We are in the last few days before the College Decision Deadline of May 1st. Edward has submitted an acceptance/deposit to his second-choice school, because he is waitlisted for his first-choice school, and waitlisted students don’t find out if they’re In until after the decision deadline. All of us feel content with this situation, except for the part where we can’t really tell anyone where he’s going yet, and we might lose a multi-hundred-dollar deposit. But his second-choice school and his first-choice school have been VERY CLOSE in his personal rankings, and in fact they swapped places a few times during the decision-making process, so what I mean is that we’re all content with the idea of him going there. And he knows that if he continues to yearn for his first-choice school, he can re-apply there next year and would very likely get in, assuming his grades at his second-choice school are good. (One of the main reasons he didn’t get into his first-choice school, we believe, is that he wants to major in computer science, and our high school’s computer science teacher left because of the pandemic, and so the high school did not have computer science classes or a computer team as they usually would; the first-choice school is very selective for computer science majors, and didn’t have much to go on when evaluating Edward’s application.)

Elizabeth is still unsure. She has run into that thing many of us run into with many of life’s decisions, which is that there is NO WAY TO KNOW what would be best/right (or even what she might PREFER) on SO MANY FACTORS OF THE DECISION. Right now her essential decision is between: (1) a stand-alone art school and (2) an art school within a university. The stand-alone is about two-thirds the price of the university, after scholarships and financial aid; it is not THE name-brand art school, but [editing this part of the sentence, because the guesses are indicating to me that I gave a misleading description; it is not the one in Georgia, because Georgia is not currently a safe place for a person with a uterus to have a medical emergency; but:] it was her clear favorite of all the stand-alone art schools we visited. (She got into THE name-brand art school, but we visited it and she disliked it.) (Not to mention the COST, which was BEYOND BOGGLING.) The stand-alone has hundreds and hundreds of students; the university has thousands and thousands. The stand-alone is further away (“plane ride” distance), and in a pleasing and interesting city; the university is nicely far away (“8-hour drive” distance), but in a depressing strip-malls-and-oversized-parking-lots suburb of a city (but with several interesting cities nearbyish). The university would give her the ability to do/create a combined major, or do a minor in a non-art field; the stand-alone would not. The university would provide fellow students who were not art majors; the stand-alone would not. Those are all the issues she has mentioned that are relevant to her.

At this point, after talking with her about it for hours and hours, my feeling is that she is going to have to get to the last minute and then just PICK ONE. Both schools are great choices in their own ways, and neither one of them has ALL the things she wants, and on some issues she doesn’t even KNOW what she wants—nor does she know HOW to know. She and I are both feeling some regret that we did not successfully find a university she felt more enthusiastically about than this one—but we DID LOOK QUITE A BIT, and she just never had a “WOW!!” reaction to a university, which she knows doesn’t mean a university isn’t the right decision.

A lot of college-choice stuff is framed as if it’s a romantic movie (find The One!! and you’ll Just Know!!), and it IS that way for some people, but it wasn’t that way for me and it hasn’t been that way for Elizabeth, and that’s normal too. It’s normal not to have all the information you need to make a decision, and yet get to the point where you have to make a decision anyway; it’s normal not to find one single college that has everything you wanted; it’s normal not to know what you like until you try; it’s normal to need to switch, once you have more information.

I have two books to recommend.

The first is called The Country of Ice Cream Star, by Sandra Newman, and I will tell you that initially I struggled to make it through even the first paragraph (it’s the kind of book that starts out with nothing making sense, AND it’s in a dialect, AND the main character’s name is “Ice Cream Star,” which, no) and closed the book and thought “Nope.” And yet it has ended up a leading contender for My Favorite Book of the Year, which is a decision we take very seriously at the library where I work. Also, I ended up finding the dialect charming/delightful to the point of being TOUCHING, and I enjoyed the sudden little epiphanies of where certain words came from.

(image from Amazon.com)

And so you know I must have opened it up again at some point after originally closing it, and indeed, that is what happened: I opened it up again because it’s a post-apocalyptic type of book and I was really in the mood for one of those. I struggled through the first page or two, and then stopped and consulted William, who is majoring in linguistics along with computer science, to see what he thought about whether the dialect was racist; and he read the first page or two, and got out his laptop and went typey-typey-typey for awhile, and then he said, “Without spoiling anything…I’ll say it looks like she knows what she’s doing.” He said there was a lot of talk about the dialect being racist, but it seemed to be from people who had my first reaction: feeling it MUST BE racist, without knowing much if anything about the topic. I realize this was (1) the quick assessment (2) of a blonde white guy, so I wouldn’t call it conclusive if I were researching for anyone else’s purposes, but it was enough to let ME keep reading, at least for the time being.

I don’t know how to explain the book to you. Can you maybe get it from your library so you can just TRY IT without it mattering if you don’t like it? Because I’m worried that anything I say about it will talk you OUT of it. For starters: it takes place after a pandemic that killed almost everyone, and continues to kill people before they reach full adulthood. You know me as someone who cannot tolerate Child In Danger stuff, and all of these children are in danger, and there is, well, there is a lot of dying in this book. And yet.

And as I mentioned, it’s in a dialect, William said it looked like it was a creole, and I am not generally interested in wrestling with that. So this is a book that, if YOU had described it to ME, I don’t think I would have read it! And yet! I loved it so much! I just loved it so much!

SPEAKING OF WHICH, the second book I want to recommend, which is also a contender for My Favorite Book of the Year, and which also is a book that if you described it to me I don’t think I would want to read it:

(image from Target.com)

We All Want Impossible Things, by Catherine Newman (Target link; Amazon link). I pre-ordered this not once but twice, by accident. I ordered it (twice) because Catherine Newman is on my very short list of authors whose books I will always pre-order.

But maybe you’re noticing this was published in November of last year and I’m only mentioning it now. Well. The thing is. It’s about a woman whose best friend dies in hospice of cancer. And each time I looked at my To Read pile, I thought “I’m not up to that right now.” And then I finally depleted my To Read pile to the point where I thought “OKAY LET’S DO THIS.”

And I loved the book so much, I want to tell everyone I know to PLEASE PLEASE READ IT, because YES, YES, it is about a woman’s best friend dying in hospice, and YES it is so so sad, you are NOT WRONG to think you will cry numerous times—but it is ALSO such a funny and delightful book, much funnier and much more delightful than you would expect considering the subject matter. And I think it wonderfully demonstrates many of the things I love about having teenagers. And if you are already a fan of Catherine Newman and her Ben & Birdy blog from long ago, you will recognize so many true things! And, combined with the fact that this is a fictionalized account of the actual death of Catherine Newman’s actual best friend, you will nosily wonder what ELSE in it is true, if you know what I mean, and if you read it YOU WILL KNOW WHAT I MEAN.

So this is a recommendation of TWO BOOKS that BOTH have plots that may make you think you don’t want to read them, but I am telling you (1) I FELT THE SAME and (2) BUT TRY THEM BECAUSE YOU MAY FIND YOU END UP FEELING AS I DO ABOUT THEM. I have already given one or the other of these books as birthday gifts, and I plan to keep doing that all year.

We had a slightly funny thing happen just now, which is that Paul and I were out on an errand, and we came back into the house in the middle of a conversation, and we started putting things away as we were talking, and it took us more time than you’d expect to realize that some of the teenagers in the kitchen where we were talking and putting things away WERE NOT OURS. I noticed first and said “Aaaa!” and then Paul looked up and noticed and said “Aaaa!” It’s not that we forgot how many children we had, it’s that we apparently forgot how many of them could conceivably be in our kitchen. Eventually my brain did the math (“Wait: COULD there be four teenagers in your kitchen right now??”), which is when I looked up and said “Aaaa!”

I bought a new mug, even though I seriously, honestly, truly need to buy NO MORE MUGS—and since that purchase, I have several times MADE MYSELF SAD by thinking “What if I hadn’t bought this mug?”

I bought it at…let’s see. It was either Marshalls or HomeGoods. I drove Henry and his friends to the theater to watch the Dungeons & Dragons movie, and the theater is too far from home for it to make sense to drive back home and come back later to pick them up, so I narrowed it down to three options: I could read my book and play on my phone in the car for two hours; or I could watch a movie by men about how some men at Nike got a sportsman to work with them on a shoe for men; or I could go shopping and see if I could spend the $14 movie ticket price on something more interesting. I bought a mug and a small lidded saucepan, which together came to two cents less than $14, and I had a nice time shopping, too.

I relearned, however, that I Do Not Like To Be Out After Dark. I do not like it! I think I am…scared of the dark? I realize that sounds silly, but I think that’s what it is. If I am out even just as the sun is starting to go down, I start to feel A Foreboding. If I am out doing errands in the dark, I have to literally talk myself through it: “This is fine! It’s just dark out! But this is the same normal familiar HomeGoods parking lot that gives you no Bad Feelings when it’s daytime! You are going to walk to your same normal familiar car and nothing bad is going to happen! And then you are going to drive to Marshalls and have some fun shopping THERE! It’s fine that it’s dark out! It makes no difference!” It’s mostly if I am BY MYSELF in the dark, but it’s ESPECIALLY if I am doing Normal Daytime Things (like going to stores I normally go to in the daytime) but it’s night. There is something very creepy to me about being in a familiar daytime store, and seeing the dark outside the windows.

I was thinking today about how very many of the things I CRINGE about are the things that, when OTHER people say/do them, I totally understood what they meant and don’t give it another thought, except for the thoughts I think about how interesting that is. Like, yesterday: I was wearing a t-shirt with daffodils on it; a library patron’s little daughter said she liked my flower shirt, and her dad said something like “Oh, yeah, that’s nice, isn’t it? with the…sunflowers…on it!” He hesitated; he was uncertain; the word did not come immediately to his mind; and maybe he will NEVER THINK OF THIS INCIDENT AGAIN. Many people (hard as it may be for some of us to believe) DON’T GIVE IT ANOTHER THOUGHT when such things happen! They probably think (I am just making it up here, because I do not know from personal experience) something like, “Ha! Silly mistake! I’m sure she knew what I meant!,” and then they GO ON WITH THEIR LIVES. I’m going to pause for a moment here so we can attempt to imagine what that must be like.

Because if it were ME, I could EASILY be wincing/cringing about accidentally referring to daffodils as sunflowers, and I could easily still be doing it YEARS LATER—not, like, DAILY or anything, and not in AGONY or anything, but as part of my rotating reminders of embarrassing moments. I would be imagining the scene, with me saying my wrong thing, and perhaps I would envision myself saying it in an exaggerated SpongeBob kind of voice. You know, when I type this out, it looks simply deranged. Who would care if they accidentally referred to daffodils as sunflowers in front of someone they don’t even know? WELL THAT IS EXACTLY MY POINT: NO ONE CARES. WE ALL KNOW THEY KNOW WHAT A DAFFODIL IS. AND/OR IF THEY DO NOT, WE DO NOT MIND OR CARE. And yet! When it is me making the mistake, I wince/cringe, sometimes for DECADES, and I KNOW AM NOT ALONE! I am not saying I think that is the correct reaction, and yes I have tried therapy, I am just saying I DO sometimes have that reaction!

Oh gosh, the time a teenaged boy at the Target check-out told me to have a Happy Mother’s Day and I said “You too!” (And why SHOULDN’T he have a Happy Mother’s Day, celebrating with his mother or the other mothers in his life?) Oh no, the time the clerk at the pizza place said “Enjoy!” and I said “You too!” Oh no, the time I said that weird thing that didn’t land right, and everyone just kind of looked at me because they didn’t really get what I meant! Oh no, the time I said something that could have sounded like I meant something I would NEVER HAVE MEANT!

What I am saying to you right now is that in most cases THE OTHER PERSON MAKES NO FURTHER NOTE OF IT. Which we TOTALLY UNDERSTAND when we are the other person! That teenaged boy at the Target check-out knew exactly what happened; he did not think I thought he was a mother. The clerk at the pizza place knew exactly what happened; she did not think “WHAT?? But I am NOT going to enjoy that pizza!! SHE is going to enjoy that pizza! Her response makes NO SENSE!!” That library worker at my library (me!!) knew exactly what happened: I did not think the patron did not know what a daffodil/sunflower was, or that it mattered if he didn’t, or that any part of that interaction had any significance or importance.

And the time I was at kindergarten drop-off and I was chatting with another mom for the first time, and as we parted I said “See you later, bye!” and she said “Bye, I love you!”—well, I CERTAINLY HOPE she is not cringing years later, as I would be, because I ABSOLUTELY UNDERSTOOD WHAT HAPPENED. I think of it years later not because I am thinking “Why on EARTH would she have said she LOVED me??” or because PEOPLE REALLY DO REMEMBER YOUR MISTAKE YEARS LATER (I realize it SEEMS like I am saying people really do remember your mistake years later, since I remember this mistake years later, but stay with me), but because I feel so warmly affectionate toward her for making such a completely understandable and relatable mistake! MAY WE FEEL THAT SAME WARM AFFECTION TOWARD OURSELVES, WHEN WE ARE LYING AWAKE CATEGORIZING OUR COMPLETELY UNDERSTANDABLE MISTAKES!

This is my coffee pot:

(image from Amazon.com)

Thanks to the power of blogging and the power of order history, I can see I bought it in January 2019, and that I paid $75 not $99. According to the U.S. government’s currency converter (also very useful if you would like to see if your raise was actually a raise: I recently got a nice raise that means I now make almost as much per hour as I made when I was hired in 2019), $75 in January 2019 is roughly $90 in April 2023, so I did not get quite as much of a deal as it might appear, but still a little bit of a deal.

For over four years, then, I have had this coffee maker, and I have been happy with it overall. It is of course rusting (the heating plate and also the metal plate on the underside), because what regularly-water-contacting item (shower curtain rods, bathroom light fixtures, coffee makers) is NOT sensibly made out of metal that rusts when it comes in contact with water? But my only OTHER complaint is that every single day when I go to fill the water reservoir, using the coffee pot, the water sloshes simply everywhere: into the part where only the filter and coffee grounds are supposed to go; all over the counter; etc. I have tried MAKING REALLY SURE the coffee pot lid is on securely. I have tried CHANGING THE POURING ANGLE. I have tried BEING LESS IMPATIENT WITH THE POURING SPEED. I have tried PULLING THE COFFEE MAKER WAY OUT AWAY FROM THE WALL to make sure that’s not the issue. I have tried saying “GODDANG IT WHY WON’T THIS STUPID THING POUR RIGHT!!!” really loudly. I have tried everything.

Well. I have tried everything except USING SOMETHING OTHER THAN THE COFFEE POT. Last night for the first time it occurred to me that I don’t need to use the coffee pot to measure the water. I can use, say, a large plastic cup. Which, as it turns out, works SO MUCH BETTER. It does mean I need to check the side of the coffee maker to see when I have put enough water in, and it means I need to refill the cup multiple times instead of filling the coffee pot just once. But ALL THE WATER went INTO THE WATER RESERVOIR, so.

A long time ago I read the book Quarantine, by Greg Egan, and if I’m thinking of the right book (and that is called into question approximately once a year when I try to refer to the book and I get it confused with another Greg Egan book called Permutation City, which seems like the right name for the book I read but apparently is not—and in fact, just now, the way I recalled both titles was to say to Paul “What is the book by Greg Egan I actually read, the one I can never remember the title of because it doesn’t seem right?,” and he said “Quarantine,” and I said “And what is the book I always think is the one I’ve read, because the title makes more sense?,” and he said “Permutation City”)… …I have lost the reins of this sentence.

A long time ago I read the book Quarantine, by Greg Egan. What I remember about that book is that the plot revolves around a man who can do a particular trick: he can split himself into EVERY POSSIBLE TIMELINE, and then CHOOSE THE ONE HE WANTS. So for example! Let us say he wishes to break into a secured building. He splits himself into every possible timeline, and then he chooses the one where the security cameras happen to be malfunctioning at the exact moment the guards happen to be distracted by something in another direction, and where the last person to have left the building happens to have left the door just barely ajar so the lock isn’t engaged—and so he walks right into the building, just as if it were unsecured.

This is where we are starting: with the amazing concept of splitting timelines and choosing the one where everything goes right. (In all the others, he fails.)

A number of years ago, I was in a store with Elizabeth, she was about ten years old I guess, and she asked to go off to look at something on her own, and I said she could, and then after she had been gone longer than I felt comfortable with, I went looking for her and I couldn’t find her. I looked through what I thought was the entire store and I couldn’t find her. And what I was thinking, as my mind became increasingly detached from my body, was that probably I would find her—but that if we could split the timeline into all the possible timelines, there was at least one timeline where I would not find her. That that is exactly what happens to some parents: they think “Ha ha. She is not actually gone. It feels like she is actually gone, but that is because I am being extremely silly and I am panicking right now, but I will in fact find her,” and then they do not, and they never do; at some point they end up calling the police; the police come; that timeline continues in a surreal episode of what must feel like a TV show but is not. And after I found her, I continued to be affected by that realization: that the nightmare scenario that everyone thinks is ridiculous to panic about, is the same nightmare scenario that DOES IN FACT HAPPEN to some parents. It really does happen to them. That’s why the rest of us panic; that’s why it’s not silly.

I had another example of that this evening, when Elizabeth went out to pick up trash along the side of the road to fulfill a volunteer-hours requirement, and she said she would be gone an hour, and I almost offered to go with her but then I didn’t; and after about an hour and a half I realized it had been longer than an hour but I told myself not to worry, and then it had been about two hours and dinner was past ready and she was still not home, and Paul was starting to say he should maybe go out in the car and just sort of drive randomly up and down the streets looking for her. And part of me was telling myself not to panic, because everything was going to be fine and she would soon walk in the door and then we would eat dinner and I would feel silly; but part of me was seeing again the timelines, all split, and how some of those timelines involved her not coming home. She did come home. Nothing had happened, she was just gone longer than expected. She was fine, and I was silly to have worried. We ate tepid dinner. It was one of the good timelines.

It’s tempting in these situations to feel embarrassed: oh, I panicked over nothing, of COURSE nothing happened; oh, I over-reacted, I let my imagination run away with me; oh, I’m so silly, why does my mind always have to go to the worst possible scenario?? But it’s clear from the news every day why we do that: so many parents panic and then it’s not nothing; so many parents imagine terrible things that turn out to be true; so many parents end up living the worst possible scenario. We’re not wrong to understand that it’s an option. We’re not wrong to notice and be grateful for our lucky timelines.

Paul: Have you ever heard of putting HONEY on PIZZA?
Swistle: Ug, no.
Paul: It says here people put it on Hawaiian pizza…
Swistle: Oh…well, actually I can picture it with pineapple—a sweet-and-sour thing.
Paul: Apparently it’s this whole THING. It’s called hot honey.
Swistle: Oh so like hot honey mustard, that’s different.
Paul: No, no mustard, just honey. Chili-infused honey.
Swistle: Well. Hm.
Paul: It’s Mike’s Hot Honey. It says you can also put it on fried chicken, in cocktails, and on ICE CREAM??
Swistle: WELL PUT IT ON THE LIST
Paul: I’M DOING IT

This is how we went from “GROSS” to “BUY IT” in about one minute flat, and ended up spending TEN DOLLARS on a thing of honey at the grocery store. To be fair, honey is already expensive, but STILL! We looked for it first with salsa and bbq sauces, but it was with honey and maple syrup.

We have not yet tried it. I will let you know.

There are two literal vultures in our yard, partaking of a dead skunk. The skunk has been there, visually intact, for ten days as best as we can figure. We have been less-than-half-wondering why nothing had eaten it, but more-than-half-NOT-wondering why nothing had eaten it. More than that, we have been wondering why it still looked so intact: little feet stiffly out in front of it, little face turned upward as if to sniff the lovely spring air, fur all fluffy and normal, really very sweet, like a stuffed animal. Also wondering: what HAPPENED? Did it have a heart attack? Did it fall from a just-short-of-splatting height? Did someone tip it over like a cow, and it perished of shock? Did it freeze to death in a standing position, and then the wind blew it onto its side? Why is it absolutely intact, yet dead, in our yard?

Anyway, now the vultures are taking care of it. When I came home from grocery shopping they were there, and the air was absolutely RICH with skunk. Luckily the breeze was in our favor: driving past the vultures, the car immediately filled with richness; at the end of the driveway nearer the house, opening the door of the car with dread (after, I don’t mind telling you, a several-minutes’ pause to process the situation and prepare for the scents), I found the air blessedly fresh and clear. As I unloaded the groceries, two separate cars pulled over to gape at the vultures.

Paul suggested we should take a photo of the scene, to include in the real estate listing at whatever future time we sell the house. A little something to go viral. It’s happening near the foot of the driveway, so we could get a real Curb Appeal shot. Imagine it: a wide view, the end of the driveway with nice little homey mailbox, part of the grassy yard and part of the road, and The House, looking lovely if a little spare in early spring. And, not immediately apparent but, once seen, impossible to ignore: in the bottom left corner, the vultures eating the skunk.

Resolution completed! I have my first tattoo! I am feeling dazed and amazed. I was trying to pin down the feeling, and at first I thought joy and also…pride?—but pride isn’t quite right. TRIUMPH. It’s triumph. To FINALLY have stopped dithering after DECADES; to FINALLY have DONE IT. I felt similarly when I got my cartilage piercing. Like “WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!” plus the huge satisfaction of having overcome a number of hurdles to make something happen.

I didn’t want to post a picture right away, because pretty much every time I see a picture of someone’s brand-new still-fresh-and-bleeding-and-covered-in-Saniderm tattoo I think of something I read in a pregnancy book about how you may want to wait a couple days to take a picture of your newborn for the birth announcements; it tactfully suggested that the baby would then be, er, EVEN MORE BEAUTIFUL than it was on the day of its birth. My tattoo is now three days old, so it still has some pinkness around the edges but it has settled down considerably and, while not ready for studio portraits, is ready for its birth announcement:

(Another thing I have learned from other people’s tattoo photos is to include BODY CONTEXT: it can be surprisingly disturbing to see a tattoo and not know WHAT PART OF THE BODY AM I LOOKING AT.)

The first picture is prettier, but the angle makes it seem as if the tulip is tilted. The second picture loses a bit of the leaf and is not as flattering to my skin and has part of the exercise bike in it, but shows the placement, which I LOVE: it was not what I had in mind, but I’d decided ahead of time to defer to the artist’s judgement whenever possible and I think she was exactly right. She did it so that the back leaf traces the calf muscle. I would not have thought to do that, and would have just centered the whole thing on the side of the calf like a big sticker—which would have been FINE, but not anywhere near as good as what the artist chose.

If I seem to be getting ahead of myself, it’s because when it’s me reading this kind of post, I can’t really CONCENTRATE until I’ve seen the finished tattoo/cake/artwork/remodel/whatever. I would be kind of skimming, thinking yes yes yes uh huh when do we see it. Now that we’ve seen it, I will start where we left off: with the making of the appointment. I’d chosen “tulip on the calf” because even though I felt MORE enthusiastic about getting something on my upper arm, I couldn’t commit to anything, neither placement (shoulder cap? upper arm? back of shoulder? more like front of shoulder?) nor flower (peony? peony plus bud? rose? cluster of roses? mixed bouquet?); whereas I COULD commit to a tulip on the calf.

It was nice to then have well over a month to make sure I continued to feel content with that decision, and I did. My main concern was that I might have told her too SMALL a tulip, but several of you assured me that that would be easy and normal to fix at the appointment, which I already knew included built-in time for adjustments and so forth, so I trusted that it would be okay, which is to say that I wrung my hands for weeks and worried it would not be okay. I was particularly worried that she would say “Oh! Well, we can change the size, but I haven’t booked enough time for that larger tattoo.” That turned out to be a non-issue, at least with this particular tattoo: the artist commented that tulips and pansies in particular are quicker-than-usual tattoos to apply (if you’re interested, she said peonies and roses are slower than usual), so even making it a fair amount larger didn’t matter much for the time allotment.

I wore to the appointment the shorts/socks/shoes I normally wear in the summer, so that she could see the exact display area I had in mind, and we ended up with a tulip that was just under 8 inches—and I think I would have gone for more like 9 inches, except we were getting pretty close to a veiny area of my calf, and I didn’t want a big magenta tulip calling attention to it or running up against it.

She’d asked for a reference photo, and I’d sent one that gave the basic idea of what I wanted; she then asked for more information about the color of the tulip, so I sent a word description (magenta), and included another reference photo of what I considered magenta tulips, in case the word magenta wasn’t as precise as I’d hoped. Then I didn’t look at those photos again: I didn’t want to accidentally memorize the reference photos and then notice all the ways in which the tattoo was different. I looked afterward, and she did make a satisfying number of changes, and I’d say she significantly improved it.

You may remember I’d considered adding my birth surname to the tattoo, but I let that simmer for awhile and realized I DIDN’T feel settled about that decision for an assortment of reasons, so I left it for now; it seemed like something I could have her add later.

My remaining worries, in no particular order:

• That it would hurt more than I could tolerate, and I’d have to have her stop

• That I would twitch or move, and cause her to make a mistake

• That I wouldn’t be able to find parking

I didn’t find myself worrying much about the decision to get a tattoo, or that I wouldn’t like the tattoo; I felt as if those were worries I’d already bypassed by making the resolution to GO FOR IT AND SEE, BECAUSE THERE IS NO KNOWING THESE ANSWERS AHEAD OF TIME. And I didn’t worry A LOT a lot about the pain, even though I consider my personal pain tolerance levels fairly low, because so many people get tattoos, and many of them go on to get MORE tattoos, and I didn’t know of a single story of someone having the artist stop and leave the tattoo unfinished. (Not that there AREN’T such stories, and at this point if you know of one it would be fun to hear it. But more like I was thinking if it happened OFTEN, then statistically I would expect to have heard a few stories already.)

It did make me nervous that no one seems to have an easy time describing the pain. And that sometimes when you ask people to try to describe it, they start to say things like, “Well, you’ve been through childbirth, right? so I think you’ll be fine,” and they say it in an evaluative, hedging-their-bets kind of way, not in a jolly reassuring way.

So while I was getting the tattoo done, I took notes on my phone to try to describe the pain. I will START by saying that overall, I felt well-prepared for the pain levels, so that OVERALL, the pain was not as bad as I’d expected; but you see how I would not want to keep saying the pain was less than I’d expected, and therefore warp YOUR preparation, so that you would end up feeling that the pain was MORE than you’d expected.

I’d thought I would want to play phone games while getting the tattoo, but actually I felt dreamily inclined to zone out and listen to the music and look at things in the studio: the interesting ceiling, the partial view out the window, the art on the walls, the decorated desk. I am not usually a live-in-the-moment kind of person, but in this particular situation I found that I wanted to Experience the Tattoo. Plus, I wanted to think about the kind of pain it was so that I could try to describe it to you. Here are the things I wrote down:

Buzzing hot scratching
Scrubby sensation, like scribbling, hot scratchy pen
Scratching with a vibrating pin
Outline hurt more, sketching back and forth over a line
Feels like scratching through layers of skin but not like cutting
Pain was all surface, unlike labor or tooth
Little chills to the scalp/face

The most helpful thing I remember someone telling me ahead of time was that it was the burn of a sunburn, and that it was like having a sunburn applied slowly to your skin. I would say yes, it was like that, but it was like having a sunburn applied slowly to my skin with A HOT SCRATCHING VIBRATING PIN.

I found it completely manageable; I didn’t wish I’d taken a sedative or a painkiller ahead of time; I didn’t need her to take a break; my eyes didn’t even water. Every so often (like when she was sketch-scratching in a way that felt like line-work rather than coloring-in), I would think “oh: ow. ow. ow.” for a few seconds, but then it would taper back to “huh! that hurts in an interesting way!” A long time ago I got a deep-gums dental cleaning, and I thought back to that: it HURT, it DID, but in a warm itching kind of way that lived very close to the line of being pleasant. …Do not go for a tattoo thinking it will feel pleasant. I just mean, it was the KIND of pain that did not, for me, feel terrible or miserable; it just felt like pain/sensation/heat/scratching. I didn’t feel like I was SUFFERING. (However, afterward I noticed I was pretty sweaty under the arms.)

Also, I kept noticing that the pain was SURFACE pain. I have had other kinds of pain I found not particularly tolerable: labor pain, for example, and bad gas pain, and dental pain. Those pains came FROM WITHIN, and in addition to being extremely and miserably painful, they made me feel PANICKY. The pain of a tattoo all felt completely on the surface, and did not make me feel panicky at all, not even a little: it was like the pain of a skinned knee, or a sunburn—NOT the pain of a deep cut, or something wrong in your organs/intestines, or a broken bone, where it feels like something is deeply WRONG WRONG WRONG and the body is setting off emergency alarms. I felt light in my mind, and a little dazed, but mostly INTERESTED and in the mood to THINK ABOUT the pain, and not at all miserable or unhappy.

Plus, I felt ELATED that the pain was PRODUCING SOMETHING I WANTED. I wondered idly if we would value tattoos as much if they didn’t hurt, and immediately concluded we would NOT. I think if it were as quick and painless as having a permanent sticker put on us, hardly anyone would do it. I think the time and pain is NECESSARY to the experience. I think it’s an essential part of what makes a tattoo feel transformative and badass. I can imagine getting a tattoo to commemorate something, and having the experience/pain of the tattoo accomplish some actual psychological work.

The ONLY time I felt a TWINGE of anything different was when she was very near the ankle and I felt what I think must have been a little taste of what it feels like to get a tattoo over a bone; that BRIEF MOMENT felt more like INTERNAL pain, and I would not want to experience too much of that.

Some notes from the artist, when I said it didn’t hurt as much as I’d expected:

• She mentioned something I already knew, which is that the area where I was getting a tattoo was not a particularly painful area for getting a tattoo

• She mentioned that she was known for having a light touch, and that it might hurt more if I were getting it done elsewhere. This made me a little nervous: do I remember reading something somewhere about some artists causing more pain but their tattoos last longer because they’re placed deeper, or am I making that up from an anxiety dream?

I see I have skipped ahead again. I’d intended to be thorough but also orderly. Let’s hop back to the arrival at the studio: I DID find parking. I went in. I met the tattoo artist. There was no one else in the studio; I wondered if it might be fun to be in a studio along with other people getting tattoos from other artists, or if it was nicer to have quiet/privacy; I think I could be happy either way. She showed me the first work-up, which was a color print-out, and she’d cut around it so I could hold it up to my calf and get the idea. We agreed on larger; she made it larger and printed it out; I held it up and said yes. She verified the colors with me, and said the greens would be a little darker than shown, and the blossom would be a little more purpley than shown.

She had me fill out a consent form that was very similar to the one I filled out when I got a cartilage piercing: my name, my age, my address; was I intoxicated? did I have any contagious/transmissible diseases? did I have allergies? And things like had I eaten in the last two hours, what medications was I taking. Also a pretty long list of things I had to say I understood: that tattoos were permanent and so were tattoo mistakes; that the tattoo artist couldn’t know if there were things in the tattoo inks that I might be allergic to; that a tattoo might get infected, might heal wrong, would fade with time, might need touching up. It was an electronic form, and I also had to take a photo of my driver’s license and upload it.

In the meantime, the tattoo artist had made a purple-outline version of the tattoo design that she could apply to my leg so we could agree on the exact placement, and so that she’d have a guideline to work with. She had me stand, and she sat on the floor next to my calf and took some time squinting, before smucking the design decisively onto my leg. She said she could wipe it off and reapply as many times as I wanted, and that she could put it higher, lower, forward, back, tilted, whatever. As mentioned, it was not where I had pictured it, but I’d decided ahead of time to go with her judgement unless I disliked something; I took a minute to make sure I didn’t dislike it, and I didn’t, and in fact I found I almost immediately VERY MUCH liked it. In the days since, I’ve felt almost appalled at the idea that I could have gone with my own original little-thought/no-experience idea instead! She does this for a living; I chose her because I liked her work; she has a lot of experience with what looks nice in this exact medium; trusting her judgement was the way to go.

She said the purple outline needed to dry for a bit, so she had me go sit in the waiting area while she got her tattooing stuff ready. I was trying not to make her nervous by watching her intently, so I mostly noticed from my casual peeks that she was getting out a lot of different colors of ink and putting small quantities into little containers. There was also a tray with equipment, like at the dentist’s office, and a cloth and a bottle of what I assumed was a disinfectant or other cleaning solution. Several times during the tattoo she wiped down my calf with a nice cool wet cloth, so that was probably the cool wetness.

Then she had me get up onto the table, and I’d forgotten to be nervous ahead of time about getting up onto the table. I am always nervous about such things. I think I don’t have a very strong sense of where my body is and, combined with excessive self-consciousness, this makes things like “positioning my human body on a table” disproportionately embarrassing and difficult—and especially if it’s a narrowish table, as it was, and if it’s covered with slidey paper, which it was, and if I have to lie in any particular position or scoot myself into a different position, which I did. I do better if I can think it through a little ahead of time. In this case, I just sort of went for it, figuring I was not the only person who did not have lots of experience climbing onto a tattooing table. She then had me move my legs back, toward her. I then spent the rest of the session worried that I had crept them forward again, and that she was having to lean over uncomfortably; at some point I realized that would be HER problem to fix if so, and that she has PLENTY of experience asking people to move.

Before she started, I told her that I was worried I might twitch or wiggle, and she said not to worry, that she is very good at keeping people still. And indeed: throughout the entire tattoo, I was intermittently aware of the firm pressure of her hand right near where she was working, keeping my calf, and specifically the inch or so of it she was currently working on, immobile. I felt pretty able to shift my head or arms a little, or pick up my phone, without worrying that I might move my leg.

She did surprisingly little pre-talk. She said “Ready?,” and I said “Ready,” and she began. I noticed she would put a little friction right where she was about to work on the tattoo—not just the pressure of the hand holding my leg still, but like the little rub-rub-rub a nurse might do right before giving a shot. This was helpful: the pain never came from an unexpected place.

There was a lot of WIPING during the tattoo: bzz bzz bzz, wipe, bzz bzz bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, wipe. I’m just going to assume wiping up blood, but maybe also ink? I don’t really know how it works. There were also several more extensive wipe-downs, where she wiped the whole calf with a cool fluid; that felt very nice against the heat of the process. I’d have been interested to see if there was a lot of blood on the cloths, but she’d whisked them away and it seemed too weird to ask. In retrospect, I should have just asked: tattoo artists as a group do not seem easily off-put by weird stuff.

The tattooing itself (excluding consultation, revisions, set-up, me wanting to pee one last time before she got started) took almost exactly one hour, which surprised me: when I’d estimated a six-inch tattoo, she’d said she could do that in an hour or two, which already surprised me; when we made the tattoo bigger, I’d expected something more like two or three hours. This is when she told me that tulips (and pansies) go surprisingly quickly. I think I could easily have endured at least another hour without a break, but it’s hard to say. I was talking to a co-worker who has had a fair amount of tattoo work done, and she said even with a break for a snack/drink in the middle, her own limit is about three hours; after that she starts to feel icky/woozy.

When she was done, I half-sat up so I could see the tattoo, while leaving my calf sideways up on the table; the tattoo artist was putting away her supplies and also periodically wiping the blood that was seeping out of the tattoo. The tattooed skin was noticeably raised/puffy, with pink all around it. (It had flattened by the next day; the pink is still there three days later, but much narrower, and less bright.) She took a few photos, and then asked me about adhesive. I do get pink marks from bandaids, and sometimes they’re itchy/raised marks, but it’s not enough of a problem to make me stop using bandaids. She said in that case she would go ahead and put on Saniderm, but that I should only leave it on until the next morning, instead of for several days as usual; she said I would get almost all of the benefit of it, but without as much exposure to adhesive. And she said if it itched or bothered me before then, I should just take it off early, no big deal; and in that case I would follow the no-Saniderm section of the aftercare instructions.

The Saniderm was like…a piece of very thin and not very shiny cling-wrap, and sticky. She cut a sheet of it to fit around the whole tattoo plus a nice wide border, and then she applied it, and it was not very visible. She said it was normal for the tattoo to seep blood and fluid, and for that blood/fluid to build up under the Saniderm; but she said if fluid started leaking out, that meant the sterile seal was broken, and I should remove the Saniderm and follow the no-Saniderm healing instructions. The Saniderm DID leak, just a couple hours later, so I wore it even less than the original smaller amount of time she’d prescribed.

Aftercare instructions vary WIDELY. So widely, it makes me very nervous: one place says do THIS, avoid THAT; another place says, do THAT, definitely not THIS. The aftercare instructions my tattoo artist gives for non-Saniderm healing: wash three times per day with unscented antibacterial soap (just using your hand, no washcloth), for as long as the tattoo is still seeping/damp; when the tattoo stops seeping and starts to feel dry/tight, apply a little bit of unscented sensitive skin lotion after washing, and drop down to washing once or twice a day. Keep up the washing/moisturizing routine for 2-3 weeks. DON’T SCRATCH OR PICK OR EXFOLIATE.

I was worried about the discomfort of sleeping, wearing pants, etc., but it’s been okay. I am very AWARE OF my pants where they brush against the tattoo, which continues to feel like a sunburn. I am CAREFUL when getting into / out of bed, and I don’t SLIDE my leg across the sheets, I only pick my leg up and put it back down in the new position; but it’s fine to sleep on it. When I first get up in the morning and swing my legs into a standing position, there is a sudden increase in the burning feeling. I keep the shower temperature lower, and try to keep the tattoo away from the shower spray as much as I can; hot water hurts more, as it does with a sunburn, and the spray is unpleasant.

I am extremely, extremely pleased with the tattoo, and am looking forward to getting more. A part of me wishes I’d started sooner; a much larger part of me feels pleased with the idea of starting NOW, in mid-life, as a treat.

Are you ever doing a task in the evening, an unromantic and unpartyish task such as descaling a coffee pot with vinegar, and you’re using a paper towel to dab up excess hot vinegar condensation and use it to really GET AT the little details of the inside of the coffee-pot lid, and you think to yourself that you could have lived so many other lives that were not this one, for example you could have stayed single and lived in Paris, etc.? I don’t know if it makes it better or worse, but this evening it occurred to me I would still need to descale my coffee pot if I were single and living in Paris.

Paul and I just had an odd exchange, and neither of us can figure out how to make it sound as MIND-BLOWING to others as it was to us. Here is what happened. He began on a good foot, conversationally-speaking: “I have just learned a new fact.” I was attentive, as expected. He said, “GUESS WHO I just found out played a PIVOTAL ROLE in [some silly getting-kids-to-brush-their-teeth song Paul liked as a child]?” And, like, obviously I have no idea, this song is not from my childhood, I find it kind of annoying after nearly three decades of hearing Paul sing snippets of it, and it sounds like it’s from the 1950s as most of his childhood favorites do; and so I did what we do in our relationship in these situations, which is that I YELLED OUT the very first DUMB/FUNNY GUESS that came into my mind. I yelled as follows: “PENN OF PENN AND TELLER.” Then I realized I meant the one who doesn’t talk, which would be a funnier guess, so I immediately corrected it and yelled “I MEAN TELLER OF PENN AND TELLER.” And Paul went completely silent, and he said, in a voice as if he had seen the water turn into wine right in front of him and as if I had been the one to turn it: “It was Penn Jillette. How did you. How did you know that.”

Well, I didn’t. I didn’t AT ALL. I was making a joke, and not even a good joke, and in fact even my joke was wrong, since I changed it to Teller. If I had been trying to guess for real, I would not have guessed Penn Jillette, because I would have assumed the song in question was from Penn Jillette’s early childhood or before. So my hands flew to my mouth, and my face went hot with the weirdness of me accidentally saying the right answer as a joke and with the earnestness with which I was attempting to assure an astounded-to-the-point-of-shock Paul that I HAD NOT AT ALL KNOWN. (You might be tempted to wonder why, or even be a little offended on my behalf that Paul would be SO SHOCKED that I’d gotten it right: how should he know what interesting facts I might or might not know? But in this case he was right to be shocked: this song, and also Penn and Teller, are in HIS realm; I am ALSO a fan, but no one would consider me a good source of Penn and Teller trivia. This is as if I’d said to Paul, “I have just learned a new fact. GUESS WHAT [obscure baby name thing from the 1950s]?,” and he had YELLED OUT (in our familiar “I do not know so I am yelling out a dumb/funny guess” way”) the EXACT ANSWER, JUST BY CHANCE.

Anyway, William’s immediate and certainly accurate theory is that this is the wonder of two aging minds combined: that Paul has discovered this fact before; that he has told me; that I have forgotten it; and that when Paul asked the question, and the mice in my brain went looking into the filing cabinets for a quick joke, they instead accurately accessed the file with the answer. William further theorizes that in fact we have this amazing conversation about every five years, and will continue to do so until our deaths.

Then Elizabeth came home from work, and we told her the story, and she said almost word-for-word the same thing William had said, including the part about every five years, so Paul says he thinks ALL of us need to get out more.