Summertime, Spirituality, and Tanorexia

Greetings, Superfriends! How is this beautiful summertime treating you?

I want to apologize for my long absence from this blog. Terrible things have come into my life since last we were together. There’s nothing worse than when you make a bunch of plans to create things and have success and get people excited and then THOSE THINGS COME TRUE. I’m just saying, I had WAAAY more time to blog when the only other competition for my attention was my next spiritual webinar(love you Vishen Lakhiani!) or MTV’s Jersey Shore.

And speaking of Jersey Shore, it’s probably just as well that I don’t have too much time to watch it because it really exacerbates my condition. As those of you who have known me since high school or college are aware, summer is tough for me because I suffer from extreme Tanorexia.

For those of you not familiar with this condition, let me explain. We who suffer from this debilitating disease report being swept by frequent feelings of “not tan enough.” This condition affects its victims on spiritual as well as emotional and physical levels, and is especially dangerous for those of us who came of age during the heyday of Baywatch.

Oh, sure, for a while, you can distract yourself with new clothes or adorable fuzzy animals or addressing your friend’s latest obsessive outrage (I have a friend who has an infinite capacity for outrage and she really keeps me busy). You can even choose to meditate on the Divine Love whose purple velvety majesty keeps this Universe expanding into ever greater dimensions.

And it works. For a while. And then you see Pauly and Vinny and Snookie and you look down at your slightly graying white legs poking out of your slightly graying white shorts and the compulsion rears its ugly head: “GTL! GTL! GTL!” (that’s “Gym, Tan, Laundry” for those uninitiated in the pleasures of Jersey Shore).

I have another friend who pointed out that I am forty-one years old and maybe it’s time I moved on to more mature obsessive compulsions. And I do my best. The reason I haven’t been writing for this blog for such a long time is that I am now writing for three others which actually have something to do with my getting paid and thus being able to support myself. I am actually becoming somewhat obsessed with supporting myself, which, believe me, is not an obsession that’s troubled me too much in this lifetime.

Mostly I like to be supported by others. First it was my family. Then it was my universities and the Ridiculously Generous Souls of the student loan system (three college degrees can buy a LOT of Nordstrom, Anthropologie, and DSW!). Then it was my former husband. Then I turned to Law of Attraction and learned that God and the Universe wanted to support me. So I decided to let God do that by allowing me to win the lottery. God told me to get a job and He/She would let me know about the lottery real soon.

Sigh.

Oh Well, as my dad would say.

My dad Matthew Melko Jr. died last summer at about this time. He was the ultimate Jersey Shore boy, having grown up spending his summers in Seaside Heights, where the show is filmed. I asked him once whether the Jersey Shore had changed much since his heyday in the fifties. And he said that although cultural norms had changed (back then you didn’t, for example, have sex with people in dance clubs as a matter of course), he was glad to see that Seaside and Jersey were just as tacky and pointless and strangely beautiful as ever.

Whether you are tan or not tan, whether you are on speaking terms with God and the Universe or not, whether you love the beach or the mountains or the mall, I salute you and wish you an amazing summer. It’s good to be back.