New Day #366

One New Thing I've steadfastly avoided this year was getting a tattoo. It just seemed so unoriginal, so mid-life crisisey. Y'know, 'cuz it is. But now that I've managed to go a year without one, it seemed a fitting way to acknowledge the project on its penultimate day.

So I went to my friend (and fellow Jersey boy) Sage to ink me a simple message for which he's ridiculously overqualified.


When Sage started on the top side of my wrist, the prickling sensation confirmed my guess that I would be one of those people who actually liked the feeling of getting tattooed. That is, until he flipped my arm over and started working on the thin skin on the inside of my wrist. Suffice it to say I now understand why it's the place the suicidal choose to slit.

As for the design, we chose a typewriter font--appropriate for a writer--and a message I thought I'd want to see every day for the rest of my life:

hope dream




It'll take a couple of weeks to heal before it looks right, but this gives you the idea.

There are few things I'd consider grafting onto my body, but I can never be reminded too much to hope and dream. I think Steve Rathje, one of the child actors in my play, put it best in the essay that won him the title of the Most Philosophical Fourth Grader in America. (That's right--in all of America.) The contestants were asked which is stronger--fear or hope. Out of the winners from grades 1-12, Steve was the only one who chose hope.

He wrote: "...hope is like running with the wind at your back."

If my wrists were bigger, I would have tattooed that instead.