So, it's Saturday and I'm at work. If I don't let myself get weirded out by the ghostly grey cubes, I think I love it here by myself on the weekend. No big surprise that I'm happiest when alone. I can play my music without headphones (listening endlessly to interpol lately, they were even playing it at Tilly's this morning, seems everyone is feeling a bit like knives and drowning and tight black suits) and curl up in my chair. And read about a dead general. Seems appropriate.

I wandered around the city yesterday after work, bringing me to my next promised topic, tattoos. I went to Barnes and Noble to look for Jane Caplan's (teaches at the alma mater of Despair) Written on the Body (almost as interesting as the novel) to read about the cultural history and anthropological theory of tattooing. Well, it was fascinating. Tattoos have been punitive, sacred, emblems of ownership and slave-branding, masochistic and decorative. There's even a Greek amphora depicting a maenad with a thrysos in one hand and a tattoo on the other arm (forgot the date). Darwin wrote about tattooing as a global, eternal human practice, and King Harold II's body was supposed to have been identified on the field of battle by the tattoo on his chest of his sister's name and 'England'. Very cool of him, and considerate too.

People get them for any number of reasons, and I think mine is that I feel I'm really an adult now (how sad that it took 30 to get me to admit that). My first job (don't be jealous of my freewheeling life), my first office, my dabbling in an American life, my first business card, falling in love with this city, living in a shoebox with strangers (fucking stop leaving your dishes in the sink), paying (or not paying) my student loans back, and generally joining the teeming hordes of workaday-life people should be commemorated in some way. Imagine what I'll get when I fall in love again and have a kid. I'm going to be that gross, sagging and inked mom that my bright and shiny, clean-living, preppy child is going to be so embarrassed of. And I can't promise that I won't wear cut-off Molson's tshirts and hot pink heels either.

I will not be swayed by a hot tattooist to get a giant coi fish sleeve tattoo on my arm (though they can be very beautiful), or to add tons of color and a few grinning skulls (though that's cool too). I think it's going to be a slinky dragon on my right ankle/lower leg. What do you all think?This is Apala, an Indian dragon that converted to Buddhism, tried to convert the other dragons who blew him off, and ended up converting humans. I think it's fitting for my soapboxing self.