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April 08, 2005

It was just a little "ow". If it had really hurt a lot, rest assured I would have whined like crazy.

Thanks to everyone who commented and e-mailed me about Hot Tamale; I'm glad people like it. Wasn't that a hilarious picture of me? I swear we took 70 shots and could not get a single one where I didn't make a weird face or look like a total goofball.

Here's what I made today:

This would be the least exciting knitting I have ever done if I had never knitted dishrags. These little stockinette triangles are going to cover up my growing-out hair while it's in the awful ugly stages. I know the colours are really BORING, but I don't plan on making one of these for every outfit so they have to be neutral. I think I'll make a red one next though, maybe lace. The camo-looking one on top is the green from the top-down raglan that didn't work, mixed with a strand of black; I said I was going to make the t-shirt with it but as soon as I had a little triangle of it like this I couldn't stop thinking of Cleo. So even though I would likely get more wear out of the t-shirt, I might just do a camocleo instead.

Thanks also for all the concern about my pain, but I guess I misled you guys a little; it didn't really hurt much at all. I've found that areas where there isn't much fat feel pretty good to tattoo, it's the fatty parts that are a bitch. It must be subjective, because I've heard a lot of people say that the areas that hurt the most to tattoo are right over bone, and that hasn't been the case for me. The absolute worst spot I've had tattooed is my belly; it hurt for more than two weeks.

Jae, if you can handle the tat you just got you can get one on the inside of your wrist; trust me, it's not bad at all. This one took less than an hour.

Grace, you asked about red ink: this tat is actually brown, but the lighting wasn't so good when I took the picture so it's hard to tell. I do have red dots in my first three tattoos, and one wee little solid area. I didn't have any problem with the red except that the dots were raised for a few years, which I really liked; sadly, they've gone down. My friend Tamara (qpaukl's wife) has lots of huge red areas and they seem fine too, although she says that every once in a while, usually in summer, the red areas swell a little.

Diana asked in the comments: "okay, I've seen other people with star tattoos on their wrists. Does it have some sort of implied meaning that I am not getting?". I sure hope there isn't. If anyone finds out and it's something bad please don't tell me. I have this t-shirt that I really like, it's red with the number 88 and inside the number is the Union Jack. Last week I read that 88 is some kind of shorthand for a certain Nazi salute that I won't write here because I don't want asshole hater-types to find me by googling it, but it starts with h and h. I bought my shirt secondhand and I'm sure it just came from some store like Zellers, but now I have mixed feelings about wearing it again; I certainly don't want the hater assholes to think I'm like them.

Yesterday I was telling qpaulk and Tam this t-shirt story while I got my new tat, and qpaukl started joking that I'm a closet white supremacist, the proof being the white laces in my boots (they are PACMAN laces, for fucksake, that's not the same). See?

So anyway. I don't know if a star on the wrist means anything to anyone else, but I'll tell you why I did it. It's actually for a class I'm taking, Ecopoetic Readings in Canadian Literature. We are all giving presentations based on one of the course readings, but we can only spend five minutes, so I thought instead of trying to cram something fun and interactive into five minutes, I would just do a show and tell. Yes, I'm serious, I put a mark on me that I will carry around forever for a five minute presentation in a class that isn't even required for my degree. Any excuse to get a little ink fix, eh?

The book is Lewis De Soto's A Blade of Grass. The story is set in 1970s South Africa. In it, there's a scene where the white farmer's wife, Marit, puts on the same type of clothes her black maid wears and goes barefoot, and the two of them walk into town together. Of course when her white neighbours see her like this, she gets a taste of what kind of treatment the black farm workers endure. So I was thinking that if we could all put on each other's skin for a while, we might not feel so different from one another. I know, I KNOW that's totally naive and hokey. So what? So I changed a little patch of my body to a different skin tone. The star is because of a story that carries some symbolism in the book, that the Bushmen never got lost because the stars always knew where they were (of course, it also suits my personal aesthetic, but hey, I have to wear this forever!). Also the story opens with Tembi planting five seeds, and they grow and bear fruit and the fruit is eaten and in the end everyone is dead except for Tembi and there are five seeds from one of the five fruits. So the five points reaching out are like the seeds, growing the little brown patch outward into my skin.

Why I think Norma is cooler than you guys are

Anybody who has received an e-mail from me may or may not have noticed the signature at the bottom:

Girls go to college to get more knowledge,
Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.
-Irish proverb

Our friend Donny is five. Last summer he told Peter "I have a song about college" and Peter said "about college?" and Donny launched into this song, which is more of a chant but sounded so damned funny because of his Chicago accent. So I made it my e-mail signature, and I thought it was so hilarious to identify it as an Irish proverb, because you always see that on self-help daily affirmation type posters, mugs, plaques and crap like that, it's always attributed to the Irish. Like they are the geniuses of stupid cliche, when we know that it's really Americans who make that stuff up. Anyway, I've had this thing on every e-mail I've sent since August, and nobody has ever mentioned it. Not once.

But just now, while writing this endlessly long post, I did a bit of e-mailing back and forth with Norma and she mentioned that she liked the proverb. See, she figured out it was a joke, when everyone else was secretly embarrassed for me ("poor Jodi, she really thinks that's an Irish proverb!") and didn't want to hurt me by mentioning it. Either that or Norma thought I meant it too, and was trying to embarrass me.

Posted by jodi at April 8, 2005 11:59 PM | categories:  self-absorbtion

Comments

Posted by: TheBon at April 9, 2005 02:23 AM

Posted by: sophie at April 9, 2005 02:54 AM

Posted by: Norma at April 9, 2005 08:36 AM

Posted by: Krista at April 9, 2005 09:12 AM

Posted by: Cyn at April 9, 2005 12:20 PM

Posted by: Dharia at April 12, 2005 11:28 AM

Posted by: Sharlene at April 13, 2005 01:22 PM