Sun vs. Skin

Two years ago, sitting on a beach on the Greek island of Mykonos, I fell asleep in the warm Mediterranean sun. It was lovely, relaxing, calming. Until I woke up.

Sunburns are never pleasant and sun allergies bite the big one. Unlike any sunburn, during an allergic reaction, your skin will not only burn to a red onion like crisp, but it will swell and itch and become as hot as the surface of Mars. I know this from first hand experience, because when I woke up on that beautiful beach, an allergic reaction to the sun quickly followed. My eyes, as though trying to expel some toxic chemical, teared up and a mucus formed at my tear ducts. My throat swelled and swallowing became very difficult. Episodes of extreme fatigue washed over me every hour of my trip. My whole body was sore and I felt like an overgrown Oompahloompah. I avoided cameras.

That trip was definitely a learning experience. I learned precisely how rare aloe vera lotion is in Greece and how expensive specialized allergin soothing creams can be. I also learned that perfect health isn't part of the formula for an awesome vacation.

Though lots of lounging was done in Greece that summer (thank God), there was too much to see and do to sit around all the time. My gracious host and super cool friend filled my activities calendar with the perfect amount of interesting stuff, some of which we did together, and some that I got to do alone (fun fact: my toenail polish perfectly matched the marble of the Parthenon -- it was magical). We went on little outings to grocery stores and great auntie's house. We went to the mountains and out to the beach. We went on trains and boats. Coffee shops and clubs and we met up with a couple other Greek-Americans who spent their summers visiting the home-homeland.

On one such outing, we went to some posh club in Athens that sits on the waterfront and pumps techno out over the sea. There were three of us: me, my hostess, and one of her Greek-American buddies who also went to UVA, Harry. We danced and drank and carried on with several groups of people speaking languages I did not understand well until the wee hours of the morning. We were by no means the last to leave the place, but when we wandered back to the metro, I distinctly remember dawn quickly approaching. It was a Saturday night, so we ended up merging with the early Sunday morning church service crowd. Since it was 4 in the morning though, our car was mostly empty save for this old man who came and sat directly beside our little group.

Now, I don't speak any Greek. At all. But what happened next didn't require much translation. The old man began to mutter, as old people taking mass transportation tend to do. We thought nothing of it, until his mutter turned to yelling, and his hands began gesturing. Out of my dazed stupor, I realized that he was yelling at us! AND, he was looking at ME!!! Hang on a tic! I'm doing nothing but sitting here swollen! Is my discolored skin that insulting?! I looked to my friends with a bewildered expression. ("Wtf?") They said he was yelling about disrespect and the flats of my feet. ("Wha...?" )

Apparently, in last-generation Greece, its a serious insult to show someone the bottom of your foot. I was sitting cross-legged and, as swollen as I was, that meant that the bottom of my foot was pointing up and out rather than down and over. Oops.

Here's where it became epic: Harry, who is a dear sweet guy a few years younger than me, doesn't appear to be the heroic type. If there is a confrontation, he seems like he would be the witness hoping it would stop, rather than the initiator standing up for justice. And usually, with most guys his age, personal comfort takes priority over a damsel in distress. Even though in that particular situation I wasn't really distressed (I couldn't understand anything Old Man was saying, so how could I get upset about it?), I was getting uncomfortable. I was beginning to wonder what I would do if this guy got really out of control. Could I punch an Old Man in the face? Could I move my arm? Just as I was trying to remember what have fully functioning limbs felt like, Harry spoke up! He spoke in Greek, so I didn't understand until later what he was saying, but he looked like he was making really good points. His voice took a controlled tone of authority. His posture was straight and unflinching. It was the Young vs. the Old, David v. Goliath, Respectful Sanity up against Unreasonable Anger. Young Harry talked this guy down from Crazypants Land! The Old Man stopped his screaming, and walked away!

When all was translated later, I learned that Harry had argued that I wasn't Greek and couldn't be responsible for unknowingly insulting someone in such an obscure way. I felt protected. An unwitting foreigner understood and defended by the natives. It put a grin on my face for the rest of the day and Young Harry became my friend.

I've loved Greece ever since.

Post-Break Up Detox

For those of us prone to falling in love hard and, some might say, idiotically, there will undoubtedly be a number of pitfalls. After all, if there's only supposed to be "The One," all the other ones will have to be heartbreak. (Unless of course you're a super model with amazing self-assurance and security who only dates fellow insanely beautiful and emotionally stable people for sport. THOSE people need not read further. They may go for a roll in the Egyptian cotton below deck of their yachts, thank you very much.) As for everyone else, we get it now; the Disney format isn't real. Chances are, one isn't going to wake up to a kiss from a handsome prince on their 16th birthday and get whisked away in a deluxe chariot wearing glass to live happily ever after in a ridiculous house in the hills. Most of us have to kiss/date/fall for/get dumped by a number of frogs before we find "The One." Of course, rarely do we just walk away from someone we've sworn to love inside and out for the rest of time. Nononono. There must be some drama. Some kind of emotional turmoil and unrest before we can learn, grow, and please oh please, move on.

But how? What to do with all of this heartbreak until then? Well, Disney? Where's the fairy tale that plays out THAT scenario?

Things get a little dicey without a Disney movie to show us how its done. I have experienced this crap a grand total of three times now, and I barely know what to expect, much less how to deal with it. I've even gone so far as to research the subject. I've taken a number of surveys, all of them ending in depressingly optimistic anecdotes along the lines of the "give it time, there are more fish in the sea" nonsense. Unable to hear such logic and reasoning, I've turned to literature, and by literature, I mean self-help pamphlets I find next to the blood pressure monitor at CVS. And by self-help pamphlets, I mean de-toxicity assistance manuals. Thankfully, there are plenty of programs to help the smack addicts find solace.

Nowadays, with only a will to carry on and a number of Addicts Anonymous hotlines, I've developed the Post-Break Up Detox Program. Its a bit unstructured, but I'd like to think that that will enable a broader interpretation and allow for people to use this as they will.

The first phase of PBUD will be the withdrawals. You'll have the shakes, the tears, and the night terrors, naturally. Your shakes might cause you to look for things to steady your hand, like the phone, which you'll use to call your true love for comfort. Instead you'll get more rejection, leading to the tears, and then you'll pass out from exhaustion imagining the very worst: He's off shacked up on some yacht with Giselle ignoring the finer points of Egyptian cotton.

Phase 1 will transition to Phase 2. Refusing to sleep (for obvious reasons), you'll begin to spend your nights tossing, turning, and moping. I, personally, like to call and cry to people in different time zones, waking them up at all hours and severing any and all ties I ever had to happiness and friendship.

From there you'll move right along to Phase 3: loss of appetite and foresight. You'll realize that he's over you and yes, moving on without you, and you'll attempt to waste away like the remaining pieces of your shattered heart. Food will lose all flavor, you won't have the stomach for anything, and all you'll be able to think about is how ugly the future looks by your lonesome. You'll consider investing in cats.

Don't worry. Eventually you'll get hungry and then you'll rediscover Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream!! This is Phase 4, the Phase of Seeking Happiness through Gluttony. There will be food, shopping, perhaps extravagant adventures you can't afford, but who cares!? "Its all about me now!" you'll say, to what's left of your friends, and you'll order a second dish of Thai food and another round of... beverages.

At some point, you'll hit rock bottom. The Low Point. The part when you think it will never get better. These will be the days when you just canNOT plaster a fake smile onto your face or even pretend that another box of girl scout cookies will make this better. The ugly days. Everything you notice will remind you of the perfect relationship you've lost and the wonderful guy you had to let go of. You'll feel awful and pathetic because you won't have let go, you might even want to call him or plan to run into him somewhere, like in his parking space, and your stomach aches from eating far too many thin mints. In this phase, you'll just want to curl up in your crappy polyester sheets and forget you ever existed. This is Phase 5. It sucks and for most of us, its inevitable.

Luckily, following Phase 5 is PHASE 6!! Thank goodness for Phase 6. Phase 6 is Awesome. Phase 6 is just the most amazing, most wonderful, most bestest thing you could ever hope for. In Phase 6, the sun rises up, the light fills your room, your bladder forces you to stand and stagger over to the bathroom, you get a glimpse of yourself in your mirror, and you think, "O Dear God, get me out of this mess!" And then you my friend, have arrived in The Future.

The Future is a wonderful place where you have to consider no one but yourself. You get to go places and do things that you want to do whenever you want to do them. You get to wear whatever you want and shave whenever you feel like it. You get to meet new people and see new things. You can change your hair, or your personal style, or just your sheets and no one else will think twice about it. You can go see that movie you wanted to see and not worry if anyone else wants to see it too. You can eat like crap or you can eat like a vegan health fiend and no one will accuse you of going on a false diet for a day. You can have a quarter life crisis career change and move to Sedona to become a crystal vibrations specialist, or you can just redecorate your apartment. The Future is just so great because the possibilities are endless and they're all about YOU!! Its like, your whole world just revolves around just you! and no one else!! This is, decidedly, a very good thing.

Following the Phase of the Future is Phase 7. Not everyone gets to Phase 7, so wrapped up in The Future Phase that they think they're cured and have survived Post-Break Up Detox and they're on to better things. Good for them. However, some of us feel as though we must not only survive, but rise above. Others of us just aren't so lucky and we still have a bit further to go. That's what Phase 7 is for. Phase 7 is where you learn how to walk again. So wrapped up in the last Love of Your Life, you kind of forgot how to take care of yourself (this always happens to me -- wtf). In Phase 7 you begin a committed regime of eating right, exercising regularly and becoming a Babe. Step by step, you'll move further away from Heartachesucksville and closer and closer to Rockinhotchickland and you can plan on glowing when you get there.

I could tack on a Phase 8, but hopefully, by this time you've forgotten all about these phases and you're on to bigger and better things like rescuing orphans or curing cancer or something ultimately more important than whatever Detox program you were following for whatever it was that you just can't remember.

Life will have begun again and you'll be that much closer to your happy ending.