channonyarrow

I'm getting a tattoo next Monday. I'm very excited, and completely freaked out about. This is not because this is somehow new (see also: I have five tattoos right now) but this is the first one that will not be easily covered up by clothing. And also, it's one of a pair.

So on my left wrist, as of next Monday, in a band around my wrist, it's gonna say "Live each day as if it's your last". On my right wrist at some point it'll say either "I am not afraid to keep on living" or "The sharpest lives are the deadliest to lead". This is not because I am either that emo or that suicidal but because what I really wanted was "Heaven help us" but I decided I didn't want to spend the rest of my life explaining that I'm not religious, and fuck me if I can pull a line out of "Heaven Help Us" that'll go around my tiny wrist (seriously, I have big hands and feet and delicate little wrists and ankles (wrists moreso than ankles, in fact)) and that doesn't require three more lines just to make it make sense.

Like this:
I'm at this old hotel
But I can't tell if I've been
Breathing or sleeping or screaming
or waiting for the man to call
And maybe all of the above
Cause mostly I've been sprawled
On these cathedral steps
While spitting out the blood and screaming

Make sense of that.

So. Famous Last Words = not my favourite song, but "I am not afraid to keep on living" is really something worth saying. "The sharpest lives are the deadliest to lead" also works for me.

I've decided I like Optima as a font, and I also really like the artist, who reminds me of my brother in a lot of ways. And I really, really like the symbols I'm using. The left hand is the subconscious, the right hand is the conscious, and the left hand is instinct, while the right is logic. I didn't know that until I googled hand symoblism right now, but I felt it important to consider the left hand the heart hand and the right hand the head hand, and maybe I just picked those up somewhere else. There's also lots of symbolism in rings and circles that I like, and since most peoples' first question has been "Why don't you just get it on the inside of your wrist where you can see all of it," that's the answer. Because I don't need to see it. I just need to remember it.

Because you know, the things I need to remember right now are not to panic and that whatever else happens, I really have an obsimpson. And those are places I've been. Getting tattoos of things that change doesn't bother me - whether I would be in the same relationship with the really ex if I met him now or I'd be shoving him off a cliff doesn't change that I have two tattoos of his art, and they're mine, made by him, and that's fine. That's where I was, and I don't regret being there, nor do I want to forget being there. So even if MCR releases an album of polka standards, even if I have another six-week-long panic attack, I will have my wrists to remind me:

Live each day as if it's your last.
I am not afraid to keep on living.

That box of Magic that I sent?

Yeah, that thing weighed thirty pounds. Go me, or something? No idea how much a card weighs, but now, if I had ENOUGH cards, I could figure out how many I sent.

I guess my guess of "a thousand" was off. Maybe more like "several thousand." Or maybe even "ten thousand."

Also, I can tell it's fall because I'm not used to having a scarf on. Which is only a problem in the bathroom. Today, we are accident-free for one day. We are also, I add, at one day of scarf wearing.

OH MY GOD.

Okay, so I now I know that my Catholic school upbringing (or possibly my public school slightly-later-upbringing) was a HELL OF A LOT more hippie dippie than I'd previously suspected.

See, I have this insane memory for certain specific sorts of things. Like, I remember my parents' next door neighbours' phone number despite not having called them for, oh, at least 15 years. Until the advent of cell phones, I was REALLY good at phone numbers. Now, of course, I don't even know graeae's phone number, but I bet if I thought about it I could come up with the number she had when I first was calling her...SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO.

The other thing I remember is songs. Like, completely randomly. I can still remember ALL the lyrics to "Peace Is Flowing Like A River" or whatever the fuck it's called, despite not having been caught dead at a church service for...a long-ass time. I would not even need help to remember much of the New Kids On The Block catalogue, and I swear on my mother's very good name that I DID NOT LIKE THEM. I am completely serious. If you believe nothing else I ever say, believe that. Even at the age of twelve I was a contrary bitch who wasn't going to like something just because everyone else did; everyone else hated me anyway, so it wasn't like I was going to score points. Besides, at that point, Jon Bon Jovi was my intended, and some day he would know about it.

*ahem*

BACK TO THE MAIN THEME. SORT OF. I hated them, but it was a bit like avoiding oxygen, back in the eighties. YOU COULD NOT. You could practically listen to the classical stations and get some goddamn song of theirs. (Side note: I very rarely have any idea what these songs are called; I can just SING them.)

So. I have been operating in the convenient belief that I learned THIS song way back in, like, elementary school as a purely vocal track, and one with a much different melody than I am now realising is true. And yet, I know that I have seen the video clip, watching it, so clearly that's an incorrect assumption, which means that I am Confused.

But every so often I've tried to remember more of it than merely the chorus, which goes "Go ahead and hate your neighbour, go ahead and cheat a friend, do it in the name of heaven, you can justify it in the end, there won't be any trumpets blowing come the judgement day, on that bloody morning after, one tin soldier rides away." and have been utterly thwarted at remembering more.

Side note: Do it in the name of heaven makes me think that I probably learned it in Catholic school (and no, I was not taught by nuns) but it seems slightly advanced for them to have had any kind of "modern" (ie, stone age) video technology. I mean, come on, that was where I found out what a mimeograph was.

And now I know that I was not hallucinating. Also that there is a song sung by a woman (okay, she sounds like Bette Midler, blow me) that I can actually sing because it is not a soprano part. Also that probably all of the school administrators were smoking weed. And that they were trying to raise hippies. Which, okay, I have no problem at ALL with that (one of my very favourite songs to sing aloud is "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane, followed closely by much of the Beatles' "Help" album) but do you really think you can make an effective governmental and societal structure by unleashing hippies on it? At this point, that would be the lions and the Christians, and the hippies wouldn't be playing the lions.

In neocons versus hippies, the hippies are going DOWN. Not that I want to be a neocon, but I don't want to get eaten, either, so I prefer to think that there is a third way, the way of the sand ninja.

But either way, I will now be singing an interesting and varied medley of completely hippie songs, and being sort of pleased that my dad STILL thinks I was born ten years too late, which is probably true, even if it's more like, you know, twenty years or something.

Although I DO have purple/blue/green/pink/black/red hair, rather than hair with flowers in, so perhaps being born in 1976 is all right too, since there is clearly a punk vibe in my life. AND in my music, but it's harder to sing X-Ray Spex songs with only a vocal track as you wander through the woods.

For elynne and mcmayhem, who both have engaged in My Little Pony gang warfare in my journal in the past. Someone linked to The Pony Project a while back.

Pictures from opening night