wickedqueen.net

Yesterday I reread Bellweather by Connie Willis, a speculative fiction novel about a sociologist statistician and a biologist chaos theorist trying to determine how fads originate. I really like most of Willis’s stuff, but this might be one of my favorites. Every chapter opens with a blurb about a fad:

tattoos (1691)– Self-mutilation fad which first became popular in Europe in the 1600s when explorers brought the practice back from the South Seas. The fad recurred as an upper-class craze in the Edwardian era. Jennie Jerome, Winston Churchill’s mother, had a snake tattooed around her wrist. Tattooing became popular again in World War II, this time among servicemen and especially sailors, again in the sixties as part of the hippie movement, and yet again in the late eighties. Tattooing has the disadvantage of being a passing fad with permanent results.

It seems like the latest tattoo fad is probably on the way out, if not already out (it’s hard to gauge these things from the Midwest), but I think tattooing has also achieved a niche status–as a fad, piercing has the edge on it since piercings are a lot easier to remove/conceal/change your mind about, but there are always SOME people getting tattoos, aren’t there? It’s just that frequently it’s a marker of being “low class.” Having grown up in semi-rural Missouri, I may have an inflated idea of the prevalence of tattoos in the general population.

My father has a Grateful Dead tattoo, which he got done in the 1970s, when all his friends rolled their eyes and told him it was “a really 60s thing to do” (proving Willis’s point up there, I guess). I got my first tattoo in 2001, when it was certainly popular among college kids in northern Missouri–and it was also a Chinese character, which people frequently give me shit about, but it does actually mean what I thought it did and it doesn’t say “love” or some shit like that, so I’m not embarrassed.

It says, in fact, “morning tide.” Just a little reminder that everything changes, and new things begin–or not so new things. Winston Churchill’s mother, remember. You can’t get away from the cycles of the world.

Tattoo #3 is a two-character compound: “eldest daughter.” Tattoo #2 is Celtic knotwork and on my lower back to boot. Clearly my tattoos are not untouched by prevailing trends, but at least I didn’t pick any of them off the wall at the tattoo parlor.

couéism (1923)– Psychology fad inspired by Dr. Emile Coué, a French psychologist and the authory of Self-Mastery by Auto-Suggestion. Coué’s method of self-improvement consisted of knotting a piece of string and reciting over and over, “Every day in every way, I am getting better and better.” Died out when it became apparent no one was.

It’s the new year, and I have a couple of resolutions and a buttload of work to do. Hopefully it’s morning tide time, and not just more of the same. I don’t know. The other side of it, of course, is that the tide goes whether you like it or not.

Over the past two months, with the exception of one search for “ethnomethodology,” every search that has yielded this blog as a result has involved tattoos or hair-dying. I’d just like to note that I also have some piercings.

Not a lot of them, really. Only two of them are non-ear piercings. However, those two piercings are both abnormally large, and this can be the source of a great deal of annoyance.

My tongue stud is a 12 gauge, making it slightly larger than the tongue piercing norm of 14. I can still sometimes find 12 gauge studs at the kiosks at the mall and whatnot, although they usually charge me more for them. It’s actually easier to find 10 gauge tongue studs than 12 gauge ones–I guess people assume that if you’re going to have an abnormally large tongue stud, you won’t be a wuss about it. But I got mine done in Tokyo, and when they showed me two sizes and asked me which one I wanted, I just went for the slightly bigger one. I didn’t know it was going to be a big DEAL.

When I got my nose pierced in Missouri in 2001 (I think–I’m pretty sure it predates my tattoos), I got a 14 gauge ring. Now, the standard size for nose piercings is 16 or 18 gauge–only slightly larger than a standard ear piercing. I have a prominent nose, however, and I felt that such a delicate piece of jewelry would be overwhelmed. Actually, it’s a bit unusual that I wear a ring at all; most women I see with pierced noses have studs. Anyway.

Yesterday, I managed to leave my nose ring in the Waisman Center after getting an MRI for the psych department .* They are closed on the weekend, so I have thus far been unable to find out if they have a lost and found or anything. I’ve never been crazy about that ring–it’s VERY difficult to get the bead in–so I stopped by the Cat’s Meow on my way to the gym today hoping they’d have a replacement.

Unfortunately, their body jewelry stores were low. The owner (I think) said he’s planning to get some more at a trade show next week, but recommended that I try the Piercing Lounge on Gilman. He was very nice.**

So I stopped at the Piercing Lounge, where a 19-year-old bit of muslin with, I swear to god, a STERNUM PIERCING, informed me loftily that of COURSE they don’t carry 14 gauge nose rings; the NORMAL gauge is 18.

“Yes, I know,” I said.

“Well, did you STRETCH it?” she demanded.

“No,” I said. “I got it pierced 14 gauge.”

“WHERE?”

“Missouri.”

She sniffed as if that explained everything.

“WELL. All you can really DO is let it grow closed some so that you can wear an 18.”

Or, you know, I could always look on the internet for a place that doesn’t pass judgment on my nose ring gauge choices, since I actually like my piercing the way it is.

I also find it rather hard to believe that all the guys with nose piercings–I know they exist–are wearing demure 18 gauge rings, and at any rate, I am not taking any guff from someone with a sternum piercing, let alone one that appeared, to the casual observer, to be infected.

I think I got my old, currently lost nose ring at Exotica on East Washington; it’s a bit of a trip, but if I guess I could call over there to see if they still carry them. I am currently wearing a GIGANTIC ring that may actually have been intended for a navel, because I worry about the hole closing up, and it is very annoying. I need either a replacement or my old ring back, and soon.

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*$20 an hour. And I find MRIs kind of relaxing.

**I think he’s also the one who helped me select the Special Effects Cherry Bomb for my hair back in May, and we know how well that turned out.

Upon some consideration, I think that the people who would identify me as “indie” are the same people who think that I have “a lot” of tattoos.

Although this is also a question of group membership. To a person with zero or one tattoos, I think my three tattoos generally seem like “a lot.” To a person with three tattoos, they often seem like “time for another one.”

I made a rule when I got tattoo #1 that I would not get more than one tattoo per calendar year, and I have held to that. Of course, given that I got my last one in March of 2004, I am free to get another one now, but summer is a bad time for it. The last thing you want with a new tattoo is a sunburn.

Well, actually the LAST thing you want with a new tattoo is a motorcycle accident, but I’m not really at risk for that. The fact that I’ve made it to July without a serious sunburn, on the other hand, is a minor miracle.

Anyway, I still don’t have a firm design for tattoo #4. I know I want the symbol for Scorpio, but I’ve vacillated about whether or not I want to incorporate the symbols for Pisces and Aries as well (my moon sign and ascendent, respectively), and it’s hard to find a really nice astrological symbol for a tattoo anyway. They’re either too plain and blocky or hideously ornamented. I definitely don’t want a Scorpio symbol that incorporates a scorpion in any way.

My other general rule about tattoos is that I should want the specific design for at least six months before committing it permanently to my skin, so I guess I won’t be getting anything before 2006.

I’ve seen some fucking bizarre tattoos lately. On Tuesday when I went to the psych building to do my $10 experiment (they made me put a pen in my mouth and read words off a computer screen), I saw a girl with a giant bumble bee on her bicep, so detailed that it almost looked like a scientific illustration, and today at the thrift store I saw a girl with a giant olive, pierced by little cocktail skewers, on HER bicep. This seems like it couldn’t have been done with any intent but irony, but would anyone commit to having such an ironic tattoo on them forever?

For a person with three tattoos, I’m kind of snobby about them. Or maybe people with three tattoos are generally snobby about tattoos, while everyone else just winces at them indiscriminately, I don’t know. A woman at the wedding I attended last week thought that the one on my shoulder, which is the Chinese/Japanese two character compound for “eldest daughter,” was “nice,” and told me that she hates tattoos but when her daughter got one, “at least it was of the Trinity.” So some members of the anti-tattoo crowd are willing to make exceptions for designs that are particularly removed from bare-breasted mermaids with scrolls that say “MOM.”

I guess I might be okay with a bare-breasted mermaid on someone (not me). I really like mermaids. But a giant fucking olive? I draw the line.