I could also discuss my pining for my hometown, but it’s been briefly chronicled already and I think all the WW had much the same experience: cried and yearned, wised up and ended the relationship, discovered friends and fun, and got over it.
So my publishable regret (there are very few. Very. Few.) is from my senior year. I took tetracycline during college, and one of its side effects is to make you extremely sensitive to the sun. As a blue-eyed, blonde, Norwegian-Scots-Irish lass, I am pretty susceptible to UV rays anyway, so adding tetracycline to the mix was going to be problematic. Very.
Well, senior year, Homecoming was approaching and I hadn’t spent much time outside the summer before, so I got a package at the local tanning bed and usually tried not to spend more than ten minutes doing a fake bake. But as the days ticked away and the weather cooled off and I started going to my appointments w/a sorority sister who had a much darker complexion than I, I lost my head a little bit. I must have fried it.
The week of Homecoming, I went for the max: twenty minutes in a bed with new bulbs … and without my ... anything.
Yes, ladies and gents, I burned. Oh how I burned. EVERYWHERE. Thanks to my ingested dermatologic drugs, all of my skin, not just my face, turned red. And the parts that were not used to seeing any light whatsoever—that of day or night or the beach or anything other than the light in the shower—were burned and blistered for weeks. It hurt to sit, to stand, to lie down, to be hugged … I just HURT.
It still hurts to think about it, honestly, so I don’t think I will anymore.
No more tanning beds for me!
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1 comment:
Oh how I remember this! You were a lobster and I felt so sorry for you and your poor skin! I guess you learned your lesson the hard way -- but you learned it nonetheless. :)
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