the tattoo that keeps on giving

Tuesday, oct. 29, 2002   |   0 comments

Oh so the tattoo article I wrote for MSN like five years ago is rotating through their front door again. The way I can tell is I suddenly get all this email from people who really, really want to see a picture of the upper-left quadrant of my torso. Either that, or they’re all:

“Tatoos, like a brand on a cow, tell the world that you’re a low class lowlife. Don’t plan on marrying anyone from Harvard afterwards: he won’t be able to show you to his friends or colleagues, who’ll assume he met you in a truck stop. With a wife like that, you ain’t gonna be ambassador to France anytime soon.”

The thing I’ve always loved about the web is that you can change things. It’s not like print, where once it’s out there, it’s out there. If you spot a typo on your website, you just … fix it. Or if something you wrote suddenly starts to embarrass you or make you feel hangdog remorse (Warning: if you’re the kind of person who needs to be warned when you’re following a link to a site that’s porntastic, well then, WARNING!), you take it down. Or you edit it. Or you write something else that explains how much you’ve evolved since you first wrote the thing (and, by the way, how much HOTTER you are now).

But that tattoo article is just so permanent. (How fitting for a piece on tattooing, am I right? Haha, irony sure does abhor a vacuum!) Even if I wanted to update that article (maybe to say that, no, I don’t regret the tattoo yet, and I’m officially in my thirties now, so all those “you’re going to wish you’d never done it/been born” people could save the email for some other sinner), or make them use an actual photo of me instead of that twenty-nothing tattooed model that I suspect everyone confuses me for, I can’t because I don’t even remotely know anyone working on the editorial staff over at MSN anymore.

But it isn’t the inability to fiddle with the article that’s so weird. It’s that it isn’t dated, so all those people who read it think it’s fresh content, that I just got the tattoo, that the 27 year-old Evany writing style (versus 32 year-old Evany) is who I am today. It’s as though I’ve been frozen in time, somehow, somewhere. I know that what I write online always lives on in the Wayback Machine, but at least it’s clearly dated so people can cut me some slack, even just a small, no-no-please-I’m-on-a-diet-thin slice.

Of course, the only reason all that reader mail manages to reach me is because I’m still at the same job (only I’m managing editor now, which is totally, totally different than senior editor, jesus christ you have no idea), so in one very real way, I am actually stuck in time. Thanks for the reminder, MSN!

In other news, I appear to be sick again, which is just so, so dumb.