I have a preference to state, and I would like to emphasize this a little more before I actually state it: that it is a preference. A preference I hope others will share. Not “Other ways are stupid! Everyone should do it the way I think is right!” I have plenty of opinions that fall along those lines, too. But in this case, I realize that what I’m basically doing is hoping/requesting that people change the way they’re doing something, in favor of the way I prefer it to be—but fully acknowledging that they needn’t, and/or that they might prefer it otherwise, and that it is a big deal to change something for someone else just as some sort of concession to that person’s preferences, so it’s not something I’m expecting. I won’t be all, “WHAT?? This again?? But I SAID I didn’t LIKE it!!” There are many people who express preferences in regards to what I write on this blog, and I decline to meet those preferences, so I am familiar with that process.

Nevertheless, here is the preference: I would prefer if a sponsored post said so at the very top of the post, or within the first few sentences.

Here is how it feels to me, when I read a sponsored post without realizing it’s sponsored until a little note at the very end: it’s like being invited over to someone’s house for a fun evening, and then realizing when you get there that it’s a “party” selling make-up, or kitchen tools, or candles. Crap, I got suckered. And I feel foolish for not realizing it sooner. And my relationship with the person who tricked me has taken a hit.

I have several local acquaintances who do sales parties, and they would argue with this. I know, because they have argued it within my earshot: “It’s not like a SALES thing!” they say. “It’s just a fun evening! Friends getting together! No pressure! It’s not like you have to BUY anything, it’s just for learning about cool new things! And it’s been so long since I’ve seen you guys! It’s a GIRLS’ NIGHT OUT!” I understand that they might really feel this way about it, but I continue to NOT feel this way about it. And with sponsored posts, I understand that a blogger might say that it’s their own content, that they weren’t in any way pressured or instructed what to write, so it’s the same as a regular post. I understand how they can see it this way, but it’s still not the way I see it. My preference is still to know from the start what I’m getting into, rather than getting tricked into it and feeling manipulated and suckered at the end.

I just finished watching It’s Complicated, and I gave it 5 stars on Netflix even though my actual score is more like 4 or even 3 (I liked it, but I save 5 stars for “OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE HOW MUCH I LOVED THAT!!”). The bonus star or two was to skew the Netflix recommendations so I’d get MORE MOVIES LIKE THIS PLZ KTHANX. Movies about people older than me? having relationships just as if they continued to be real people after their twenties were over? and dealing with issues involving their children? THERE IS A MARKET FOR THIS, I THINK.

I ALSO like movies about attractive single people in their twenties finding Obviously True Deep Real Lasting Love with other attractive single people in their twenties (“We’re REALLY attracted to each other, so we MUST be eternal soul-mates!”), but it’s nice to see some VARIETY in human relationships. And, just as I enjoyed the “romance in their twenties” movies in my teens and the “having a baby” movies in my early twenties (it’s exciting to imagine What’s Ahead in life), NOW I would enjoy seeing movies about people navigating things in middle age.

And perhaps they can deal with problems I’m more familiar with than the “Do I think the bad-boy guy is too hot to give up for the obviously-better-choice Nice Guy guy who is also really hot?” theme. Like, maybe the husband could say that he’s going to do the dishes every night, and maybe he even kind of cheeses his wife if she tries to do them. And she SUPER LOVES that he is going to take over this chore, and praises him mightily and regularly. But then, like, some nights he doesn’t do them. Which is fine! It’s FINE! It’s FAIR to share this chore! But in that case, he should mention it to his wife, because then she wants to take her option to do them herself, because waking up to a dirty kitchen and dried-on food and no clean sippy cups makes her want to give up and just heap the dirty dishes in the TRASH. But she’s already mentioned this several times, with careful explanations, and still she is sometimes waking up to a dirty kitchen, and HOW CAN MERYL STREEP SOLVE THIS PROBLEM IN A WAY I CAN APPLY TO MY OWN LIFE??

Remember how just a couple of weeks ago I was all, Summer is going GREAT!?

Never mind. Forget it. I ran out of steam.

We’re still going to swimming lessons, but activities at the library have almost completely ceased (in many cases, because so many of them are scheduled at the same time as our swimming lessons, a conflict I’d thought we were avoiding by booking lessons at lunchtime), and today we have no swimming lesson and yet I don’t feel at all motivated to figure out something else to do—even though I know full well that if I don’t schedule something, everyone is going to end up bickering.

I seem to have lost both my “Hey, I can DO this!!” feeling AND my “Hey, I WANT to do this!!” feeling. In exchange, please accept “When does SCHOOL start?” and “Why did we have so many CHILdren?” and “There are not enough CHAIRS in this LIVING room.”

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Also, a school-related vent: the school supply lists. They NEVER WORK OUT. Either we don’t get the list until the first day of school, by which time all the back-to-school sales are over, OR, worse, we get a long list in the mail well before school starts and I carefully purchase everything on the list, only to be told by the teacher on the first day of school that “Oh, the office just sends those out—here’s my completely different list” and now all the back-to-school sales are over.

Here is what I want, because “asking for what one wants” is allegedly more mentally healthy than complaining about what one doesn’t want: I want each teacher to send out their own supply list, and I want it on the last day of school with the report card. That’s when we get the classroom assignments, so by the last day of school it’s already known what teacher the child will have—and except in the case of a new teacher, the teacher can use the same list year after year. The office can in fact combine this with the classroom-assignment sheet, since they’re printing out a million of those and custom-assigning one to each child ALREADY: top of sheet can say “Your next-year’s teacher is ____!” and rest of sheet can say “Here are the supplies you will need!”

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I just read Hilarity in Shoes’s post about post-break-up post titles (post post post), and I DO feel bad that it is DEEP MISERY fueling this excellent funniness.

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I bought a box of Drumsticks ice cream treats for the children to try, because I have a general summer policy of “a new fun treat each week.” Later that night, putting something else away in the freezer, I noticed my terrible error: FOUR Drumsticks per box. FOUR. The box was the same size and price as 12 ice cream sandwiches, 12 ice cream bars, or 24 popsicles, and I hadn’t even thought to check my unknowingly-held assumption that I would get enough Drumsticks in a box to hand out to five children.

Anyway, I was telling this sad tale to Paul, and he said that it probably wasn’t a big deal—that I should check beforehand with the children, because Edward didn’t really like meat, and Rob was squeamish about eating meat off a bone. And there was a long pause, and I said, “But they don’t have ANYTHING TO DO with meat! or bones!” and he said “…”, and I said, “DRUMSTICKS! The ICE CREAM TREAT! Did you never have a Drumstick as a child??”, and he said “I did! I did! But I thought you meant you bought a box of frozen chicken legs, for them to try!”, and I said, “BUT I SHOWED YOU THE BOX!!”, and he said “But I didn’t see it!”, and I said “BUT I WENT INTO DETAIL ABOUT IT BEING A CHILDHOOD TREAT EVERYONE SHOULD TRY EVEN IF IT IS A DISAPPOINTMENT!”, and he said “But I thought you meant CHICKEN!”, and I said “CHICKEN IS NOT A CHILDHOOD TREAT!”

Anyway, now we’re cleared up and we’re agreed I need to go by another box of them, even though 75 cents (on SALE!) for a Drumstick is more than I’d expected when I embarked on this mission. (Ice cream sandwiches are TWENTY-FIVE cents.)

This morning I was trying to proofread my Milk & Cookies post (I’m giving ideas and also looking for more ideas for birthday party gift ideas for a 10-year-old girl) (the site format is a little wonky right now—it doesn’t usually look all smashed together like that), and the children were being interruptive as usual. I have sometimes wondered if, when I’m trying to write, I over-accuse the children of interrupting: that is, maybe a full fifteen minutes went by between this interruption and the last one, but it felt to me like it was practically CONSTANT.

So today I wrote down the time of each interruption. I counted only deliberate ones: that is, if a child made a loud sound in another room and it distracted me, or if children were bickering and I interfered, or if they had a loud conversation right next to me and I couldn’t concentrate, I didn’t count those; I only counted it if a child approached me (or yelled to me from another room *clenching teeth*) to tell me something, complain about something, or ask for something. I ended up having to make tick-marks to indicate more than one interruption in the same minute:

8:46 – 3 interruptions
8:47 – 1 interruption
8:48 – 3
8:49 – 0
8:50 – 1
8:51 – 2
8:52 – 2
8:53 – 0
8:54 – 2
8:55 – 0
8:56 – 1
8:57 – 1
8:58 – 2
8:59 – 3
9:00 – 1
9:01 – 2
9:02 – 2
9:03 – 1
9:04 – 1
9:05 – 0
9:06 – 1

That’s where I stopped keeping track. In 20 minutes, there were 29 interruptions, and that’s if I did the math right—a child was trying to talk to me while I was adding them up just now.

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I loved this post from The Brunettes Blog, about who is being spoken to when something controversial is said in a Facebook status or Twitter remark. She makes a neat point about how in person, we would know if we could politely/firmly disagree depending on context (in her example, we wouldn’t run across the room to confront a stranger at a party, but we could certainly respond to someone in our conversation group), but when someone posts something we consider objectionable on Facebook in an “of course everyone agrees with this” tone, it’s hard (and very conflicting) to know how to respond—and to feel right about not responding.

I also liked this post by Miss Zoot, especially the part about our responsibility to moderate our comments sections. A couple years back I had a post where the comments section got wayyyyy out of hand—and I had no idea what to do. Looking back on it, I could see how I could have nipped the whole thing in the bud about two comments into it—and although that would have been very difficult (because it would have involved moderating someone I considered a friend, and because I’ve had unpleasant experiences with anonymous commenters retaliating viciously when moderated), it probably would have been the right thing to do. Freedom of speech has never, ever, ever meant that we have to give people part of our own space in which to express their vicious and hurtful remarks. I try to keep that in mind now, though it can still be hard to know when/how to apply it.

But she also takes it further, discussing how such issues can help guide us in teaching our children things we didn’t have to be taught by our parents (and therefore might not realize we need to teach): we need to teach them the responsible use of anonymity; and we need to teach them the responsible management of what other people say in public spaces they control, such as their Facebook pages.

Did you know that it is possible to:

1. Feel uncomfortable in seasonal heat, and
2. Realize that people in other professions/states/countries feel heat that is more intense or more oft-felt, and
3. Nevertheless wish to complain/marvel about one’s own heat experience?

The Giant Internet Hand of Spanking does not know this.

Did you know that it is possible to:

1. Have a pet/child/pregnancy, and
2. Understand the various options for caring for that pet/child/pregnancy, and
3. Make an informed choice for that pet’s/child’s/pregnancy’s care, and
4. Have that choice be different than someone else’s informed choice, or
5. Even have that choice be different than what the current mainstream opinion is, and yet
6. Still have the choice be a truly INFORMED CHOICE, one that needs no further input from others?

The Giant Internet Hand of Spanking concedes none of this.

Did you know that it is possible to:

1. Complain about one’s spouse, and
2. Understand that there are worse traits the spouse could have, and
3. Understand that people who have been painfully removed from their spouses would give anything to be able to complain about such small things, and
4. Nevertheless wish to complain, since there are also BETTER traits the spouse could have, and since people who would like to complain about such things would ALSO be complaining about such things, if given the chance?

The Giant Internet Hand of Spanking refuses to believe you.

Did you know that it was possible to:

1. Feel minor interest in the death/divorce of a celebrity, and
2. Feel intense distress about a bomb in another country, and yet
3. Only mention 1.?

Did you know that the reason for this could be:

1. That a person feels one event is appropriate to discuss on light social media, and feels the other is not, or
2. That a person needs more time to process one event than the other before discussing it, or
3. That a person feels one event is easier to discuss in 140 characters, or
4. That a person likes discussing one subject but not the other?

The Giant Internet Hand of Spanking does not know any of these things.

Did you know that it is possible to:

1. Be very uncomfortable in the late stages of pregnancy, and
2. Wish to complain about that discomfort, but still
3. Fully WANT that discomfort because of what goes with it (the pregnancy, the baby, the health and maturity of the baby, etc.), and yet
4. Still prefer not to have the discomfort itself because, clearly, it is discomfortable?

The Giant Internet Hand of Spanking does not know this, and feels you shouldn’t either.

Did you know that it is possible to:

1. Understand how the legal system works, and
2. Still feel upset about the outcome of a trial?

Did you know that the reason for this could be:

1. That the person thinks it’s a rotten system that needs serious fixing, or
2. That the person thinks the system generally works but failed in this case, or
3. That the person thinks the system worked but wishes their side had presented the case differently, or
4. That the person thinks the system worked the way it should have but nevertheless continues to have negative feelings about the outcome?

The Giant Internet Hand of Spanking continues to treat you with detached condescension.

My mom and I were running errands today, and she mentioned she’d had a very hard time finding singalong books to read to small children (baby/toddler/preschooler). It’s pretty easy to find ones where it’s one book devoted to one single song, but what she’s looking for is each page with its own classic children’s song, to sing one after another. She’d like these for reading (singing) to children, but also for getting the songs into her head so she has them stuck in her head when there is the sudden need to sing to a child and she is scrambling to think of a children’s song.

I bumbled around on Amazon for awhile, finding books such as the Priddy line—but some of them have no reviews or very mixed reviews, and they don’t have lists of what songs.

We looked at Target and found Nursery Rhymes (yet another from that Priddy series), and I liked it from just looking at it briefly but you can see some complaints in the reviews: evidently it uses the version of the old woman in the shoe in which she whips them all before she tucks them in. Though, even though I am not crazy about that myself, I don’t think I would have gone as far as the review-leaver, who used “shocked” to describe her reaction, and concluded that the book was “inappropriate for anyone.” How are we going to describe actual shock or inappropriateness-for-all-of-humanity, if we are going to use it about things such as this?

Where was I? I guess what I am looking for are titles of children’s song books you’ve found, the kind where there’s one song per page.

I just finished Bossypants, and I really liked it, and I recommend it. However, I wish the reviews I’d read hadn’t been all “I PEED MYSELF MULTIPLE TIMES JUST READING THE TITLE,” because it’s a bad idea to go into ANYTHING expecting to be dead with laughter. I DID laugh, and often, but more than that I came away liking Tina Fey. Well, which I already DID from episodes of 30 Rock and from her famous impressions of Sarah P., whose name I prefer not become a search result on this site.

As I was reading, I was piling up things I wanted to tell you about the book. Some were mild whiny complaints: I wanted a big fat photo section in the middle; there was a chapter about her dad but not about her mom, and I wanted more about her mom as soon as I read that her mom made barfing sounds when she heard that a former president had personally telephoned her daughter. And there were many praises: the overall balance of show-business and personal, upbringing and current life, jokes and not-jokes; the photos sprinkled through the text; behind-the-scenes peeks; the extremely funny and also extremely touching mother’s prayer thing.

But ALL THAT got puffed right out of my head by her final chapter, which ASKED ADVICE about what she should do with her “final five minutes.” That is, she’s over 40 and she has a 5-year-old TV show: should she try for another baby (giving up the show that might not go on much longer anyway) or should she continue work on the show (giving up on another child).

Well! I would be HAPPY to give input! I would never ever have given an opinion on it unless I were asked (Ha ha! total lie. But I might not have actually titled a post as if it were a topic for general discussion, if she hadn’t asked for general discussion on the topic). My opinion is that she should have another baby. I have no idea if she’s a good mother; I have no idea if another baby will push her past her personal brink of stress. But I DO know I would like more Tiny Fey genes in the population, and I am willing to risk her sanity to get them.

Also, I think the situation she sets up (baby OR show) is not quite the way she’s agitating about it. Sometimes on the baby name blog, we get a question from someone who is losing her mind with panic: NO NAME works, not one single name! But it turns out that most of the problem is that the parents have set things up impossibly: they’re requiring that the name meet two or more incompatible standards. And the standards are totally self-imposed and unnecessary—and often unrealistic (for example, their tastes are 100% Top 50 names, but they arbitrarily insist on a name outside the Top 500).

Where was I? Oh, yes. So when Tiny Fey says that she can’t have a baby because the show would have to be canceled and 200 people who count on her would be out of work, I wonder if that is entirely the case, or if that is Panic Talk. It MIGHT be the case! It might VERY WELL be the case that if she has a baby, even if she does Worker In A Field maternity leave, the show will be canceled.

But in these dilemmas I think it can be useful to consider how things would go if her estimated absence were involuntary rather than voluntary. If, for example, she were in a car accident and were forced to spend, say, one month in heavy, three-quarters-comatose, totally-not-working-at-all-not-even-to-answer-a-quick-question recovery—would the entire show actually be CANCELED? just, on the spot? She’s the most crucial member on the entire thing, but would they be literally unable to find a way to coast for a month? My guess is no, they could find a way. I don’t know what that way would be, because I have zero experience with that industry, but…timing it for a part of the year they’re not working so much, if such a part exists? making shows ahead? skipping a couple of shows and doing re-runs those weeks with an awwwww-inspiring photo of the newborn reason for it? having a few famous guest directors/writers and making a big deal of it like it’s fun to see how someone else would run things, which it in fact would be? doing a couple of crappy shows and just living with that because it’ll be back to normal soon? doing amusingly crappy shows where the actors keep stalling out and then saying funny things about how they can’t function without Liz and how without her they feel like they can’t even talk and don’t even know where to stand in a room? getting Amy Poehler to sub and have everyone just call her Liz and act natural about it?

And she did two movies while also doing the show. So it seems like there is some wiggle-room for doing activities in addition to her 30 Rock duties, and that it’s not “If one more thing is added, the show is gone.”

Besides, as she points out, it’s pretty rare for a show to last longer than five years. The worst-case scenario here, I think, is that she’d give up on the idea of a baby, and then the show would have one more season—ending right around the time the baby would have been born, but now the ovaries have shut up shop.

So that is my input: go with having the baby, if it is not already too late; take the Field Worker maternity leave; hire the second babysitter; make the problem of “but what about the show?” a group problem (as it would be if there had been a car accident) rather than a personal “Everyone is counting on me” problem. This is a pretty smart group of people she’s working with, and my guess is that they have solved many problems well together on other occasions.

UNLESS: deep down she doesn’t really want another baby, but needs a solid reason in order to (1) put her mind at rest and (2) get everyone off her back about it. In which case, I say don’t have another baby, because if she did, the entire television show would have to be canceled, and none of those 200 people would ever find work in the industry again. Maybe this hypothetical second baby wouldn’t have children anyway, removing the issue about genes lasting longer than a television show: perhaps he/she will ALSO be too crucial to a television show to take time off to have children. It’s important for the good of the many (the aforementioned 200, plus TV viewers) to outweigh the good of the few (Tiny Fey, her family, and those positively affected by the genes later on), and this resolves the dilemma.

It troubles my mind that sapphires and rubies are different colors of the same gem. “Pink sapphires” could just as well be called pink rubies—and why aren’t they? It makes more sense. We don’t call the light blue stones “blue rubies.”

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So, when you have people who put out autobiographies when you’re PRETTY SURE they’re personally unable to successfully clack two words together, but then there’s no “as told to” or other credit—I guess this means there is such a thing as a totally on purpose uncredited writer. In fact (*two neurons clacking together*), I guess that’s what “ghostwriter” MEANS. That seems like it might be kind of…unsatisfying, as jobs go.

It shouldn’t surprise me that such a job exists: manuals don’t usually have authors on them, and yet we know someone wrote them. Advertising copy doesn’t have an author’s name on it, either. But…in those cases, we know someone wrote it, but we don’t know WHO. In the case of a celebrity autobiographer, we know someone wrote it, and the celebrity takes the credit—and no doubt goes around claiming to be a published author.

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Dieting tricks I keep expecting to see developed for mass use:

1. Temporary taste-bud numbing

2. More stuff like that berry that makes everything taste sweet

3. Something that messes with the thing that makes us feel hungry

4. Parasites

The children are in the kind of mood where they think it’s worthwhile to have the argument that another child can’t claim to be doing “nothing” when that child is in fact breathing, and also their heart is beating, and also their hair is growing, and also they’re blinking, so obviously they must be a TOTAL IDIOT to claim to be doing nothing. I’d been sipping a diet Coke, and I added a slug of vodka to it. Just slugged it RIGHT IN.

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This might be the only time in my life I see this, so I am making note. First, you have to imagine a woman in her late 60s, with sensible glasses and a conservative grey haircut of the sort I would have called a “mom haircut” except that since it’s usually OUR moms we mean, I suppose it’s actually a “grandma haircut.” (But not OUR grandmas. Unless your grandma is in her late 60s. You know, maybe referring to things with labels that apply to more than one generation is too confusing.) Picture her wearing an Alfred Dunner set: elastic-waist wrinkle-free pastel trousers with coordinated short-sleeved seersucker button-down collared shirt with a subtle pastel stripe that includes the same pastel of the trousers.

Got her in your mind? Now imagine her on a tough-looking motorcycle. Not wearing a helmet. Cruising along. Chin held level. Nothing in her face to show she admits this is out of the ordinary.

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Is your Nice Things We Do For Other People list a little SPARSE? Perhaps they asked you not to donate blood again after you fainted six times in a row, and the place you’d like to volunteer isn’t something you can do while the children are still small, and things are a little tight for donating money right now, and so on? I have AN IDEA. And what makes this a Great Idea is that it is (1) something that takes almost zero effort, which is nice if you are feeling like if ONE more person asks you for ONE more thing you are going to rip off your clothes and go shrieking down the railroad tracks, but (2) genuinely helpful in its own modest way, and (3) you might be doing it ALREADY for other reasons, but now you can feel Cheerful Community Member about it.

The idea is: bring in a cart with you from the parking lot. Take it from the corral, or better yet get one that someone left in/near a parking space. You need a cart anyway, and this means your Net Cart Effect is zero or better (you take one in with you; you take it back out and leave it properly in the corral) rather than -1 (you walk in; you take a cart out with you; somebody has to go out in the nasty heat/slush and get that cart and bring it back into the store). (Speaking of which: this idea doesn’t work in circumstances when all the outside carts are scorching hot or covered in snow/ice or dripping with rain. Yick.)

Plus, it’s handy to get the cart early: you can put your purse and/or reusable bags and/or small children in it at the earliest possible moment (these are the reasons you might already have been participating, without realizing you were being a Cheerful Helpy Citizen), and you don’t have to get in the way and/or wait for people to get out of your way at the in-store cart area. Plus, as my mom points out, a cart that has been used for an entire shopping trip is less likely to be a bum cart. [Clarification: by “bum cart,” I mean one that squeaks or has stiff wheels or has a wheel that pulls to one side so you’re constantly fighting it.]

So! Since high school, I have been considering Getting A Tattoo. The problem with this is that I remember clearly the tattoo I would have gotten if I’d gotten one in high school: a Winnie the Pooh. On my ankle. I KNOW. I’d recently won a speech contest by doing a Winnie the Pooh story monologue, and it would have been Classic Pooh rather than Disney Pooh, but whatever.

This has made me very, very uncertain about EVER getting a tattoo, because that was ME at 16, and so perhaps “Me at 50” will be looking back at “Me in My Mid-Thirties” and thinking “OMG, Winnie the Pooh would have been WAY BETTER.”

Here are the things I think are important:

1. It has to be something I will identify with FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE. Winnie the Pooh = no. My children = yes. Paul = not necessarily. (If he were to cheat on me and then leave me for someone else, I would not be happy to have him permanently on my skin.)

2. It needs to be in that Perfect Location of hideable + showable. That is, I need to be able to easily hide it if I want to, and I’d like to be able to fairly easily show it if I want to—even to a casual acquaintance who has not plied me with drinks. Upper arm? Shoulder blade? Ankle? I’ve heard ankles are Very Owie.

What I’m currently considering is a fox. (My current favorite is here: fox saying “WHAT.”) We found out awhile back that my family-of-origin surname is fox-based, and ever since then I’ve found I have an increased affection for fox-related merchandise. Plus, foxes are cute. I’m thinking of this for the upper arm.

Second possibility: children’s names and birthdates. But perhaps you have noticed that I have a lot of children. That is a lot of real estate to consider, location-wise. And there is the font to endlessly dither over consider. So I think that would be a nice SECOND tattoo, probably shoulder-blade area. Except then I can’t see it. But I’m not sure where else to put it. Make them small and put them on the OTHER upper arm, maybe.

And then there is the TIMING to think of. It would be pleasing to get it for a Milestone Birthday, but I’m too far from both 35 and 40. And I can’t think of any other milestones. So then…a random Tuesday?

What I think I like BEST about tattoos is tattoo STORIES. So if you have a tattoo, would you be willing to tell me any of the following things:

• what it is
• how/why you chose it
• where it is
• how/why you chose the location
• whether there was any significance to the timing
• how long it’s been since you got it and how you feel about it now
• what you’re glad you considered
• what you wish you’d considered

And could you also try to tell me how much it hurt? and whether I’d be allowed to bring a flask?