GUEST COLUMNIST: Trying to get some rays

Every year at about this time, my coolness rating drops by about 10 points. It isn't because the temperature rises, but instead because the sun shining overhead affects everyone but me. While those around me quickly turn a nice shade of brown these days just from taking a stroll around the block, I remain -- despite numerous one o'clock bike rides -- an un-missable shade of incredibly pale. Most of the year, I can hide it. After all, I have long-sleeve shirts, pants and even stockings to work with. But in the summer months it's impossible to mask the sad truth: I'm paler than Casper the friendly ghost. For me, summer means constantly reapplying sunblock and turning only lobster red despite my efforts. And although some people claim that their best tans follow their worst burns, it doesn't work that way for me. I go from red straight back to pale. My sunburns just hurt. It wasn't always like this. When I was little I could tan. Not perfectly, mind you, but enough so that my skin color at least matched the light brown of my freckles. For 10 or 12 years my summers were graced with tanned skin, maybe due to endless hours spent playing in the sun. But at just about the point where I was old enough to notice and care about whether or not my skin was tan, most of my pigment seemed to take a permanent vacation. From then on I was always the palest one in the swimming pool. I'll be straight with you, it wasn't a tan, it was a burn, and a bad one at that. But what started out as a burn so painful I had to have a constant supply of aloe soaking it for a day and a half, turned into semi-pink, semi-tan lines on my shoulders outlining where my tank top straps had been on that fateful day. At a quick glance the palest girl on the block had something resembling a tan line. I showed all of my friends. Repeatedly. (I even made new friends, just so I could show them too.) You see, being tanned is just the "cool" way to be. Just look at any bathing suit model and you'll note that besides the perfect figures, those women all share the same toasty brown skin color. A tan is a fashionable accessory to suits of any style. Every year I scan magazines for the "in" look of the summer, thinking that maybe, just this once, it will be cool to be pale in the summer. I've had my hopes up lately especially with all the emphasis on preventing skin cancer. Yet the models remain tanned year after year. To comply with the need to be brown and the dangers of too much sun exposure, the brilliant minds of the world have come up with a beauty product to save girls all over from a colorless fate like mine: self-tanners. I like the idea of self-tanners -- you put the stuff on and ta-da, you're tan. But the actual "put it on" process scares me. The package has all sorts of warnings. You need to wear gloves; make sure you don't put too much on your knees and elbows; exfoliate before applying; the list goes on. The convenience of tan-in-a-bottle loses its appeal to me when I think of the big chance that I will end up with orange streaks all over my body screaming, "I don't tan naturally" to everyone I encounter. That wouldn't be acceptable. Anyway, I don't want to give in to the tan craze. Next year could be the pale year. But the ironic thing is, although I'm resigned to the fact that my skin won't ever be complimented by white fabric and I don't lay out in the sun attempting to become something other than red, I think I'll be the skin cancer candidate in 10 years. Why? Because I'm the girl who gets burned -- with or without sunblock -- every time I go head-to-head with the sun. And even though that is not fair at all, the pale people of the world have to live with it. I once told my friends that I was pale because I was saving all my tanning abilities up so I could give them to my daughters when I grew up and had kids. I've given up on that lie. Unless I marry someone who's tan year-round, the miniature me's will be just as pale as I am. Hopefully by that time, it will be trendy.