It’s that time again, sugar. You thought maybe this year you’d get away with lurking in the house and office until the sun went down, venturing out to 7-11 for beer and jerky only under the cover of darkness. You’d hoped that you could find yourself a project at work, preferably something requiring long visits to the server closet or the basement file room, wherein you could log 70 hours a week in overtime and spend your leisure time at home reformatting your Very Important Database and not returning phone calls. Not gonna happen. This season, like all summers that have come before it, will draw you out of your fusty little cave and into the light. Barbecues with quivering potato salad, other people’s dogs (“Her name is Misha! She only bites if you hold her gaze for too long!”), careening toddlers and tipsy, sunburned friends of friends mispronouncing your name are in your immediate future. Saturday afternoons at (or on, if you’ve got a swell friend with the wherewithal to have procured themselves a genuine craft of some sort) a lake and balmy nights roaming the streets in tank tops and absurd open-toed shoes are your destiny.
You will participate, like it or not. It’s in the blood; vitamin D (which does nice things like protect you against osteoporosis, osteoarthritis and breast and bowel cancer) is most efficiently produced vis-‡-vis that hurty yellow ball in the sky shining directly onto your sallow hide. Moderate doses of sun or ultraviolet light enhance immune system function, ratchet up your serotonin (nature’s synaptic hot cocoa and cookies) levels and augment a whole host of biological functions, including ovulation. (Infertile? Throw on that bikini and toss yourself on a towel, mama. You never know.) Lying in the sun taking great gasps of fresh air was the treatment of choice for tuberculosis in the 1930s, before antibiotics were discovered. Our bodies were made for sucking up sunlight. Yes, even you, my lily-white friends; you may fry like a shucked oyster in extra-virgin too long under its rays, but without the glorious sun you’d likely be a histrionic pile of pale, suicidal rags.
And with the sun comes a mingling and muddling around with the heat-stroked hoi polloi. Hot tub parties, outdoor music, the aforementioned meat-grilling extravaganzas, frisbee-tossing, drum circles, skinny-dipping, gardening and strolling around your block at sundown to ogle acres of lumpy American flesh are all value-neutral byproducts of our intrinsic need to get as naked as possible and turn our cranky faces to the sky. So maybe other people’s thongs (both kinds) and fountain-dancing aren’t your cup of tea. Maybe you prefer online gaming or late nights locked inside the sweltering apartment with your good friends Misters Waits and Beam. You’ll still have to hazard a foray into society once in a while, to cash the unemployment check or score some blue velvet. While you’re out there, take a great big gasp of fresh air and thank your lucky stars it isn’t November yet. That month is murderous.
I tan because I can.
populargirls@tabletmag.com
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