Sunburn

As is only logical, with the end of the school year thoughts on summer begin to surface everywhere. Usually, such thoughts revolve around trips to the pool, popsicles dripping down youthful chins, catching fireflies, and the smell of freshly cut grass.
I could wax poetic about the smell of freshly cut grass for days, but that's not the subject on which this post is concentrated. I would like to discuss something that happens to me at least once every year: a sunburn of epic proportions.

First, let me go back...waaaaay back to the early days of America when immigrants were flocking to our shores from all over the world (ok, so it was mostly the British Isles, but that's far less sentimental). At any rate, a young Irish man decided he would brave the New World to pursue his fortune or some other romantic notion. Long story short, this man got married and had children who also got married and had children and it went on in this fashion for generations until I was born. What does this have to do with sunburns, you ask?

Everything.

Let's think about this, shall we? What is the most well known stereotype concerning Irish, English, Scotch, and Welsh weather? It is gray and rainy there just shy of 100% of the time. Apart from the psychological issues this sort of weather presents (i.e. an entire culture of cynical people inclined towards depression), this also explains why they are stereotypically the color of the purest Vitamin D milk.
This whole "correlation between geographical sun exposure and melanin concentration in the skin" theory is one that I have believed in since I was maybe 15. The continent of Africa gets a lot of sun, pretty much all the time. African people have very dark skin. People with very dark skin, for all intents and purposes, don't get sunburns. However, the British Isles get hardly any sun at all. People from that area are pasty white. Pasty white people light up like a fire in three hours if they are lucky enough to have sun-resistant skin (I know some pasty-whites who will go "fire engine red" in less than 20 minutes). As far as my ignorance allows me to take this theory, it seems to work.

Now lets take all of that hypothesizing and do some verbal math.

Known Irish heritage + Assumed Scotch and English heritage + living in area that is very sunny + 3 hours in direct, unfiltered sunlight = UNCOMFORTABLE, LOBSTER RED SKIN.

As you might have gathered, I am quite familiar with this formula--I must also be a complete moron, because I always allow myself to get horribly sunburned at least one a year. I call my self a moron because a surefire way to change the solution of that equation from "lobster skin" to "normal/very slightly pink skin" is to simply add sunscreen or tanning oil into the mix. No joke. I liberally apply some of that stuff every four hours or so, and I magically remain blindingly white. This has been a constant throughout my life and I really should know better by now, yet here I am, looking like I have personally seen the Glory of God with my own eyes.
Although, it would seem that if I had seen God with my eyes, one would logically assume that the experience would have either corrected my atrocious vision, or just finished the job and caused me to go blind entirely. Since neither of those has happened, I'll just keep telling people that I allowed myself to fry in the park like an idiot.

Anyway, it stands to reason that since I get terribly sunburned on a regular basis, I would know how to deal with a sunburn. Both that premise and its conclusion are correct.
So, putting ice directly on a sunburn is supposed to be really bad for you. That is always my primary course of action upon receiving a bad burn. Why? Because if feels fucking GREAT. It also leads to being a soaked, drippy mess for however long you want to feel awesome.
The next (and medically recommended), course of action that I take is smearing so much Aloe Vera on my red body parts that I vaguely resemble a slime monster. It's awesome. I used to have a cheap camisole reserved solely for this purpose. It turned green near the top before I outgrew it.
Since the basic chemical process of a sunburn is the sun literally evaporating the water out of your skin, extra moisturizing lotion will do in a pinch.

I did all three in one night recently, which resulted in the simultaneously hilarious and disgusting experience of having the aloe-lotion mixture seep back out of my traumatized skin, forcing me to wipe the goo off with paper towels.

The whole time I was doing this, smelling of aloe and radiating heat like a small furnace, I couldn't help thinking: "Summer's here."

Stories

I love stories—have since before I can remember. 

My parents tell me that they could get an extra half an hour of sleep in the mornings simply by putting books in my crib. There’s also a picture of me in a blanket fort surrounded with what looks like all the books that were in my possession at the time. But I didn’t always simply look at the pictures, nor did I have to have a live person physically read the books to me. I may or may not have possessed the largest collection of books on tape known to mankind. Initially, it was just a bunch of Disney movies condensed into 10-12 page books that came with cassette tapes, but I must have worn my mother’s nerves thin listening to the same stories over and over. So she came up with a rather brilliant plan. We lay down in our tiny living room floor one day with a huge stack of books and she recorded herself reading them all to me, with my high pitched 3-year-old voice saying “Turn the page!” at the appropriate moment.

Needless to say, I came by my love of stories honest. Both of my parents are avid readers, and my father, being unable to tell a joke to save his life, can spin quite a yarn. So it should come to no surprise that in such a nurturing environment, my love for a wicked awesome tale grew exponentially with each passing year of my life. Now, I read books like crazy, become highly addicted to television shows that catch my interest, will click through an entire web-comic in one sitting, and could honestly watch movies from the moment my eyes open in the morning ‘til well past they should have closed for sleep that night.

I’m not terribly picky when it comes to which kind of stories I like. They can be long, short, vapid, deep, simple, belief challenging, meant for children or adults—the only thing that I require to get me truly interested is a group of utterly compelling characters. When I think about all my favorite franchises, they all have that in common. Whether it’s a whip-brandishing archaeologist, a boy-wizard with a famous scar, an alien with pointed ears, an adorable genius who catches serial killers, a fake psychic, a pissy fire-bender, or even a friendly bear who can’t help dancing to the beat, they are who I must fall in love with first in order to truly love they story they’re responsible for telling. 

So, I suppose that’s why I decided to attempt to do this blog: I want to tell my story.

I can’t promise that I will be consistent or timely with updates—who knows, I may even completely lose interest or forget the password three weeks from now—but I will do my utmost, both at actually updating and at attempting to produce something of quality.

Because if there’s one thing I hope, it’s that I’m enough of a character to tell a compelling story in the first place.