I’ve been playing around with the idea of a deafness-related tattoo for a while now. Of course the only thing I can really come up with is the ILY handshape - anything else seems like it would be too complicated, although I did know a girl with a finely detailed tattoo of the sign for interpret.

The design I have been working on is pretty basic. I drew up a basic premise and went over it in permanent marker; then I tried to make a color version on the computer but it didn’t come out very well. The blue and green (and maybe purple) should fade out around the edge of the picture, as in the bottom of this space tattoo. The rays should look like crepuscular rays, as seen on this tattoo (but not in green). The style of the heart itself will depend on how the ILY over it comes out, but I would like for it to be kind of 3-D and shaded, a bit like this one.

I am thinking to place this on my upper right arm, up high where it will only peek out from under cap sleeves, for example. And yet I want it to be big enough to be crisp, so the height should be at least the width of my hand, I think. I have no idea how much this would cost or where to go, though I will be stopping by Marlowe Ink tomorrow after work to see how much it would cost to get one of my paw prints fixed up, so I might ask them how much they would charge for that kind of thing. Obviously I’d have to get someone to draw it up proper, though presumably tattoo artists do that all the time, right?

This is all just an idea, the tattoo itself could be months or even years away, or it could never happen. But that’s what’s been knocking around in my head, so I just wanted to get my thoughts down.

• I inadvertently clicked on ModBlog in my feed reader, even though I’m still at work, but I went ahead and looked anyway - the pictures were already downloaded. I’m glad I did, because I noticed that I’m linked to in a post made on the 10th. A bunch of the people I nominated for Bloggies left comments on that post, but Shannon apparently felt it was worth a blog post of its own. The ensuing conversation is a little confusing, though. Some people don’t seem to realize that I am just a nobody, making preliminary nominations. If those nominations weren’t already closed, everybody who reads ModBlog could have run out and nominated it too. I do think it’s a good topical blog, that’s why I nominated it…if I only nominated blogs I thought would win, every category would be full of Dooce.
• I finally woke up for the day around 3:00pm.
• I found a pho place that apparently has vegetarian pho! At least these reviews seem to think so. We used to go to Scent of Saigon which is pretty near home, but one day we went there for dinner and it was a Thai restaurant. Everybody else uses beef broth. We’re going to try out Pho Bac on Monday, though - it’s near A’s work, and she has work on Monday but I don’t, so we’re going to go there for lunch. I also got a recipe for vegan pho from my friend Ryan, who writes VegBlog. If Pho Bac doesn’t pan out, we’ll try making it at home.
• Diet Hot Chocolate Delight: 1 pkt Diet Swiss Miss hot chocolate (made with water) + 3 pkts Splenda + 3/4oz Godiva chocolate liqueur + 1oz Walden Farms chocolate syrup. It wasn’t too bad for about 100 calories. It would be more if you used regular chocolate syrup or non-diet hot chocolate, of course.

I finally rediscovered the link for how to get a free BME t-shirt: you review experiences submitted by website users. They’re not looking for heavy copyediting or anything like that, just verification that the submissions are actually about body modification, that they are not written entirely in netspeak, and so forth. And once you have reviewed 500 experiences - the first level at which you earn anything - you get this t-shirt. Needless to say I am reviewing experiences as fast as I can, which unfortunately is limited by how fast they come in!

Finally! After years and years of looking at BMEzine from the outside - I remember freaking out the first time I saw a genital piercing on there years ago - I finally have a membership! After getting my tattoo in December 1999, I tried to submit the pictures (NSFW) to BMEzine. They were rejected as being too small, even though I felt it was a nice sequence of photos from before, during, and after the process. So since then I’ve just looked from the outside, and I’ve occasionally been frustrated by not having access to the mods of friends who have accounts on the IAM community site.

Last night I figured I’d submit that sequence of tattoo pictures again. I knew they were still too small, and I have the original prints somewhere but I’m not sure where so I can’t re-scan them. (By the way, those pictures are the origin of my 2001 essay entitled Don’t develop your dirty pictures at CVS.) So I resubmitted the little pictures, and got the automated warning that they would probably be too small but were being sent to a human for checking. And then I thought…wait a minute. BMEzine considers corseting a form of body modification; maybe I should submit my corset pictures. So I sent in a couple. Tonight I got the rejection for the tattoo pictures…and then shortly after I got the approval for the corset pictures! What’s funny is that they’re not even very good pictures - the reduction is not especially dramatic - but now that I have access to the full corsetry gallery, I see that there are plenty of pictures in there less “intense” than what I’m doing. But I can see the whole gallery now!

I’m working on my IAM page; fortunately the name “etoile” was still available. I don’t think it’s visible to non-members right now, so I’ll have to figure out if I want to change that setting, and if so, how. Also, my name didn’t get attached to the two photos I’ve submitted, so I will have to ask if there’s a way to do that. Now that I’m logged into IAM it looks like any new pictures would have my name attached, but these initial ones don’t yet. Yay, I’m excited to finally have IAM access and a full BME membership!