First of all, I got a new contract job (and there was great rejoicing).  Today I'll have the pleasure of quitting my displaced, weird, old job and beginning to prepare myself mentally and physically (where the hell did I put all my office clothes, again?) for the three-month contract that starts on Monday.  What am I going to do AFTER the three-month contract, you ask?  Ha ha - you must be under the mistaken impression that I know what I'm doing with my career.  Silly Internet.

On to other things.  Last night I taught my class at the community college.  One of my students had just gotten a new tattoo (or really, SERIES of tattoos) on her foot.  It looked like dragonflies or really more like regular flies, but I thought it might be rude to point that out.  I told her it is actually illegal in some states to get a tattoo below your ankle - I know, I have one on the inside of my left heel.  That launched a lot of tattoo talk, and so many of my students were so knowledgeable that I ended up polling them by a show of hands to see how many of them had tattoos.  Ready?  Out of fifteen people aged 18 to probably around 50, NINE had at least one tattoo.  If you count me, ten out of sixteen.  We are a Tattooed Nation, people.

I knew we were hopelessly off-track, but the conversation was fascinating.  One guy (the cage-fighter), said his buddy got a tattoo and they used a machine with 36 needles in it to do the shading.  Some students said they regretted the unfortunate placement of their tattoos, now that they were out trying to get jobs and such.  A slight girl mentioned that her friend had a bunch of biblical stuff tattooed on his body, but he wasn't necessarily religious - he just thought it looked cool.  Considering I've been reading John Irving's Until I Find You, in which the main character's mother is a tattooist, I've been thinking about tattoos more lately than I have in years.

The tattoo conversation then lent itself, as tattoo conversations generally do, to a discussion of piercing.  One of the students in the back, a middle-aged father of two who works at Large Corporate Telecom, joined the discussion of tongue piercing by sticking his pierced tongue out.  It turns out it had been pierced for sixteen years. I'd certainly never noticed. He mentioned most of his back teeth were chipped from him playing with it.  Then we discussed how quickly a tongue piercing can grow shut. One student mentioned his had grown shut when he went to jail. 

Next came the belly-button discussion.  One woman, a mother of four, had kept her belly button ring in all throughout her first pregnancy.  When she had her C-section, they took it out, and apparently the hole grew closed before she could get it back in.  Three kids later, she says she'll get it pierced again in a heartbeat as soon as she gets her figure back.

I had to end the conversation and ask the students to please open their books to page 91 when one student then started to carry the piercing conversation into previously uncharted waters.  I do not want to know EVERYWHERE my students are pierced.

Ahem.  Community college - it's not for amateurs.