Posts Tagged ‘stickers on my eyelids’

So I’m at the tanning salon which is only a few doors down from my office. As I’m there, I’m still not totally sure why I’m there: Nobody cares if I’m tanned, including me. It’s something I used to do more of once upon a time and I thought I’d get back into it. Still, as I said, I’m not totally sure why.

The comedy begins before I’m even slapping my bare butt on the tanning bed glass like a slab of raw chicken on a barbecue: The girl at the counter advises me that I am going to need some eye protection. This wasn’t unexpected, as I am already aware of the dangers of tanning for your eyes. What was unexpected is that, instead of giving me a small pair of goggles to cover and protect me, she gives me two small, round stickers roughly the size of quarters. These are meant to be folded in a delicate way to make them slightly conical, and then they go over your eyes. I think the part I liked best is how she described it to me like there was nothing weird about taking stickers and plastering them onto your eyelids. Like we just do that casually around the house or when we have a coffee break at work. Like people just hang around with stickers on their eyelids, chatting to each other. Anyhow, the idea is that these little stickers would deal with the ultraviolet rays and keep my eyes safe. Ok. I let that one go.

I filled out a form which asked me questions like “How would you describe your skin tone?” and “What color are your eyes?” and “What color hair do you have?”. Without a word of exaggeration I began to move my hand to circle the questions and then draw a line from the circle to a little note that said “I’m standing right here in front of you. Stop playing Minesweeper for 10 seconds and take a look.”, but I caught myself just before I did it. Apparently these factors are all added up to give you a score of some sort that determines how long your tanning session should be, and the score said that I should have ten minutes in the bed. As you will find out by the end of this blog post, the scoring system has some accuracy problems.

There was a steady stream of questions about my tanning history which, to be honest, I didn’t mind. When someone overdoes it with questions in order to keep you safe, you shouldn’t really begrudge them and should make an effort to cooperate (which is part of the reason I didn’t make the note I mentioned). I have to say that the questions seemed a little random and I think the author of the questionnaire could have saved some time and energy by letting the results of one question inform the results of the next. For instance:

Tanning salon girl: Have you been in a tanning bed in the last year?

Me: No, I have not.

Tanning salon girl: Have you experienced a sunburn from a tanning bed in the last six weeks.

Me: Yes. I have. From the bed I haven’t been in. Somehow it got me while I was sleeping. Through the walls of my house and from hundreds of miles away.

Okay, obviously I didn’t say that. But you get the idea.

There was a lot more discussion and I started to think that maybe she was overdoing it a little. Again, I was trying to make an effort to be cooperative, as she was trying to look out for my safety, but I can honestly say I’ve had shorter job interviews. One thing I remember her telling me was “If you feel yourself burning, you should stop tanning.” Again, I wanted to follow up with something like “Really? Because I was thinking that if I felt myself burning I would just turn up the heat and add 90 minutes to the tanning session.” The main reason I was holding back on some of these snarky answers is because I know full well that a lot of clients probably need to be told stuff like this. I remember reading once about a woman who sued a company that makes contraceptive jelly because they didn’t write on the label that it wasn’t meant to be consumed on toast (which she, predictably, found out the hard way)… so saying things like “If you’re burning your flesh, don’t keep burning it” isn’t necessarily so uncalled for.

Oh, and as a quick aside: I hear that contraceptive jelly tastes horrible.

Obviously you’re waiting for the good part, and here it is: Just before I went into the bed, she asked if I would mind wearing a sticker. I did actually say “Apparently not, because I’m about to stick two of them to my eyelids just because you told me to.” She clarified that no, this would be another sticker in the shape of a heart that’s about the size of a dime and meant to be stuck on my body wherever I wanted it. Now, I’m pretty comfortable in my sexuality but I’m no idiot: Putting a heart sticker on me while I’m tanning will make me look like a 18 year old girl getting ready for Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale. Apparently I gave her the expression which let her know she was going to have to do better than that to sell me on the heart. She said that it would help to measure how much tanning was happening by comparing the covered skin with the uncovered skin. She also said that if I wasn’t tanning enough to show a difference, I would get a free session. For some reason, this actually made sense to me and seeing as I’m not exposing my naked flesh to anyone in particular these days, I thought “Okay. Who’s gonna see, right?” I did ask if there was anything available other than hearts. Like an axe or a skull or fighter jet or something. No. There was just the heart. So I took it.

She showed me to the small room where the bed was and told me that there was a radio built in that I could use and I explained to her that I had my own MP3 player and would use that. She had no objections and gave me a quick demonstration on how to start the timer and so-on. She left me on my own, I got undressed, and prepared to lie down in the bed like a grilled cheese sandwich on a George Foreman Grill. First, however, I had to negotiate the earbuds and eye-stickers. So there I am with music in my ears and stickers on my eyelids wandering around like a fat, naked, white, male Helen Keller trying to find the right switches to turn on the tanning lamps and crawl into the bed and tan with a little heart sticker on my stomach. Just so that the story is fully told, allow me to inform you that the glass on the tanning bed is freezing cold.

It’s not so much that I burned. I’m sure you already know this part before I even had to say it. It’s how I burned that makes this so interesting: As I was laying there I was trying to remember an incident I had once before, maybe as many as eight years ago. I was going into a tanning bed after not being in one for a long, long time and I stayed in for five minutes. And I did burn very badly. When I told the salon proprietor (who was a friend of mine but wasn’t there when I did that session) he was laughing at me and told me I should know better than to sit in a tanning bed for five minutes on my first visit.

This was going through my head at what felt like five minutes into the session I’m talking about. A slow, deductive voice in my head was saying it slowly: “If I was in a tanning bed back then… and I burned pretty badly after five minutes… and this timer is set for ten… wouldn’t that mean… ?” Yet, like a contraceptive-jelly-eating idiot, I just laid there. In my defense, I didn’t “feel” like I was burning (which was something she warned me about) so I figured I would be okay. I did feel a slight vague prickling on my skin, yes, but I didn’t know if that was what was supposed to happen or not.

When I got out of the bed, it was awkward and utterly graceless… but I had stickers on my eyelids, so cut me some slack. Speaking of which, I peeled them away a little squeamishly and tossed them into a nearby garbage bin. Then, I reached down to find the little heart and peel that away as well. I felt like I was ready to go when I noticed something wasn’t quite right and reached behind myself to investigate. To my shock and horror, there was a small card (roughly 4″x4″) stuck to my butt. I peeled it off myself and lifted it to take a look. It said “This tanning bed has been sanitized for your convenience” and had a little happy face on it. Even a contraceptive-jelly-eating idiot could figure out the implications of what that would be.

So that night I stood in front of my bathroom mirror looking at myself. There was red flesh all over me, save the underside of my arms which were at my sides, and the burn was drawn along my arm with a red crayon and a ruler. My butt, predictably, was beet red save for a white square where the card had been stuck. What I didn’t predict, however, was the long, pencil-thin line over my back where my cord for my ear buds was trapped as I baked.

Turning back to the mirror, I looked at myself replete in my nudity with red ink painted carefully on me from my shining crimson forehead down to my toes… save for a small white heart off to the side of my bellybutton.