Part I: Desperate Times

My skin is the color of nothing.  I'm so pale, I'm pretty much transparent.  I'm always surprised when nurses taking blood have a hard time finding a vein.  They're right there.  Right.  There.  I see them always.

Being a pale princess means that the sun and I have a contemptuous relationship.  Basically, I really like the sun, and the sun hates me.

My sister, Pippy (again, not her real name, but bizarrely the name she has chosen for herself for blogging purposes), can think about the sun and become gorgeously tan.  So for years, I thought I was just doing it wrong.  I just hadn't found the right ratio of sunscreen : sun exposure.

I tried SPF 15, 8, 2.  I tried laying out for short periods throughout the day, long stretches, tanning beds.  It didn't matter, the result was always the same.  Translucent skin became bubbling, raw red skin that turned into a peel and then, unfairly, right back to snow white.

The worst of these experiments was in college on spring break in Mexico.  I hadn't prepared my "tan" for the trip, and showed up as snowy as ever.  So, I came up with the genius idea of just not wearing sunscreen for an entire day to build up a "base."  

The result was that my entire body, minus where my bathing suit sat, was the color of a fire engine- seriously that was the color.  Imagine a fire engine and that's what I looked like.  When I took off my bathing suit, I looked like a negative photo of someone wearing a bikini.  I was hit on by sooo many cute boys.  Oh wait no, I sat in the room and rubbed aloe on myself and cried.

Now that I'm older, I've learned my lesson.  I've accepted my pale, pale skin.  I am Sun Challenged, and must never leave home without a layer of protection (at least SPF 30, but 50 if the beach is involved).  And I'm pretty diligent.  That's why I was so pissed when I got one of the worst sunburns of my life..in March...when I was fully clothed...the week before Pippy's wedding

Brad and I went to an outdoor concert with some friends.  It was fabulous, we saw a lot of minor celebrities and some rad bands.  We ate free food, drank ourselves silly and had a blast.  It was even better because it was like 70 degrees and cloudy all day, so we weren't hot.  And this was the rookie mistake that I should have known to avoid.  Everyone knows, but especially the Sun Challenged know, that you can get just as sunburned when it's cloudy as when the sun is out.  Stupidly, I didn't even think about sunscreen.  I just drank beer and sang.

Also important to note, I was wearing shorts and a white, scoop neck t-shirt.  Well, the patch of my chest that was not fully covered, the scoop part if you will, was eaten alive.  

I knew it was going to be a really bad sunburn when we got in the car.  I put my seatbelt on, shrieked in pain and threw it off.

It was bad.  It was so sunburned it was purple.  When I went to work on Monday, people made little surprised yelps and then backed away laughing nervously.  I didn't know what I was going to do.  Pippy's wedding was the following Saturday and I was the matron of honor.  I looked like a burn victim, which I kind of was.

I bought special, very expensive, cream that I kept in the refrigerator and rubbed on my charred chest all day.  I prayed.  Nothing helped.

As the week went on, not only did it not get better (and kept hurting), but it wasn't peeling.  That meant I wasn't even half way to better and I would surely be a hideous gargoyle for the wedding.  And really, how I looked at Pippy's wedding was what everyone cared about.

I was getting desperate.



Next week:  Part II, Desperate Measures