Wow...doesn't SHE look healthy?

In Titanic, Jack Dawson, in his first meeting with Rose DeWitt-Bukater, says quite memorably that she looks like "kind of an indoor girl".
Well, I like to think I don't have the pretension of the DeWitt-Bukater family, but I'm certainly an indoor guy. Especially these days.
I remember the first time I felt like my neck hairs were smoldering. It was a hellishly hot day sometime in the summer of 1987. I was helping my stepfather weed a parking lot in Stratford...long story. Anyway, the day was crystal clear and maybe 30 degrees, and the sun was beaming down like God's own iron...right on the back of my neck. I felt distinctly crispy...not at all a pleasant sensation.
This summer I feel that awful feeling nearly every day. Even on those days where the smog's so thick it looks like airborne gravy, I can still feel the sun, lurking up there, ready to nuke my nape.
I've only had one bad sunburn in my life. La Guaira, Venezuela, 1986. What can I say: the novelty of swimming outside in February must have addled me. Also, in 1986, if there was such a thing as sunscreen, nobody I know had ever heard of it.
After about four hours splashing around in the pool of the Hotel Macuto Sheraton, I emerged quite well done. The ensuing couple of days (when the very air felt as if it was slapping me) and nights (every blanket in the hotel couldn't keep me from shivering, even as the sheets seared into my flesh) permanently nuked any chances I had of becoming a sun-worshipper.
That experience--that ONE SINGLE BLISTERING BURN-- also TRIPLED my chances of developing melanoma.
The attitude of today's teenagers astounds and confounds me. "We're all gonna die of something!" "Shit, eating broccoli gives you cancer!" "Hey, if I'm gonna die, I might as well look healthy while I'm dying!" Healthy.
This, from the same people who are abandoning tobacco in record numbers. Not because of all the diseases smoking causes, but because cigarettes turn your teeth yellow and make you stink.
Hey, tanners: there's a reason they call it "tanning" leather. Look again at that girl in the picture above. Burn that image into your brain. That's what tanning does to you. Attractive, isn't it? And oh, yeah, then it can kill you. Not that you care about that, right, teens?
I don't know why, but I was a different breed of teen animal. If something hurt me, or was likely to hurt me, I either stopped doing it or never did it in the first place. That just struck me as common sense. Hey, I'm nobody's masochist. I believe quite strongly in the concept of "no pain...no pain."
And while it does seem like anything you do in these modern times has potentially lethal consequences, some things are proven more deadly than others. Let's put it this way: if you not only can buy, but are strongly encouraged to buy, a product that protects you from the sun's harmful rays, it follows, as the smog follows the humidex advisory, that the sun's rays are...harmful.
They are now, anyway.
When I was a child, peanut allergies were exceedingly rare. Now peanut butter qualifies as a weapon of mass destruction in schools everywhere.
Ditto--I swear it--lactose intolerance. The market in lactose free milk is, quite simply, booming. I carry nine different varieties on my milk counter--and I'm not listed for everything on the market.
While I seem to be the only person wondering why these afflictions are increasingly common, we all know why it's getting hotter, why the air's getting more polluted, and why my neck hairs fry up golden crisp every day from May to September--and sometimes even in the dead of winter.
The Coppertone era is--as teens would put it, "like so over." It's time we all got with the program. Say it with me: healthy flesh is...flesh-coloured.