09 May 2011

The mirror at the martial arts studio informed me today of something that I had barely noticed before: I am incredibly pale. I mean, don't get me wrong, I know that I come from northern European stock, where the sun shines as little for much of the year as it does here and the people are approximately the color of the new-fallen snow (it's for camouflage in the snow, I am quite certain), but for most of my life I either 1. lived in Africa, or 2. was in school and had summers free to be outside.

I guess I didn't quite realize that my natural skin color is quite as, er, putty-like as it actually is. This is a scarily white town with very little truly warm sunshine, and most of my fighting class, and the larger kung fu class, is pretty pale, and it's barely the end of winter here, but I am quite possibly the palest of them all. The palest of them ALL. This never happened to me in the Dutch-land of West Michigan. I could always count on someone (eh-hem, my sister) to be paler than me.

I don't like it. I also, however, do not like skin cancer, not that I've had it but of course I do not want to have it, and so the pale will likely continue. Even when I go to warm places, we now all wear that cursed sunscreen paste to protect ourselves from the flaring sun, and those of us misfortunate (shut up, that's a word; because I say so) enough to be born of the people from the northern part of Europe, we stay the color of the off-white wall.

I miss my tan.

I also continue to maintain that skin this light is just not practicable for survival in the real world. The sun will kill off all the people with too little melatonin to fend off its rays. There is nothing but sunscreen we can do about it, and really, we all get sunburned despite that stuff, anyway. Pale skin = wimpy, by necessity. I am not sure what evolution was thinking.

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