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Horizontal Eyebrow Piercing

26

Horizontal eyebrow piercing 1

I should start by say­ing that I’ve wanted a pierc­ing since late high school, either an eye­brow pierc­ing or a tongue stud1.

For some rea­son though, I never seri­ously con­sid­ered it. To me, it was like hav­ing chil­dren; one of those things you know you’d want some day, but don’t take it seri­ously. Then last week, I was sit­ting at my desk and ran­domly thought, “Why not?”. So I slept on it, and woke up the next day still want­ing one. That’s when I decided to do it.

My biggest con­cern was that it wouldn’t match me. Some peo­ple with pierc­ings look like they’re try­ing to over­com­pen­sate by being part of a “scene”, or by being younger (i.e. the midlife cri­sis, which my dad seems to be liv­ing out with three pierc­ings last year), or it just doesn’t fit their face. The last thing I wanted to do was get some­thing that screamed atten­tion for the sake of it. Most peo­ple have told me that I’m a far cry from mid-life cri­sis age, but I’ve feel­ing much older lately.

So I fig­ured that I’d rather get it at this age, than when I’m in my fifties like my dad, when it looks ridicu­lous. But as Tiana reminded me, it’s much less per­ma­nent than a tat­too. If I don’t like it, I can just take the pierc­ing out with min­i­mal scar­ring (as long as there are no other complications).

So I decided to get a hor­i­zon­tal, because I find that ver­ti­cals are not really my style (and alto­gether too com­mon for my tastes). The side seemed some­what arbi­trary to me, and I didn’t decide which side until I did my hair one morn­ing and noticed that the part on my hair was on the right, and so it seemed like there was a more open space there for the pierc­ing to fit.

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  1. My work in the den­tal indus­try, how­ever, has made me shy away from get­ting any­thing in the mouth, so that elim­i­nated the only other option for me. [↑]
Date  October 20, 2009
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Categories  Photos

A Letter To The Officer Who Made Me Drive Into A Ditch

2

(If you haven’t seen the pic­ture.)

Maybe we have a few things in com­mon. We were both dri­ving back to the office at the end of the day (me to drop off the cases I had picked up, you to do more paper­work). Both five years at our jobs. Both with­out prior acci­dents. But I’m actu­ally in mar­ket­ing, not deliv­ery, and if it wasn’t for the fact that our so many of our dri­vers had called in sick, I wouldn’t have been on the road at this par­tic­u­lar time on this par­tic­u­lar day.

It was actu­ally a few fac­tors that led to my dri­ving into the dirt shoul­der, and even­tu­ally, set­tling in a ditch fac­ing the wrong way in the grassy median. You drove from the onramp directly into the pass­ing lane — where I was — with­out check­ing your blind spot. Or sig­nal­ing. I didn’t real­ize you were com­ing into my lane and about to hit me until it was too late. I didn’t have time to brake, so I had to drive half onto the shoul­der. As I steered back onto the cement road, it caused a dif­fer­ence in trac­tion between my left and right tires. It made me veer left, and I tried to cor­rect it by steer­ing right. Then the same thing hap­pened in the oppo­site direction.

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Date  July 30, 2009
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Categories  Daily Life

Strip Club Experiences

9

It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a strip club. The co-workers of my first job, along with the pres­i­dent of the com­pany, were the ones took me to my first. They made it a point to “ini­ti­ate” me when they found out I had never been. I still look back on that mem­ory fondly, because I was so young and green, and they wanted to get me over my inexperience.

But it was never some­thing I did with any fre­quency. You always look at those guys, seat­ing by them­selves at the head of the table with a beer in hand, think­ing, “Is this bet­ter than what you have at home?”

After all, strip clubs are never really about the girls. It’s about being out with your friends, when your par­ents think you’re at a movie1. They’re like con­certs. You could sit at home and lis­ten to a CD with stu­dio qual­ity sound, but there’s some­thing dif­fer­ent about the atmos­phere of a live experience.

It’s easy to grow past the appeal of strip­pers though. There’s no per­son­al­ity there. Even Playboy mod­els have likes and dis­likes. The fur­thest a strip club goes is by say­ing, “Here’s Porsche, and she used to be an air­plane attendant”.

Don’t get me wrong; I love the female fig­ure. But there’s no appeal in a stripper.

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  1. Some of them had ring­tones set for their home num­bers, and just the ring would set off a round of teenage spite [↑]
Date  June 1, 2009
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Categories  Random

This City Lets Me Live

2

Boundary Street Balcony — Sunset

I think it was some point between hail­ing a taxi to meet my Uncle Joe, and the com­fort­ing famil­iar­ity of find­ing myself in one of the same malls I was in five years ago, that it really sunk in.

I’m in HONG-FUCKING-KONG.

The con­stant din of traf­fic and peo­ple reminds me of the way New York never sleeps. It pul­sates and breathes, as if it was a body. I won­der how there can be so much life in such a tiny city1. None of my words, pic­tures, or videos could ever do it jus­tice, because it’s the expe­ri­ence that makes it real. The things that can’t be said. Like the way peo­ple treat the elderly. The every day sig­nif­i­cance of food and eat­ing well. The mil­lion sub­tleties of the Chinese culture.

The temp­ta­tion to move here is com­ing on me again, with every street, every sign, every per­son I pass, every day gone by. Maybe the tim­ing is right, where I find myself not only root­less in Ottawa, but with a sense of for­lorn­ness attached to the city as well. I’m begin­ning to won­der; what can I leave behind? What do I want to leave behind?

  1. Half the area of Ottawa, with over seven times the pop­u­la­tion. [↑]
Date  March 14, 2009
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Categories  Photos Random

Residence

7

Ah, res­i­dence. The first year of uni­ver­sity, the first year away from my par­ents, and my first year in Ottawa. Also, the year I was intro­duced to Fear Factory, Dream Theater, and Refused.

I found these old pic­tures while orga­niz­ing my pic­tures folder. Boy, do they take me back.

Headbanging

Take a look at this photo, for exam­ple, where I strapped a pair of khakis to my head, and started head bang­ing to Deftones — Shove It (My Own Summer). Why did I strap a pair of khakis to my head? Cause I didn’t have long hair. Why did Pita and I decide to do this one day? I have no idea.

Dying my hair red

Washing my hair after the dye job

Alicia drying my hair

Or how about these ones, where the girls agreed to give me red chunks, back when I was obvi­ously in my Tool phase. Nadine mis-read the instruc­tions, mixed the wrong chem­i­cals, and it came out all sparse.

Highlights include:

  • Failing Calculus 2 with Dave and Jarod. When we wrote the sup­ple­men­tal exam, it was five peo­ple total in the pro­gram who failed, three of whom were us. I guess I had the wrong study bud­dies. In the end, I was the only one who passed.
  • Most of the guys on the floor get­ting sued for sex­ual harassment.
  • Jarod and Jono’s rave room, lit with a black­light and disco ball, which was some­what famous around campus.
  • Constant con­flict between neigh­bors, me and Pita included, over the vol­ume of music.
  • Going to the gym with Dave, and hav­ing him spot me while I benched the bar. As in, the bar with­out weights. Afterwards, I would spot him while he benched 240. I don’t think I could have helped much.

Pita took these pho­tos, got them printed, and scanned them. Dated ’99. Sure they aren’t great. They’re dark. They’re grainy, taken with a cheap film cam­era. But they’re still unfor­get­table mem­o­ries, and it gives them a cer­tain dated style. Makes me wish I had a taken some pic­tures myself.

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Date  January 5, 2008
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Categories  Photos Random

The Tao Tattoo Experience

8

Part of The Tao Tattoo Series

  1. The Meaning
  2. The Experience
  3. The Background
  4. Tattwo

I decided to get my Tao tat­too about a month before I actu­ally had it done. Choosing an artist wasn’t hard. Tiana, who’s awe­some bro­ken argyle tat­too reminds me of insou­ciant kites against a sky, had hers done by Jay at New Moon. After see­ing some more of his work, which fea­tures finely detailed lines sim­i­lar to what I had in mind, I decided to go with him as well.

The appoint­ment was short. A quick check to make sure the posi­tion­ing close to the wrist joint was accept­able, and to leave a deposit.

The recep­tion­ist asked me, “What does the kanji mean?”.

“Kanji?”. I ques­tioned her assump­tion, and she quickly cor­rected her­self. “Sorry, is it Chinese or Japanese or Korean…?”. I explained the char­ac­ter, and how it’s writ­ten the same way in Chinese and Japanese, the cal­lig­ra­phy being in a Chinese style.

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Date  August 16, 2007
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Categories  Daily Life

HK Fullscreen, Revisited, Again

0

Here I am, try­ing to get another entry down, but there’s a movie play­ing on OMNI.2, one of Canada’s pre­mier multi-cultural chan­nels. Although the pro­gram­ming of OMNI.2 is aimed for 22 dif­fer­ent eth­no­cul­tural groups in 20 dif­fer­ent lan­guages, Saturday nights are always in Cantonese. Almost just as invari­able are the roman­tic come­dies of Hong Kong cin­ema that they broad­cast around this time.

It makes sense of course; stud­ies have shown that by 2017, vis­i­ble minori­ties will top 50% in Toronto and Vancouver, with Chinese peo­ple mak­ing up over 500,000 of that per­cent­age. Add to this the grow­ing fas­ci­na­tion of younger peo­ple with the Asian cul­ture, and recent flicks from Hong Kong are the per­fect way to build a strong mar­ket presence.

Unfortunately, the movies are mostly trite: a col­lec­tion of pre­dictable, sac­cha­rine love sto­ries with lit­tle artis­tic intent, and the one on now is no dif­fer­ent. I have to admit though, as sim­ple as these movies are, they still affect me. When I see the char­ac­ter­is­tic neon build­ing signs, homely food stalls filled with wok hey, and claus­tro­pho­bi­cally busy streets of Hong Kong again, I’m filled with a cer­tain inex­plic­a­ble romanticism.

And I can’t seem to get over it. All I want to do is go to Hong Kong again and share the expe­ri­ence with some­one. An expe­ri­ence that’s heart-racingly poignant, like the ado­les­cent mem­ory of a first date, when you’re build­ing up the courage to hold someone’s hand. Perhaps, like Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita, the mem­ory of my child­hood has frozen some­thing in me. A mem­ory that’s beautiful.

Simply, purely, beautiful.

Date  July 9, 2005
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Categories  Thoughts
Viewing entries tagged with "experiences"   //
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