Rabbit, Run

So I have this tattoo on my right upper arm. I got it back in the summer of 2003. At the time I had moved back home with my parents, was single, unsuccessfully looking for a teaching job, waiting tables part-time, and staying up until 3 in the morning on an average weekday. What better way to celebrate these great achievements then by rewarding myself with a tattoo.

The tattoo is this logo thing that I carefully designed using my initials, which for better or worst just happen to be B.S. The tattoo itself is blotchy; it's not as filled in as it could be. That's because the day I got it I had the bright idea that to lessen the pain normally associated with getting a tattoo I would take a few shots of rum. However, alcohol causes your blood to thin, so as the needle is going in and out of your arm, you bleed more, making it harder to ensure that the intended area is covered. So I ended up with a less than stellar tattoo.

But at the time I convinced myself that regardless of its appearance this tattoo was more than just ink strategically placed under the skin, it was a statement, a statement of uniqueness, like a trademarked symbol. Think The Artist Formerly Known As Prince. It's completely ridiculous thinking behind this completely ego-centered image, that I will wear for the rest of my life.

It's not that I'm now against tattoos, it's just that tattoos on me don't seem right. Like going to McDonald's and finding salmon tar-tar on the value menu, ink on me is confusing, humorous, and more than slightly disturbing.

As time has past I've come to confess the errors made in many of my choices. Like when my 2 year old son asks me why I have a sticker on my arm, I admit to myself that this tattoo was a mistake. I regret getting it. People say you shouldn't regret things in life. I don't understand that. Having regrets doesn't mean you didn't learn something valuable, it just means you identify your wrong doings. Show me someone who has no regrets and I'll show you someone who either has never made a mistake or more likely is too embarrassed/delusional/arrogant to admit them.

I've come realize that I am my worst enemy, and the same probably holds true for most people. No one has lied to you more than yourself. The person who has talked you into making all those horrible decisions is the person you see in the mirror each day. We tend to either trust ourselves way too much (learning to twist our reasoning until anything is justifiable) or not at all (by knowing our flaws and continually use them against us).

The author John Updike died back in January of this year. I had never read any of his work and since this celebrated writer is from the state I call home, Pennsylvania, I felt compelled to read one of his more well-known books. That and Conan O'Brien recommended him in an issue of Entertainment Weekly.

Never have I hated a main character more than I have in Rabbit, Run , so much so that I repeatedly wanted to toss the book aside and it took much longer to read than it should have. The character doesn't know what he wants, only what he wants right at that moment. He's an anti-hero, and his super power would be the ability to justify running away from all the responsibility in his life. At no point did he get any sweet tattoos but his actions and attitudes just happen to be total B.S.

Among The Thugs

When I was in high school there was this propaganda spread around to all the students, that to get into anything close to a good college a student had to take at least 2 years of a foreign language. Maybe it was the guidance counselors who spread this lie, or the language teachers wanting to ensure their services would be in high demand. Nevertheless, my fellow students and I bought into it and were soon choosing our classroom aliases and looking up curse words in the English to foreign language dictionary.

I took Spanish and during my second year I had a fresh out of college, 5 foot small, meek and incredibly kind-hearted woman for a teacher. And we made her life, or at least the class period, miserable. The class was filled with sophomores. Now sophomores are essentially freshmen trying to act like juniors, full of delusional immaturity. What made things even worse is that of the 25 students in the class only 4 were girls. There was so much testosterone in that room it's surprising that the girls didn't sprout whiskers as a result of a contact high.

So needless to say we were beyond jerk status in our treatment of this woman. I remember almost nothing she actually taught, but I do remember how we would rhythmically pound on our desks in the middle of her lesson, how we would steal things off her desks and hold it above her head as she would jump and try to get it like some kind of poodle. On a number of occasions we somehow convinced her to let us listen to the song The Humpy Dance during class, and to celebrate the end of the year we had her show us The Goonies. And again this was Spanish class.

I'm not sure how many times we made her cry during class. It was enough to make us feel bad but not enough to make us stop. Clearly we were complete and utter bastards to this poor woman. But the thing is we weren't bastards by nature. Individually, we weren't troublemakers. We weren't making frequent visits to the principal's office. In fact many of us had never seen the inside of it. However, when we were thrown together in that classroom together we transformed into a pack of incarcerated vikings.

I choose to read Among the Thugs because, A. I read Buford's book Heat some time back and enjoyed it and B. it's about soccer (or I should say football), a sport I'm not any good at but have enjoyed playing ever since I was six years old. I was about 20 pages into this book when I came across an article in the latest issue of Newsweek called "Fifty Books for Our Time", and in a serendipitous moment this obscure, 19 year old book, that I couldn't even find in a book store or libraries, was listed. This was my first hint that this book was more than just soccer.

Among the Thugs is about the author's time spent around soccer hooligans in Europe and analyzes crowd violence. Some even see the book as being insightful in understanding terrorism. Maybe if that Spanish teacher had read it our Digital Underground fueled attacks would have been squashed.