Well, what the hell??

So, I'm fairly certain that at some point or another, I knew how to have links just hanging out at the side of my blog. I liked them there. I knew where they would be and they couldn't cause too much trouble that way. Yet I find myself so hopelessly un-tech savvy that if he were here, I would expect Nick Burns, your company's computer guy (aka Jimmy Fallon on SNL) to yell, "MOVE." Still, eventually, I will prevail.

In the meantime, in honor of summer and sun and stuff like that, I'm going to post, in its totality, my essay about tanning:



No, I Don’t


Every so often, I find myself in a situation that I can’t respond to quickly enough. I can’t find the words or the tone, and I ultimately say nothing. I ran into one of my favorite of all such experiences this weekend at work.

I work at Applebee’s. We’re required to wear black socks with our uniform. We’re required to do a lot of things: wear black pants and black shoes, have our hair up, have no polish on our nails, have “normal” hair, and cover up tattoos to name just a few. When one of our managers is feeling particularly managerly, they check our uniform to make sure we’re complying with the requirements. We were having a routine “sock check” during our morning directional meeting when one of the servers saw the white skin above my socks and said to me, “Oh, honey, you need to get a tan. I thought you were wearing white socks.” My first thought was, “Well, fuck you!” However, to everyone else, that probably would have seemed a little bit vehement for the situation, so I didn’t say anything.

With summer approaching, I’ve decided I need, in addition to the customary new bottle of 45 SPF sun block, a stock list of possible responses to the inevitable, “You need a tan!”:

Well, fuck you!
My first possible response is my gut reaction. In very few other situations would an insult be ignored the way that most people expect me to ignore being told that I need a tan. And it is an insult, whether intended or not, to be told that you look so bad that you need to instantly go out and inflict radiation on your skin.
No one would ever consider it appropriate to go up to someone and say, “Oh, honey, you need to wear more make-up,” or “Oh, honey, you need to stop wearing that color.” I would be chastised for saying to someone, “Oh, honey, you look so orange. You’ve got to stop tanning.” Still, no one thinks it’s wrong to tell someone they need a tan.
So, fuck you, there are no health benefits to tanning. I wouldn’t suddenly find more time for myself or lower my stress level. I wouldn’t spend any less money. No, the only benefit to anyone would be not having to look at my hideously white skin. Too bad, I’m not going to do it.

You’re not my mom.
Admittedly, this response doesn’t exactly show me to be a responsible and mature adult. However, I am, and I don’t think I need to be told how to live my life. Enough said.

I disagree.
Why do I disagree? Because no one else has lived in my skin for 22 years, or for any years for that matter.

So they couldn’t know that: I don’t tan. I burn and freckle. I get a rash from a combination of extended sun exposure and wearing sunscreen. If I don’t wear sunscreen, I burn badly. If I wear sunglasses, I get a raccoon burn. If I don’t wear sunglasses, even my eyeballs get sunburned. My skin tone is a frigid blue from translucence and veins; warm tones do not complement it. Given that information, no one could think I need a tan.

I honestly don’t think that tans look that good on anyone. Most people turn orange or green when they force their skin into a color they can’t naturally be. Moreover, I’ve seen the effects of constant tanning. My aunt Shelly has been tanning since she was 16. She’ll be 48 this year, and her skin looks like she’s 80. It’s not pretty.

Why?
Seriously, why?

Two hundred years ago, it was considered beautiful to be as pale as possible. Not being in the sun prevented freckles and showed that you never had to work. Like perfectly manicured hands and perfectly coiffed hair, it was a fashion accessory that was necessary to any young girl.

Now, it’s necessary to get a tan. I understand that I Coco Chanel to blame for the trend. In some ways, having the perfect tan, whether from the sun, in a tanning booth, or from a bottle, is the new way to show you have money, or at least the leisure time to dedicate to tanning.

It’s part of our society to follow and create trends, to be fashionable. This isn’t just a new skirt or the right color shoes for the season, though. This is about my skin, which I have to keep for the rest of my life. For so long, I’ve heard that I need a tan. I’ve even had international problems with this. Standing in an airport in Tarragona, Spain, guards said in Spanish (which I thankfully didn’t understand) that we should have gone to the beach because I was so pale. My roommate translated well after we were away from the guards.

But the question remains, why? I understand that it’s considered an element of beauty, but look at all the exceptions. Liz Taylor, Liv Tyler, Kate Beckinsale, Cate Blanchett. I’m not saying I look like those women, but I don’t think anyone runs around telling them they need a tan.

The only reasonable response anyone has ever come up (in a magazine) with is that it makes you look thinner. So do corsets, no one’s told me to use them. So does not eating, no one’s told me to stop eating. Why this?

My aunt died of skin cancer at 37.

I think this is probably the response I’m most ashamed of even thinking. I know no one knows my life story unless I tell them, and I know that it’s not fair to throw my personal life at them every time they make a comment about how pale I am. Knowing those things just doesn’t matter though. It doesn’t matter because every time someone even talks about how much they need to go tanning, I just want to hit them.

My family has a history of skin cancer. My grandfather and my aunt Shelly have had benign skin cancers removed. They have to have them frozen off, just in case the cancer starts to spread. The moles are frozen off, which, while not a painful experience, I imagine is costly and scary. The reason melanoma is such a dangerous form of cancer is that it’s difficult to catch early. Each time someone in my family notices an odd-looking mole, it’s terrifying.

My aunt Jenny died of skin cancer at 37. The last time I saw her, she was jaundiced. Somewhere in the back of my head, I knew that her liver was shutting down. That it was letting toxins back into her blood that normally would be filtered out. All I could think though was yellow and skinny: yellow eyes, yellow lips, and yellow skin barely covering bones I imagined were probably yellow.

We all knew she was probably going to die and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do. So I came home from college for the weekend to say a goodbye in my heart that I could never say out loud, because we all wanted to keep hoping that everything would be okay. I found out that I had come home too late to say goodbye the aunt I knew, because she was nothing like herself. She was angry and edgy and vague from pain, drugs, and worry.

She had 3 kids less than 10 years old. I’ve seen a one year old learn the word mama with no one to apply it to other than my mother. I’ve seen my grandparents try to deal with losing their youngest daughter. It may not be fair for me to unload my issues on someone just because they make a comment about how pale I am, but neither is it fair for someone else to tell me to run out and radiate my skin just because that’s what people do.

Coming up with things I can say is easy. This is a rant that I’ve had in my mind for the last three years of my life. Deciding what I should say is more difficult. I want to sound intelligent and calm, but I want people to understand that this is important to me. I want to be fair, but I want to convey my feelings.

I think that I’ll keep it a simple and constant, “No, I don’t.”