Earlier in the semester, I woke up one morning and went to the dining hall to find Chris and Dylan already eating.
The three of us walked down to the incessantly-legitimate business establishment where my soon-to-be tattooer was chillin’ on a sofa watching TNT.
It took ten minutes to do, and thankfully, there was much cleaning and unwrapping of instruments beforehand. Assembling the multipart needle apparatus was like putting together a rifle or SLR. Then there was all the cleaning with what smelled like phenolics. The actual process hurt like an intramuscular injection given to me by a power sander. But it wasn’t unbearable. It became easier after a while.
A short while later, we were making our way back to Harrison, hopping fences and disrupting the established order in somewhat of a thuggish manner in accordance with my new status as “badass” although I continue to question the aptness of my new designation.
Everyone at the Grille wanted to see it. And the people on my floor when my RA noticed it in our particularly echoey hallway. And then the engineering majors (which is everybody) found out and I had to roll up the sleeve for them, too.
The design is mostly original. I pulled a free copy off of the internet and photoshopped the hell out of it. The upper bar is actually originally a tilde that I grew to enormous size and tamed and whittled. The legs are flipped around and slimmed variants of the originals.
I’ll spare you the details of the aftercare which lasted a week at a half and involved much more lotion than I care to remember. Although I will have to say that I bled blue without even being a Cubs fan.
I am not so eager to tell my family about this. It’s not the programmer aunts and engineers uncles that are the problem so much as my immigrant grandmother whose math skills are rudimentary at best and whose world views are essentially reactionary and… “distrustful”.
She’ll think I joined a gang.
When I try to explain to her the concept of using pi as a universal constant for Euclidean calculation, she’ll inevitably fill in the words she doesn’t recognize with such panic-inducing terms as “firearms” and “rollin'” and an image of a young urban thug named “Euclid”.
But so it remains. An irrational and constant reminder of a constant and irrational decision.