Well, now I know it's summer. I have a sunburn so bad I have an icepack on it. It's a driving burn, so it's thankfully limited to my right shoulder, but it's stinging, and unpleasant nonetheless.
It happens this way every year: starting in mid-August, I swear to myself that I'm going to be really careful this year; I'm going to wear sleeves when I go outside; I'm going to try to stay inside when the sun is strongest; and above all else, I'm going to remember to reapply my sunscreen throughout the day. That's the one that always trips me up, and the one that is responsible for today's sunburn. It seems to take the first sunburn of the summer to kick me into being (relatively) good about my regimen.
I remembered to put sunscreen on in the morning before I went to uni -- I've got fair skin and moles everywhere (they're getting demented faster than my doc can take them off), sunscreen is part of my morning routine -- and then Ethel and I cruised off down the highway to Wollongong to catch up with a friend from Canberra who was visiting there overnight.
We spent the afternoon at the beach, me in my long sleeves, looking with not inconsiderable horror at the steelworks just down the beach. We're small-town girls; large-scale industrial developments are a worrisome novelty. It was that cliched scene -- smoke billowing from chimneys, lurid orange flames spurting into the sky. I imagine it would be quite nightmarish at night, but it was pretty disturbing even in broad daylight. Actually, I'm sort of intrigued to see it at night ...
On the drive back up to Sydney, I got what I think was my first real glimpse of the scale of the city, and I was honestly horrified. While I have a certain amount of intuitive understanding of the size of Sydney (90+ minutes from my place near the CBD to my brother's former school in the outer suburbs), it's a very different thing to see the city stretching from horizon to horizon in front of you. My reaction was disgust - I found it difficult to think that I was driving back into something like that.
I suppose the usual reaction to a day like today, in which I was confronted with the industrial realities of city life, would be to start thinking about sustainable living practices -- but I've never had a great deal of time for rabid tree-huggers, and still don't. My vague ex-flatmate put me off serious environmentalism for life with her evangelical spiels (my favourite remains the one in which 'possums should be allowed to vote' and the extended - and deeply flawed - Lord of the Rings metaphor). No, my reaction today was to start thinking more seriously about what I'm going to do when I finish my thesis next year. I've been saying for awhile that I want to move on from Sydney in the near future, and have always vaguely imagined that it would likely be to another big city. Today, I'm thinking that maybe some time spent in a small community would be good for me.
I don't know. It's all wild speculation at this point. At this stage, all I can really say is that I want to spend some time out of the city this summer. Day trips, I suppose, since I have work commitments, but definitely to get out and about.
It happens this way every year: starting in mid-August, I swear to myself that I'm going to be really careful this year; I'm going to wear sleeves when I go outside; I'm going to try to stay inside when the sun is strongest; and above all else, I'm going to remember to reapply my sunscreen throughout the day. That's the one that always trips me up, and the one that is responsible for today's sunburn. It seems to take the first sunburn of the summer to kick me into being (relatively) good about my regimen.
I remembered to put sunscreen on in the morning before I went to uni -- I've got fair skin and moles everywhere (they're getting demented faster than my doc can take them off), sunscreen is part of my morning routine -- and then Ethel and I cruised off down the highway to Wollongong to catch up with a friend from Canberra who was visiting there overnight.
We spent the afternoon at the beach, me in my long sleeves, looking with not inconsiderable horror at the steelworks just down the beach. We're small-town girls; large-scale industrial developments are a worrisome novelty. It was that cliched scene -- smoke billowing from chimneys, lurid orange flames spurting into the sky. I imagine it would be quite nightmarish at night, but it was pretty disturbing even in broad daylight. Actually, I'm sort of intrigued to see it at night ...
On the drive back up to Sydney, I got what I think was my first real glimpse of the scale of the city, and I was honestly horrified. While I have a certain amount of intuitive understanding of the size of Sydney (90+ minutes from my place near the CBD to my brother's former school in the outer suburbs), it's a very different thing to see the city stretching from horizon to horizon in front of you. My reaction was disgust - I found it difficult to think that I was driving back into something like that.
I suppose the usual reaction to a day like today, in which I was confronted with the industrial realities of city life, would be to start thinking about sustainable living practices -- but I've never had a great deal of time for rabid tree-huggers, and still don't. My vague ex-flatmate put me off serious environmentalism for life with her evangelical spiels (my favourite remains the one in which 'possums should be allowed to vote' and the extended - and deeply flawed - Lord of the Rings metaphor). No, my reaction today was to start thinking more seriously about what I'm going to do when I finish my thesis next year. I've been saying for awhile that I want to move on from Sydney in the near future, and have always vaguely imagined that it would likely be to another big city. Today, I'm thinking that maybe some time spent in a small community would be good for me.
I don't know. It's all wild speculation at this point. At this stage, all I can really say is that I want to spend some time out of the city this summer. Day trips, I suppose, since I have work commitments, but definitely to get out and about.
posted by beck at 7:13 pm
1 Comments:
Tan lines? I don't get tan lines -- I go straight from pale to peeling, back to pale. I do get more freckles. That's uncommon for my family, who all tend to tan, (I'm very much the odd one out in terms of colouring) but we all have pretty similar skin and of course share a strong family history of skin cancer.
As a kid, my gran lived with us, and she provided some pretty graphic object lessons in Why Not To Tan in the form of close-up inspections of her wounds where skin cancers were removed. I got taken to one of the doctor's appointments when I was about eight. It was ... educational. My mum took us along when she had mole biopsies done. That was educational, too.
Most educational of all: having my own suspicious moles cut out for the first time three years ago (ah, the frailties of the body ...). Mole biopsies are a sufficiently unpleasant process that I'm not inclined to go through them every couple of months as I saw my gran do. My not-getting-burnt regimen thus looms ever larger in my imagination (although, apparently, not large enough).
The sunburn now feels okay, although it's peeling a bit since I didn't get in fast enough with the ice-pack and aloe vera process. I'm pretty practiced in dealing with sunburn.
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