The Night I Gave Myself a 3rd Degree Burn And Hung Out With My Boyfriend Instead of Going To The Hospital...

Okay, the time has come. I can’t continue with all these frivolous blog posts about fashion and cookies and TV Shows. It’s time to get back to the roots of my four month old blog. (Yeah, deep, deep roots.)

It’s time for another ultra embarrassing, ultra awkward, ultra “OMG! Is this really my life?” story. I mean there’s nothing like a little embarrassing story to make your Monday, right? I call it the story of the night I gave myself a third degree burn and then decided not to go to the hospital and hang out with my friends instead…

It was Friday night sometime around the end of February of my junior year (still living in Germany) and I was looking forward to hanging out with my new boyfriend, Matt and some other friends. Matt and our other friends, Sean and Kristen, had been a good influence on me and when I say “hang out” I really do just mean that. I think our big plans were to go bowling or maybe see a movie… on base which meant no ordering beer mixed with soda at the German movie theater off base. (And yes, beer mixed with Coke was on the menu and not some weird drink the local American teenagers wanted.) So, yeah, there I was 17 and all excited to do very PG activities that Friday night.

I got home from school around 4 and the plan was for Matt to pick me up around 6 to go grab a bite to eat and then hook up with our friends. So, I got home and since there was no way I was going to do homework on a Friday night and since we only had five English channels on our TV, I decided to take a long bath (something I still love doing) and actually do my hair and plan a cute outfit instead of just throwing it in a ponytail and wearing jeans and my Ramstein Royals sweatshirt.

So I took a bath…

Me: (in the bath) "Ahh…"

Bubble Bath Bubbles: "Pop! Pop!"

Me: “I love baths.”

Hair: “You should wash me. I’m dirty.”

Me: “But I’m taking a bubble bath hair. I can’t wash you in my bubbles.”

Hair: “But I’m dirty…”

Me: “But if I wash you, you will not have enough time to dry and then you will be wet and I will get sick because there is still snow on the ground and duh, it’s cold. (No, I didn’t own a hair dryer. In fact I still don’t own a hair dryer.) I know! I won’t wash you, but I’ll curl you and make you all pretty and then Matt will fall even more in love with me and we’ll live happily ever after…”

Hair: “Yeah… I don’t know about that… I was really just looking for a wash…”

(Note to readers: I do not actually have conversations with my hair. The previous conversation was for blog humor reasons only… moving on…)

I got out of the bath and immediately ran to the thermostat on the wall and cranked it up to 90 degrees. I did this whenever my parents weren’t home and I was cold. (Sorry Mom and Dad and your check books.) So, with my room all nice and toasty and my curling iron warming up, I started looking around my room and closet for something fun to wear even though it was like 12 degrees outside and I would be forced to wear a coat over anything. I couldn’t decide on an outfit, so I sat down at my vanity to do my hair instead.

So, here’s the mental picture… I’m sitting at my vanity. I’ve put on makeup and pants, but I haven’t done my hair yet or put on a shirt. This is honestly something I can’t remember. I can’t remember why I was sitting at my vanity topless. Well, not completely topless. I had on my favorite bra from back then. It was lavender and had little butterflies on it and I bought it at H&M and it had matching panties and I loved it and wore it all the time. Okay, so I’m sitting in my bra, curling my hair, probably jamming out to Linkin Park or New Found Glory or some other God awful band when disaster strikes.

As I am curling a front section of my hair I DROP MY CURLING IRON for no apparent reason. I didn’t drop it because my music skipped or because I heard one of my parents walking in the front door and the heat was still jacked up to 90 and it felt like a F-ing Amazonian jungle in our house or because the phone rang or because I have some medical condition where, although thousands of people have looked for a cure, I just randomly drop shit all the time and it’s really quite sad because I honest to God can’t help it. No, the was no reason at all except my hand just let go of the hot iron it was holding near my face.

It fell. The curling iron fell for what seemed like minutes as I tried to get my hands to keep working. Mentally I was yelling at my arm to move faster and my thumbs to do what evolution had made them do which was grab on to things… but I wasn’t fast enough and the hot curling iron landed. It landed right on my left boob.

Here’s the thing, too… I had zero boobs back in the day. Seriously I was barely out of an A cup until I turned 22 and the damn things just grew over night. But, on that horrible, horrible night I was wearing my favorite bra. It had cute butterflies and was a pretty color, and (I don’t think I mentioned this) was padded like I was fearful of drowning and my bra would be the only thing around to save me from dying a watery, cold death. The clamp on the curling iron got caught in the padding and underwire, thus trapping the hot medieval torture devise in my “cleavage” and not letting it keep falling like gravity, and my boob, wanted.

By the time my hands and thumbs remembered how to work and made it down to save my beautiful, soft, booby skin… it was too late.

Me: “OOOUUUCCCHHHHH!!!”

My Left Boob: “HOT! HOT! HOT! Very Fucking HOT down here!!!”

Me: “OMG! What do I do? What do I do? OMG? Shit! Shit! Shit!”

My Left Boob: “Help me! Help me! So hot! Help me!”

As the skin on my left boob is burning like Hell (yes, that pun was intended, thank you very much) I did what any 17 year old girl would do, I put a cold wash cloth on it and slathered my breast with Vaseline because in my mind Vaseline cured everything. Kinda like the Dad in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Except he was all about the Windex and my love was petroleum jelly. Sitting on the couch half naked with a cold towel on my chest, I started to feel better pretty quick.

Me: “Okay Lemon Lady, calm down. You are okay. Life is okay. Crisis averted.”

So what did I do next?

Did I…
A: Call off my fun night with friends and lay face and boobs down in a vat of ice cold water.
B: Call my mother crying because I totally disfigured myself for life.
C: Call my mother asking if we had any drugs for burns because I “had a little accident”.
D: Continue to curl my hair and get dressed for the fun night we had planned.

If you guessed C and D, you are right. I did call my mom and she told me we didn’t have anything, but I wasn’t too worried because I had slathered my wound in Vaseline and I figured it would be all cured up by the morning. I wasn’t until I had gotten completely dresses in my jeans and cute sweater when I realized things might be a little worse than I thought. My left boob was on fire! It felt like the curling iron was still attached and would always be there burning and burning my flesh.

Me: (to myself) “Wow, this really hurts. I hope I didn’t do any lasting damage. I wish the Vaseline would work faster and make it stop burning. I wish we had some burn cream.”

IDEA!!!

So, I called my new boyfriend, who I really, really liked, and told him I burned my boob and did he have any burn cream because I’m pretty sure it’s going to fall off if I don’t do something to help it out. Then I hung up the phone and died just a little bit on the inside.

Doorbell: “Ring ring!”

Me: (opening the door) “Thank God you are here! Give me the cream! I need the cream!”

Matt: “Oh, were you serious? I mean I know you were serious, but were you serious, serious? We didn’t have any. I did look! But, yeah we didn’t have any… Should we go to the Shoppette (corner gas station to you non-military folks) and see if they have any? I’m so sorry… Is it that bad???”

Me: “No, I’ll be okay. It’s not that bad.”

And honest to God, it wasn’t that bad. When I opened the door and saw Matt standing there I did feel better. I felt the pain slipping away and I knew everything, including my left boob, would be okay. In my retarded 17 year old mind the reason for this was Matt. My amazing new boyfriend had saved me from the fire of my boob and we would live happily ever after. Yeah, no. Love was not the magic that caused the burning under my sweater to stop, THE FUCKING FREEZING AIR OF GERMANY IN FEBRUARY caused the burning to momentarily cease. I learned this three minutes later when we got into his still warm car and the fire started again…

Me: (to myself) “Oh, God, it’s getting all hot again. No, no more burning. I can’t handle the burning. I need the magic burn cream. Fuck Vaseline! I need the cream…”

Matt: “You okay?”

Me: “Yeah, of course… What could be wrong? I’m fine…”

Matt: “It’s just you’re kinda squirming around a lot and sweating. Are you hot?”

Me: “Yes! I’m so hot!” (rolling down the window and letting the snow blow in) “Ah… so much better…”

Matt: “Okay…”

I found out from Matt the plan of the night was to meet up with friends Sean and Kristen at Popeyes and then go bowling because Kristen wasn’t going to be able to stay out very late that night. I was feeling great when we arrived to Popeyes because I had the windows rolled down the entire car ride there (all of four minutes), so it wasn’t until we arrived and walked inside when I started to get uncomfortable again. To top it all off, half of my high school was there. (Okay, not half, but Popeyes was one of like three places to eat on base and it was Friday night, so there were like eight or nine other people I went to school with there.) I couldn’t eat. Putting hot fried chicken in my mouth just seemed to make it worse. If my mouth got hot, then my left boob got even hotter. About half way through my first piece of chicken I just couldn’t take it anymore and I just up and ran outside. I didn’t stop to tell anyone where I was going or to put on my coat, but Matt, Sean, and Kristen all watched me sprint outside in relief. And what relief it was. The cold air was my drug and I needed it. I put snow in my hands to get them really cold, I danced around to create wind, anything to stop the burning!

Matt: (walking up to me) “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Me: (holding my sweater away from my body fanning cold, freezing air down my shirt.) “Me, yeah sure… I’m doing great.”

Matt: “I don’t think you’re doing so good…”

Me: (grabbing snow until it melts making my hands super, super cold and then putting them down my shirt) “No, really I’m okay.”

Matt: “Lemon Lady, you’re feeling yourself up with icicles.”

Me: “Okay you’re right. I’m not okay. I burned the shit of out of my left boob trying to get all pretty for you and now I’ll probably be all permanently disfigured at age 17. And I feel like it’s on fire. I feel like my boob is on fire. No, I’m not okay.”

And then I showed my wonderful and amazing new boyfriend my scalded left boob outside of Popeyes in the snow.

...yeah...

I sucked it up and managed to get through the night, but I had to tell Sean and Kristen why I was acting all weird and keep running out of the bowling alley to rub snow up under my sweater. All those other kids I went to school with who were at Popeyes or later at the bowling alley just thought I had lost my mind. And by the time Matt dropped me off back at home that night, it really did feel better, although I slept with a cold washcloth under my T-shirt that night. I told my mom, kinda what happened the next day. She asked me if I found the burn cream I had called her about and why I needed it in the first place, so I told her I dropped my curling iron on my chest, but that I was fine. She didn’t understand the magnitude of the burn until we went to the island of Crete for spring break and I had to make sure my bathing suit top covered up the huge scab on my boob so it wouldn’t get re-burned in the sun. (The scab itself was about the size of a quarter… a kinda stretched out quarter.) She was pretty horrified and told me I should have told her and we should have gone to the doctor. Um, my bad mom, but I wanted to eat fried chicken and bowl with my boyfriend.

The scab fell off months later, but left a very sexy, very attractive white scar (again about the size quarter) on my left boob just where my bikini top would start. It finally faded away about two years ago. Meaning whenever I was naked, whenever I showered, whenever I wore low cut tops for five years, I was always reminded about that time I tried to be pretty and curl my hair for my new boyfriend.

Driving: Watching Sister Make a Fool of Herself and How My Parents Taught Me...

Lately I’ve been carrying around small notebook and writing down any good ideas I think of for my blog. This is a good thing because I don’t sit in front of my computer with writers block because I can’t remember that really funny thing Boyfriend said last night. The notebook is a bad thing because last night I dreamed that something slightly… okay not slightly… really embarrassing happened while I was trying to buy a bottle of Disaronno Amaretto (which I don’t even drink) and after I left the store in shame (without my alcohol) I thought to myself, in the dream, “well at least this will make a good blog post.” Swear to God people… I am now putting myself in awkward embarrassing situations in my dreams so you people can have a laugh and I can quietly crawl under a rock and die. FML…

But, If I’m going down, I’m taking my sister with me!

Today I’d like to write about that oh so important time in a young girls life when she learns how to drive.

But first I want to write about when my sister learned to drive.

My sister started learning to drive when we lived in Alabama. I’m sure I don’t know the whole story of every time Mom and Dad would take her out on the road, but I do remember a few things. The first is that I was extremely jealous of my sister getting behind the wheel. Looking back this is pretty funny. I mean I was in 6th grade, so I was nowhere near being old enough to learn to drive. I didn’t care that my sister was dating and I wasn’t. I didn’t care that she was in high school and I wasn’t. I didn’t care that she played an instrument and I didn’t. But, the first day mom pulled over at the entrance of our neighborhood and turned to Sister and asked if she wanted to drive the rest of the way, I was pissed! Driving, like most things adult get to do, looked like so much fun and at that point in my life I was pretty sure my sister thought I was the biggest nerd, so I immediately started hating her for being able to drive.

My sister learning to drive was hilarious. Her first big obstacle was stop signs. Sister would start slowing down for a stop sign like a block before the stop sign, and this is our neighborhood when she was only going 15 MPH anyway. Then she would dramatically come to a stop about ten feet behind the actual stop sign, meaning she couldn’t see around the corner to see if it was okay to continue after the stop. OMG my mom used to get so frustrated…

Mom: “Daughter! Keep driving forward! You are nowhere near the stop sign!”

Sister: “Stop yelling at me mom! I am right at the stop sign! If you count the nose of the car I am practically at the sign!”

Me: (to myself) “Haha, she sucks at driving. When I get to drive I’ll be awesome.”

Then I remember my sister having a very hard time judging the distance between her car and other cars on the road. This happened one time when my whole family was out driving to who knows where and Sister got to drive. We were driving on some pretty little country road with only two lanes. And my sister kinda drove like this…

Dad: “Daughter! Drive in your lane!”

Sister: “I am in my lane! If I get any closer to the side of the road I’ll be in the bushes.”

Dad: “That’s what I meant! You’re driving on the shoulder of the road. Move the car closer to the center.”

Mom: “Now, Husband, don’t yell, but really Daughter you’re driving in the dirt and it’s not good for the tires. Now gently ease the car back into the center of the road.”

Sister: “I’m on the road! If I get over anymore to the left I’ll hit the oncoming traffic!”

Dad: “You are nowhere near the oncoming traffic! In fact I think the oncoming traffic might flag us down to make sure our car is okay because you are driving off the road.”

Sister: “Stop yelling at me!”

Dad: “I’m not yelling at you. Drive better!”

Mom: “Let’s all just calm down…”

Sister: “Mom!”

Dad: “Daughter!”

Me: (to myself) “Hahaha!!!”

Like I said, I don’t know all the gory details of Sister learning to drive, but I do remember mine.

First of all I didn’t get to learn how to drive at 15 and take my driver’s test at 16 like most normal teenagers. We lived in Germany and the driving age there is 18 or 17 if you already had a license in the states. I did not. So I got in a few more years of being driven around by my parents and begging my friends for rides. The very first time I ever drove a car was in Germany when Ex-Boyfriend Matt asked if I wanted to drive his car in this old abandoned lot.

Ex-Boyfriend Matt: “Hey, you’ve driven before, right? Wanna drive my Opel around this abandoned parking lot?”

Me: “Of course I’ve driven before! Hell yes I wanna drive! Pull over and hand over the keys!”

Ex-Boyfriend Matt: (pulling the car over and getting out of the driver’s seat) “Yeah, this sounds like a great idea and not at all irresponsible of me!”

Me: “Buckle up kid. I’m a pro.”

Yeah, I wasn’t and Ex-Boyfriend Matt quickly demanded I pull over and give his keys back and he never ever asked me if I wanted to drive again. But the first time driving with my father was the best time ever and if by “best time ever” I mean horrible.

My dad told me one day during the week when I was a junior in high school that he wanted to start teaching me to drive. My first thought was “AWESOME I FINALLY GET TO DRIVE!” and my second thought was, “wait Lemon Lady when your father tries to teach you to do something and you’re not good at it you get very defensive and end up in tears with your father swearing at a very high decibel that no, he’s not in fact yelling at you… remember when he took you to the driving range and tried to teach you how to hit a golf ball?” But that thought was quickly covered up by, “AWESOME I FINALLY GET TO DRIVE!”

That weekend Dad drove me to the high school parking lot right there on base and handed over the keys to his Honda Accord. I got behind the wheel and waited patiently as he went over what every single button, knob, and gage’s purpose was. I waited while he spent 10 minutes making sure my seat and mirrors were adjusted perfectly. After what seemed like an eternity behind the wheel he finally let me turn the car on and drive down the parking lot row.

Me: (to myself) “OMFG! I’m driving!!!”

Dad: “Good job. Keep her at the same constant speed and get ready for to turn left at the end of the row and drive down the next row.”

Me: “Okay Dad, sure.” (to myself) “Yeah I’m going to turn this car. Watch me turn this fine Japanese automobile. You like that Accord? You like that nice and easy left hand turn?”

Dad: “Nice turn.”

Me: “Thanks.” (to myself) “Who has two thumbs and is the best left hand turner driving this car at this very moment? Me, that’s who.”

Dad: “Okay and pull to a stop right here.”

Me: (stopping) “Okay. Can we do right hand turns now? I’m sure I’ll be even more awesome at right hand turns.”

Dad: “Nope, let’s work on backing into this parking space.”

Yeah, you read that right. I had been driving for all of 37 seconds and my dad has me stop and try to back into a parking space! BACK INTO A PARKING SPACE!!! I didn’t even know if I could perform a right hand turn! For all I knew I was the Zoolander of driving and my father wanted to start on backing into parking spaces! Yeah, about 30 minutes later we were back home with me wanting to wash the tears off my face and my father wondering either A, “Why didn’t I have boys?” or B, “How F-ing hard is it to back into a parking space? What’s her problem?”

After that my mom and the driving school taught me to drive my senior year. I turned right on red without stopping once while driving with Mom and she freaked out. (Hello, we were fine…) But then she hurt herself and I had to drive her across San Antonio to the hospital before I had really driven on the highway in driving class. So, yup, that’s how my parents taught me to drive… backing into spaces before I knew what a turn signal was and driving my paralyzed mother, who could only lay in the front seat and pray I knew where I was going, to the Emergency Room when I should have been in 1st period.

I love my parents.