I am a 38yo wife, mother, friend & sister. I have been married for 17 years, and I have two children: Music (formerly Karate Kid) my 14yo son, and Drama Queen, my 12yo daughter.
I understand that God had to make us all different colors. I really do. I just wish He could have seen fit to add just a little more pigmentation to my particular skin. Of all of the people in my family, extended and immediate, I am the whitest person around. Think fish-belly white. I'm scared to swim in the ocean for fear that a shark is going to mistake me for a nice big meal. I never know whether to be really still so they don't notice me or flail around to try to scare them away. Since I don't make it to the ocean very often, you would think that wouldn't be a problem. Ha! I saw a picture yesterday of an alligator gar caught in an Oklahoma lake that weighed 327 pounds. I would be a very tasty meal for one of those. I've heard that the fish are the biggest over by the dam because the water is so much deeper. I try to never, ever go near the dam while we are in the boat, but if I fall in while tubing I'm back to the question: be still or try to walk on water?
Since my siblings and even my own children always have a beautiful tan despite being slathered with sunscreen, I always feel obligated to try to do something with the pasty whiteness of myself. I've done some crazy things in the process. Before it became taboo to tan, I used to lay out and try to bake myself. I once actually went so far as to slather myself in Crisco to help produce the great tan that I heard would result. Helloooo? Crisco is for cooking, and that is exactly what happened. I would have made a perfect lobster dish.
Of course, I am a fair weather person. No matter how much I wanted a tan, I just could never lay out for more than 5 minutes if it was too hot out. It wasn't the accelerated heart rate, the shaking or the rivers of sweat running down that forced me to head inside. No, it was my feet. I absolutely cannot STAND to have hot, dry feet. It's a good thing I don't have any vital information to guard. All my captors would have to do is make sure my feet were hot and dry and I would cave in about 5 seconds flat.
When I finally wised up to the fact that my body takes to tanning about as well as my Southern Baptist ordained minister father takes to gambling, I had to explore other golden avenues. Since the world was realizing that tanning causes cancer about the same time I had my epiphany, I was saved by sunless tanner. Heh.
Do you remember the first sunless tanning lotions? The neon orange results that others could smell from five houses away? Good in theory. Thankfully they have progressed by leaps and bounds. Now we can have a more subtle tan and only the people in the houses on either side of us can smell it. I actually found a very good product that works very well and doesn't have the bad smell. But not only am I too cheap to buy it more than every few years, I am also incredibly lazy about actually applying the stuff. The solution to that was the new machines at tanning salons that sprayed the stuff on for me. Of course the inside of my lungs were also a beautiful golden bronze.
But I apparently will never lose my desire to have a healthy golden glow because the sunless tanners beckon to me as I pass by the sunscreen kiosk at my friendly neighborhood drug store. My dilemma of deciding to be blindingly white or to actually put forth the effort to try to apply the fake stuff in a "smooth, even layer" has possibly been solved. I am now the proud owner of a bottle of micro mist airbrush tanning product. Promises of an easy application, even in those hard-to-reach places, had my little heart tripping merrily along when I saw it, so I had to buy it.
As of right now I have been happily misted and am awaiting the promised two shades darker, even tan to appear in two to four hours. Stay tuned to find out how it turned out.
Posted @
6:53 PM ~
2 comments
