I will say, I've been proud this semester. An odd comment, to be sure, but one I feel comfortable standing by.
Well done to Loyola for becoming a university, but that has nothing to do with this new feeling.
And I couldn't be more pleased about the Phillies "three-peating" with another division championship, but that is a topic for another column.
No, my happiness has something to do with another "p-word," unrelated to my hometown baseball team.
The one I'm thinking of is "pale." It's a description that for the first time in my four years feels applicable for this campus. And it's not entirely surprising that this is the case. We have grown up in a decidedly bronzed age. Self-tanning lotions, sprays, and creams, hours spent frying on beaches because sunscreen was left accidentally-on-purpose back at the house, and tanning beds.
Lay down beds, stand up booths, super, premium -- when it comes to tanning, the customer can pick their poison -- quite literally. For those of you who may have missed the "little" study released this summer, allow me to explain. In July, The International Agency for Research on Cancer placed tanning on the same level as mustard gas and arsenic in terms of cancer causing potential. "After class do you wanna get food and then go mustard-gassing?" doesn't have quite the same ring, does it?
It shouldn't. Because as enjoyable as a December tan may very well be, I'm not sure a future's worth of chemotherapy sessions is a fair exchange.
And while some might be lucky enough to avoid the actual disease, I struggle to imagine this group offering thanks for their severe, premature wrinkles.
Consider this for a second: when I was eleven-years-old, I spent (as many of us do) an incredibly earnest year of D.A.R.E (Drug Abuse Resistance Education).
To culminate nine months of watching videos about peer pressure, acting out fake drug deals, and wearing special goggles that simulated drunkenness (wipe outs galore on the gym's hardwood floor), we were planning a "graduation ceremony."
Speeches, appearances from local law enforcement officers (the last time many of my peers would be seeing these civic servants for pleasure rather than business), and a homemade poster contest were on the agenda. For my part, I was planning on contributing a bit of anti-smoking propaganda.
I had put my shoddy artistry skills to their meager use by sketching a train going through a tunnel.
The terribly creative twist here was that the train was actually a smoking cigarette.
To really drive this point home, I added a sloppily-drawn sign at the mouth of the tunnel that proclaimed "Wrong Way." Shockingly, I did not place in the competition.
Taking it home after the graduation ceremonies, I remember my mother candidly telling me that she had smoked as a young person -- and that most all of her friends had as well. I clutched my D.A.R.E. badge the way religious zealots might grasp a crucifix at the mention of the devil. How could she have made such a grievous error? "We didn't know it was bad for us," she explained, "even doctors smoked."
But my overly-pious 11-year-old self wasn't sold on the notion that an entire generation of people somehow decided that inhaling vast quantities of smoke into their pink lungs could be good for them.
And I can't help but feel the same about tanning. I'm not saying I didn't do it. I'm not saying that many people still don't.
What I am proposing is that we all take a moment to consider what we are doing to our young skin in an age where cancer is running rampant.
This way, we don't find ourselves thirty years down the line, with a face full of wrinkles and a puzzled looking eleven-year-old of our own asking us blankly: "you didn't know tanning was bad for you?
How could you think that laying four inches away from ultra-violet rays could be good for you?"
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