Thursday, May 26, 2005

Cubicle-Coloured Girl. I'm losing my tan. Oh, yes, it's true. Those of you who are anti-tanning (which really, anyone with a whit of sense is...) are probably rejoicing as you read those four sad words, while the rest of you, be you guiltily or proudly browned, are sharing in my sorrow at that increasingly ghostly visage staring back at me in the mirror. Sunlight is good for you. Vitamin D is something everyone needs to function properly, and to keep sane. You get Vitamin D by spending time outside. It's probably the cheapest supplement known to man, unlike the remedies I see in the natural foods store, which generally involve eye of newt and essence of crabgrass, and cost approximately eight thousand dollars. With the sun, you just walk out your door and BAM! Vitaminy goodness. This doesn't mean you're not supposed to wear sunscreen though....oh no! indeed you must!...for it is not changing colours that should be the goal, but impacting your health for the better. Still....for whatever stupid reason, I seem to fancy a few freckles and a bit of bronzy glow this time of year. I think I look better. I think my skin feels better. I think I absorb all that solar energy, and come out looking slightly less like the Zoloft Blob. I had a great look going a couple weeks back, when the sun was high in the sky, and I was a freewheeling freelancer. Now I work in an office during the hours in which the sun is impactful on the epidermis, and I am watching myself slowly turn the colour of a boiled egg. It's okay...I'd rather have the income than the glow, because I'm fully aware that one cannot exchange a tan for rent or food (unless your name is George Hamilton). Still, I find it ironic that the more practical and responsible steps I take in my life, the more I look like a faded, blinking mole when I step outside my apartment building at 7 am, and then out of my office building at 4:30 pm. You can look healthy, and have your life in shambles. You can look wan, and have it all together. Appearances are tricky things...we spend so much time tweaking them on a daily basis, because we want some control over how other people see us. If you wear the right things, if you have the right shape, if you look like you leave your home now and again, you might seem to have your life in some sort of rational order. But it's meaningless. How do I know? The thinnest I have been in years was during the summer of 2003, when I threw up for a month straight due to massive doses of antibiotics that I was taking, both intravenously and orally, to counteract a staph infection that nearly took my leg in the space of four days. I was feverish a good portion of that time, so my cheeks were rosy, and I was running a camp, so I had a tan. Sometimes, when you ingest a lot of antibiotics, your skin achieves this crazy clarity...your system is so bacterially challenged, you find it hard to even get a zit together, let alone break out. Because of some idiotic ethic I possess that manifests itself in generally destructive ways, I chose not to take any time off for that whole month, and instead worked 14 hour days, tooling around with a taped off shunt in my arm, and occasionally heading to the hospital to hook it up to a bag of limb-saving, tummy-wrenching fluid. I was really not well. But I got more compliments that month than ever before or since. People kept telling me I'd never looked better. But I had never felt worse. Last month, before I became fully employed, I was undergoing a terrible health scare that still isn't completely resolved. But I had this tan...I looked good. The compliments were coming again. I was broke, scared, potentially sick...and I appeared to be just fine. Well, I am fine now. But I might not look it. That thing on my chin won't go away, and I've lost most of my colour. But I feel only a good kind of stress now...the kind borne of hectic deadlines and financial planning and good changes. So I think I shall go look in the mirror and be thankful there is someone staring back at me, period. 'Cause I am the cubicle-coloured girl. And...really....I can live with that. 7:20:53 PM    build me up, buttercup... [] Season Fiasco. Okay, I'm just going to come out and say it. I hate season enders -- those miserable finales with their cliffhangers and unresolved plotlines and dubious cast member deaths -- but for some reason, though I am consistently disappointed by the way writers seem to drop several IQ points right around May, I always watch the last episode of the shows I love, and end up bitter at whatever crap they hand me in lieu of dramatic resolution. "Oh, but Meg..." you say, "That's how they get you to come back the next season!" "But no...." I say back to you, "What you underestimate is my ability to hold a TV grudge!" If writers do something stupid and improbable to end off a show's run, even for the sake of sweeps, I simply say farewell to their characters forever, and go back to chasing spiders around my bathroom. It's no big loss...I barely watch TV (since the hockey season misfired), and we don't have cable. But man, as a writer, I just get irked when all creativity dies in the space of an incredulous two hours. It's like the groom at my wedding running off with a bridesmaid. Like marinating and BBQing a steak to perfection, and then dropping it in the dirt. Like brewing the ideal cup of coffee, and putting salt in it by accident, instead of sugar. I used to think I could write TV. But I'd have to break something or come down with pneumonia when the time came to pen the season ender, because honestly, I just don't think I could do it to fans. Anyhow, this is all a very overwrought way of getting to the point that I'd like to vote the writers of 'Lost' off the island. Freakin' baby-snatchin', hatch-exploding, character-detonating, luggage-draggin', raft-sinkin', flashback-havin' twerps. I can't believe I just wrote all this text about a stupid show! But bah! Bah! 12:15:37 AM    build me up, buttercup... []

© Copyright 2005 Meg Fowler. Last update: 6/1/2005; 9:42:45 PM.