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cocktailstraw replied to your photoset: What I Did for My Summer Vacation (That Lasted…

Can you tell us about your tattoo? Cool post.

 

The tattoo. Bare with me. This is pretty TL/DR, so let me put a line break in here for those of you who could give a shit.

I’m not sure when I developed an affinity for the ampersand. I haven’t always loved it, but I don’t remember exactly when it came in to favor. It was probably some time in the past 15-ish years since I began writing professionally. To anyone outside of advertising this has to sound ludicrous, but there are two decisions to make when you begin writing for a business. The first: hyphens or periods in the phone number? That choice says a lot about a company’s style. The second: how do you connect things in headlines and other important statements? There are three choices:

1. And
2. +
3. &

Completely ridiculous to spend any amount of thought on that. Except every company has its own voice, and that decision really does have an effect.

At some point, I would guess that I began to contemplate the ampersand outside of my job and those decisions. The ampersand has more presence than any other punctuation mark. It’s a really strong design element. To me, it was aesthetically pleasant. For whatever reason, I found a lot of comfort in it.

I’ve planned out dozens of tattoo designs over the years. I have a few from my college and post-grad era, but I stopped getting them after I was married. Our money had more important uses. Primarily, it was to buy her booze and shoes. Once I left, I started getting itchy again. I’d always wanted to sleeve my right arm and half-sleeve my left. 

The ampersand kept trying to weasel its way into the plan. As a guy with a couple of meaningless, shitty tattoos, it was pretty important that future tattoos meant something to me at the time they were done. That meant I had to figure out whether the ampersand “meant” anything. More specifically, did it mean anything to me? So I did some research.

Here’s the history of the ampersand. In centuries past, efficiency was key. After all, you were constantly dipping a quill in an inkwell. To keep doing that, what you were writing better be important. When someone reached a place in their writing when details were too cumbersome, they’d use the latin phrase “et cetera.” It means: “And other things.” 

Pretty soon, “et cetera” became “etc.” Then the “e” and the “t” got combined in script, and they became “&,” so “etc.” became “&c.” After a time, people dropped the “c.” The ampersand was born. 

“And other things.”

That phrase was perfect for the time period I was (and am) in. I guess most people would call it a “midlife crisis.” I don’t see the crisis in it at all, though. It’s more of a moment of clarity. 

I emerged from a ridiculous divorce to find myself at a point in time when I’m still able to make significant decisions that can better my life and the lives of my two girls. For more than two decades, I walked around in an amorphous existence of drugs, alcohol, shitty relationships and — finally — a fantastically asinine marriage. There’s nothing I can do about that. But I absolutely can mark the time and set a milestone for everything that comes after it.

“And other things.”

I’m also a tightly wound ball of anxiety on many days. I usually wake up fine, but by the end of the day, I’m often a panic attack with a fuse waiting for a flame. Not every day, but enough days. That phrase settles me a bit and lets me know that tomorrow is new. With a little work and a lot of regulated breathing, it can get better when the sun rises again.

“And other things.”

Obviously, I chose not to get an ampersand — the very thing that started this long discussion. Why not? That’s another story. But the phrase “et cetera” (or as it’s come to be Americanized, “etcetera”) was (and is) perfect. So that’s what I chose to put front and center on my left forearm.

That said, there’s a noticeable adjustment made to the word — I dropped the Es and replaced them with 3s. 

There’s not much to offer about this other than to say that the numbers 3, 33 and 333 have followed me for a very long time. I have no idea why. They’re always there. I see 3:33 on a clock at least once a day. (Insomnia often makes it twice.) And they pop up at times that make them feel more significant than any other numbers.

For instance, I got this tattoo on the last Friday I was in Toronto. I took a taxi back to the hotel in time to meet my coworkers and clients just in time for a late dinner. There were eight of us, so we were constantly crawling into two cabs. I was always in charge of paying for one of those. As we dove into the taxis that night (30 minutes after walking out of the tattoo shop), I turn to my colleague in charge of the other cab to see exactly where we were going. She told me we were headed to Blowfish Sushi. The address? 333 Bay Street.

3TC3T3RA. ”And other things.”

There are always other things. What will you make of them?