Even Faeries get moles

In three weeks I turn 30, 21 days left of my 20's. I'm rather excited to be honest, I think the 30's will be good years. I also know that the only alternative to aging is not desirable at all.

I think I am most shocked to realize that 10 years ago today I was an exchange student at the University of California, San Diego. I had not yet changed apartments to get a single room, so I had not yet met a lot of the people I became good friends with in the last 12 weeks of my exchange year. Ten years ago today I was also in the final healing stages of my first tattoo: a crescent moon with roses on my left hip bone. My tattoo is almost old enough to be out of primary school! This faerie is my other tattoo, I got her/it on my lower right back in January 2001, so she's only 9.

I've had a love/indifference relationship with the faerie tattoo. I had carried the pencil sketch for this design in my planner since I was 15, but not long after getting it I discovered a variety of faerie art that impressed me even more, and having it on my back meant I didn't get to admire the artist's work every day like I have with the crescent moon. There is also an unfortunate cult of Tinkerbell fans, women who enjoy the bitchy princess spoilt brat persona, and adopt Tink as their mascot. As I grew up with peter pan, the flower fairies, and mythology involving the wee folk/sidhe, my impression of the Fae is that they are forces of nature, neither kind nor cruel, a symbol of the harsh beauty of nature. Definitely not a squeaky little female sprite who stomps her feet all the time and obsesses over human boys. I've been toying with the idea of expanding her wings, darkening the green, giving her an owl or a raven as a companion, or even choosing a slightly larger design and having her covered over by an acanthus leaf or a William Morris style peacock.

Matt took a closeup photo of the ink work so that I could study it, and decide what I wanted to do, but while cropping it and brightening it up a bit on photoshop I noticed something not part of the original design. An oval mole on her right upper wing (left as we look at her). Of course it's not on her wing, it's on my back, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't there when I got inked. Especially since the outline of her wing is broken at that point.

With my history that means time for a biopsy. I only just had a screening with my dermatologist, but the tattoo does disguise the mole, and she relies heavily on me spotting any changes. I'm waiting to hear back on a biopsy she took from my leg, a tiny but very dark mole we decided to investigate, but I think I'm going to call and make another appointment to show her this offender as soon as possible. I'm sitting here wanting to tear it off myself!

Of course there is a certain amount of self blame for getting tattooed at all, though who knows if I'd have spotted a new pointy mole back there at all if I wasn't studying a photo of my own back for planning purposes. I'm really done with the constant vigilance thing, though I know I don't get to choose, I have to keep an eye out for skin changes for the rest of my life.

Besides all this, I need to submit review board approval of my thesis project, get my Master's committee officially listed (I've got them lined up, but they're not on file), and apply for graduation. Instead I'm scanning through a few years of photos to see if my lower back shows up in any of them, in case I can find an earlier comparison.

Speaking up

Someone on Ravelry has an icon with a picture of David Bowie in Labyrinth... and a joke about rape. I am not usually a letter-of-complaint type, but this is just ridiculous. So I am sending this email to the owner of the icon:

"You may not realize it, but any kind of rape joke, but especially ones involving "you know you liked it" is not cool. Ever. No way, no how. Even if they have a picture of David Bowie. Private joking as a way to process things is very different from publicly displayed comments and icons.

Please consider the high number of women who have lived through rape or sexual assault, and the effect your icon has on an unsuspecting reader having fun on Ravelry, only to be reminded of a deeply unpleasant experience, and the way it is devalued and brushed off every day. "

I'm just sick of it. Sick of random reminders that I am, merely by being a woman, at greater risk of violence, sick of these reminders coming up and slapping me in the face when I am going about my normal day. Sick of movie trailers and television shows that treat sexual violence as some sort of voyeuristic marketing tool. Sick, in particular, of the idea that it's just part of how the world works, something to be taken for granted and worked around, something I just have to learn to deal with.

So this is my awareness activism for the day. Dear fellow knitter: Knock it off with the rape jokes. XTHXBAI.

SPROING!

That is the sound of Spring. It has Sprung. I now have a waltz going around in my head that I learned as part of the School For Girls choir, it's a good waltz, so it's OK. Though I always thought the bit about the violets blooming was inaccurate because there never were a lot of violets around, crocuses and daffodils and a few early flaming parrot tulips. No violets.

Living here I feel as though we go straight into summer, the bright hot sun, with a breeze that varies between a little warm and perfectly cool. I really wish my lab had windows so I could enjoy watching the weather go by.

This coming Monday I have my first exam since early 2001, which was my ill-fated finals in London. This midterm is based on an 18 page terms list with definitions of words related to epidemiology. Some of the definitions are actually contradictory to the text book, a lot of them are inelegantly worded, but I have been told "stick to the version in the list, even if the book says otherwise". I am torn: I don't know if I'm more worried about being able to learn it all by then, or about being marked down for an "incorrect" answer because I find it easier to memorize paraphrased definitions that make more sense to me.

I suppose this is the part of "school" that I find the hardest. Not the learning and understanding of new stuff, it's the flaming hoops of nonsense you have to jump through, the atrociously written homework assignment it takes longer to decipher than to actually answer, and the terms list that someone pulled out of their ass and then didn't even bother to proof read before flinging it at us. Um. Sorry. That was a little disgusting.

I know I will have to deal with more of this, and I know that if I do go through this program, THEN get into the Epi Doctoral program, and end up teaching this class, I will want to rewrite the terms list, and maybe I'll be told it's not allowed, and maybe I won't possibly have the time to, but I really wish academic success were based more on learning and intelligence than on the ability to parrot back a definition exactly as written, even if parroting their exact wording may detract from real understanding of the term or concept.