Only a slight exaggeration.
In any case. At my Chocolate Shop job, we're remodeling for the next 10 days or so. Part of the remodeling has involved moving all of our production equipment out of our tiny little storefront, and the other part of it has involved spiffing up the furniture that we will be putting in to the new cafe. So, because AJ knows that the German in me will always do a finicky job right (it's the only German thing about me, since I don't keep a spotless house like my grandma does), he asked me if I'd clean the new (to us) chairs that were actually pretty gross. There were about 15 of them, and so I grabbed a bucket of soapy water, a sponge, and got down to it, thinking it wouldn't take me much longer than half an hour.
It didn't.
I'd gone out of the house that day, expecting to be inside, boxing up kitchen equipment, possibly painting, definitely scrubbing the floors. I had put sunscreen on my face, because I always do, but I neglected to put any on my arms, because--well, I thought I'd be relatively safe, and I don't get all that much sun-based vitamin D anyway, so I don't mind if the sun gets on my arms while I'm driving.
I gave about half a thought to getting sunburned while I was scrubbing, but I dismissed it with, "you need the sun, you pale weirdo. Anyway, you'll be done in no time." I even moved my scrubbing center of operations into the shade, out of the direct sunlight.
With the last chair as spotless as I could get it, I wandered inside the shop to finish up my last school assignment and eat some quartered grapefruit that one of my co-workers was sweet enough to share with me. I felt fine, heartened by the fact that I didn't feel any extraneous heat coming off my body. "Maybe I'm getting an immunity to the sun. Maybe I'm like normal people, now," I thought, cheerily.
My boss and co-workers left momentarily to go get the display case to see if it'd fit through the door. I finished up my essay revision and turned everything in, and looked at the shop in its utter chaos for a while, while I waited for their return.
They came back, and I went outside to get a look at the case. It was pretty dirty--it had been sitting in my boss's garage for a while, and I was fairly sure that cleaning it would be my next task, so I had to go take a look at the enemy. I stepped outside, and dang--it really was dirty. But then a weird sensation distracted me.
It felt like my arms were shrinking and sizzling. I've never really known what things in the oven feel like until today--even though I've been sunburned before, I've never gone in and then came back outside and felt the sun make me feel like I was fizzing. So I looked down at my arms, realized they'd turned the color of a strawberry daiquiri, and looked at my boss.
Me: AJ. . .
Him: Hmm?
Me: I'm burnt.
AJ is the kind of person who laughs a little bit at pain. Including his own, assuming it doesn't involve his head. So he kind of, well, he cracked up as I held out my poor little lobster-red arms for his inspection.
AJ: I told you you should play outside more.
AJ tells me all the time I should play outside more. He tells me that when I tell him I'm cold and I'm wearing a sweater in the shop when the AC is on. He told me that when I told him that my grandma was a little bit aghast at my whiteness. It's one of several AJisms that I'm accustomed to hearing at work. They're all pretty endearing, because they're all in jest, but he's never cold or freakishly pale, so he doesn't quite understand.
I love the guy. But he's always warm and vaguely tan. Even in winter.
The rest of my coworkers saw and heard me, so naturally, everyone else started laughing and asking questions and saying things like, "wait, how long were you out here?" "you SHOULD play outside more," "are you secretly a vampire? Could you see the smoke rising up off of you? Because I can see it now."
And I laughed along, but. . .
I never understood the pain vampires must feel at daylight until now. And while I don't drink the blood of virgins or have the ability to turn into bats, I totally get the aversion to direct sunlight. I have friends who sit in the sun *cough, Sahara* and bask in it like a reptile. I sit in the sun and come back in twenty minutes later looking like I actually spent the entire time being toweled down in sandpaper. Vigorously.
So not that I'm planning on sleeping in a coffin and trading daytime living for moonbathing (moonburn is probably a very real possibility), I'm definitely going to be carrying a freaking bottle of SPF 50 in my purse for the rest of the summer, because
this is just embarrassing. There is no filter on this picture. I WAS OUTSIDE FOR TWENTY MINUTES.
And I hurt.
I like the story that Native Americans told about the white men they first encountered; that they were half-baked, unfinished somehow. While there is, I believe, a larger commentary to be made about how it could be argued that the white men who colonized the Americas were basically morally unfinished because they thought it would be okay to subjugate an entire culture and kill off hundreds of thousands of the original population (subtle hint: it was NOT OKAY, in fact it was reprehensible and gross and nothing justifies it); the unfinishedness of the total lack of melanin in my skin is accurate. Can't re-bake something that's been not been baked properly for 20 years and expect it to bake right the second time.
Moral of the story is: while it's fun being lily-white and knowing that women in Romance Novels are described that way for some reason, it's not super conducive to scrubbing chairs, unprotected by sunblock, at noon in eighty degree weather.
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