HOT!

I may look happy now, but look at the sun beating down. First come freckles, then comes....

(Okay, I admit it. This is from an asthma incident unrelated to summer that took place way before the first picture. check out the steam coming from my mask!)

Today I saw an egg on the sidewalk. It hadn't fried yet, but I'm pretty sure it was about to because it sucks outside. I mean, it's beautiful, but it sucks.
Maybe it was wearing a skirt suit with nylons (is that what people say now? tights? panty-hose?--it all seems the same to me) in a car with no air conditioning to go to a job interview. (as a side note, that's really the bummer about being a "professional." You have to dress like you're on Mad Men but rather than it being sexy hot, it is just temperature hot.)
I'm not a fan of the summer heat, but kind of in the same way that someone could not be a fan of N'Sync--you may have a lot to dislike about it, but you can't help being sucked into the celebration anyway.
Anybody who is overweight knows that summer is the most uncomfortable season of the year. There's a lot of surface area so more places to sweat and be hot. There's a lot of overlapping skin so you get all chafey and stinky. There are a lot of outdoor physical activities to emphasize your mediocre physical condition in the gleaming sun. For me personally, add moderate allergies and seriously sensitive skin (one of the many follies of my youth was my participation in a skin study for $250. They sunburned areas of your skin, biopsied them and stitched you up. I still have the horrific-looking scar. It looks like I was kidnapped by pirates who stole some organs in a hackneyed surgery, packed me up with ice and used a staple gun to close me up before dumping me on the front steps of a hospital in a developing country. The sunburn was inflicted with a UV light directed at specific patches on my hip. They just wanted a minor sunburn and 7 minutes was about the average time it took for the normal white person to get slightly reddened. I sunburned in just over two minutes and have the dubious distinction of being the person with the lowest threshold sunburn time in a sample of several hundred people.) and you understand why I sometimes feel ambivalent about the whole summer thing.
Now that I'm losing weight, I wonder how much that will change. Obviously, my allergies and lack of skin pigment will always be an issue--but if I'm not huffing and puffing through a game of ultimate frisbee (my least favorite game in the world, by the way), will my attitude toward summer change? Stay tuned. (p.s. I am super hungry and lunch is "settling" in the microwave and my house now smells like maple syrup (from last night's dinner) and thai food, and it doesn't make as good a combination as you might think....