On Tanning

I'm having an identity crisis. For the past week or so, I have been obsessed with the idea of tanning.

And most people would decide, instincitvely, to go to the tanning booth or not. But I am Jakey, and therefore I have to internalize all of this into something much greater.

I have always been pale. I knew this as a child, when I was fixated on the olive skin of a Black Irish classmate named Danny (I would call him "Tanny" as a nickname), and when I was at a pool party for a friend's birthday and he, at age nine, told me "Go in the sun, Jacob! You're white as a sheet!"



I signed up for a gym recently (I am paying way too much for personal training services, which means I won't move out of my parents' house until I'm 30, but I will get that shit tight). I am enjoying the results I am getting, but maybe I will never be satisfied. Everytime I see my arms in the giant mirrors I cringe at how pasty I am compared to everyone else.



Alas, here is where a moral dilemma comes into play. I was friends with a douchebag once. He was in the famousphere of Hollywood, where apperance is everything, and I understand that. He was also a gay man living in a world of masculine ideals and, in this world, you had to be a certain way to be happy. "If you want to ever make it to California," he once told me, "You have to be tan and buff."




"KISS MY SKINNY WHITE ASS!", I wanted to say. "I WILL NEVER BE TAN AND BUFF AND I AM FINE WITH THAT!"

And I'm not fine with that, but if I do go tanning, then am I making him right, by subscribing to this beauty myth? And what if I do it wrong and show up at work looking like an oompa-loompa? It all greatly confuses me.