Hawaiian Getaway

Recently, I went to Hawaii for a week to celebrate my parents' 30th wedding anniversary. Apparently once you've been married that long, it doesn't seem strange to have your grown children tag along with you on a romantic getaway. Regardless, it was very nice of them to include my sibling and me, especially since it was my first trip to Hawaii. It is positively beautiful, so now I understand the hype.

Unfortunately, my trip to Hawaii was hardly a dream vacation. A few days in, I was overcome with an intense itch. For whatever reason, the itching started in my crotch region. I kept trying to find ways of scratching that area while laying out on the beach without looking obscene, all the while worrying about what was wrong with me. I'm not going to lie, I actually went back to my room and WebMD-ed "crabs."

It wasn't crabs, it was heat rash, and it quickly spread. It looked like I had red goosebumps all over the majority of my body. Evidently, heat rash forms when your body overheats and sweat is unable to properly escape from your body. I guess I had an adverse reaction to my suntan lotion (gotta buy the non-pore blocking stuff from now on) and it clogged me up. Heat rash is most common in infants, which makes me pretty darn awesome.

So once the heat rash ravished me, I couldn't be in the sunlight. Unfortunately, the number of Hawaiian activities that do not involve sun is practically nil. This directly contradicted with my sibling's sole Hawaiian plan: sitting in the sun. She literally wanted to do nothing else the entire trip. For her, it's all about what people will "think" when she gets back home, so she wants to be as tan as possible. Even though she can be a little bigoted, in this instance she wouldn't mind being mistaken for a different ethnicity. So while my family laid on the beach, I stayed inside or found spots in the shade near elderly people.

The itching came to a climax at the luau. We sat a table with another family which included a cute four-year-old girl. This girl came to EAT. At first I thought she was making the classic mistake of filling up on bread, but she was still revving by dessert and her parents had to limit her to two desserts. The girl put me to shame, but to be fair, I was focusing on my itchy rash. The whole time I hoped that the other family was too busy watching the fire dancing on stage to notice me rub ice cubes on my thigh or doing over-the-pants groin scratching with a fork.

As soon as the dancing stopped, my family bolted to a pharmacy where I picked up some Benadryl - both cream and liquid. The cream said "do not apply to large areas of the body," but I lather nearly my whole body with it anyway. As for the liquid Benadryl, I'm not sure whether you've had Benadryl lately (what up? to my recreational drug using readers!) but that stuff knocks you out, so I spent the next couple of days not only avoiding sun, but nearly incapacitated. You know, just living the dream!

At any rate, I was pretty ready to take my gnarly-skinned self home by the end of the week. Some of my friends were nice enough to compliment me on my "tan," which was nothing short of kind considering I actually looked red and splotchy.

Until we meet again, sunshine!