came on, and the dog decided that she had enough, and went to pee on the carpet. While she went to clean it up, a segment on the Jonas Brothers came up. When she came back, they were just talking about the condition that afflicted Nick Jonas: Type II diabetes. However, she had missed that part, and all she heard was that Nick had managed to perservere throughout his tragic disease. She's not very familiar with the Jonas Brothers, so she heard that, looked at them performing on the TV, and said very sympathetically, "Ohhh, AIDS....poor thing." I looked at her, then looked back at the TV, and realized how much I'd miss being at home.

Below The Influence

For the past few weeks, I've been pretty sick, particularly in the mornings. My head feels like it's been used for batting practice by Babe Ruth, and my stomach has been insisting that all food in solid form be banned from its current vicinity. I've also noticed that my usual habit of spending hours roaming the forest of fears in my mind before finally settling to sleep has gone, and I've been falling asleep within  five minutes of the light going out. 

About a week after telling all this to my doctor (and I'm not ashamed to say that I was happily five pounds lighter), she called me in to let me know what was causing it. You see, I have a tendency to sleep with my head under the covers, and my dog will usually sleep under the covers as well. Recently something about her has made her irrestisable to fleas. I would say it's her big brown soulful eyes, but its become quite a nuisance, so on went the flea medication. It smells wonderfully like baby powder, and it seems that my constant inhalation of it has been the culprit of all my maladies. 

We've taken the dog off the flea medication since, and I'm finally getting around to eating a nice hamburger, while my dog is sitting in her bed scratching her ear. 

How about a magic trick?

It was a few days before Christmas and I was about to finish the last of my holiday shopping and buy my dad his gift. It had been a particulalrly grueling day, and I was kicking myself for doing all of it in one day instead of a little bit at a time. So at that point, when people come up to me to ask me for things, I'll just give in. My phone number, some money, my social security number, I would have given it all away just to make it through. As I approached the final store, I was cornered by an amteur magician who said he could tear up my fifty and put it back together again. So he tore it in half, did some flourishing of his hands, and showed me my two halves again. He tried again, and in order for it to work, he had to cut it up again. Then he showed me four pieces of my fifty. Five minutes later my fifty was ironically in about fifty pieces, and he ended up resorting to paying me back in the quarters and half dollars he had saved to pull out of people's ears.  I then had to explain all this to the saleslady so she wouldn't look at me like I was the plague while I had to pay her in coins, which was all I had. As I walked out, I could see her looking at me and talking to one of her coworkers as they shook their head at me. It wasn't my fault, but I rushed out of the store with my head hung low, while half a block away I saw the magician enthrall a small crowd by pulling flowers from his sleeve.