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Six or seven years ago, I was involved in this clusterfuck of a documentary project in Baton Rouge -- Andrei Codrescu was teaching a class in documentary filmmaking, which, since this was Andrei, appeared to mean giving MFA students access to video cameras and no oversight.  I imagine there were a lot of gross, fairly awkward stories about poets he'd seen drunk; that was a major component of the poetry workshop I took with him, anyway.  A couple of the students in that class decided their documentary was going to be a "poetry combine," something Andrei had done in New Orleans, where he'd filmed poets who were friends of his going around and doing New Orleans things, and then they'd written poems about it and done a reading.  The students were going to do theirs in Baton Rouge, with local poets, which immediately presented difficulties, since Baton Rouge didn't have nearly the doing-things resources New Orleans did, or local poets to do them -- but our budding auteurs decided to take on the challenge.  They asked me to be in on it, and without getting a lot of details, I said, oh, sure.

Unsurprisingly, with inexperienced students basically making things up as they went along, the process was far from hitch-free.  Things were supposed to start off with an evening at a blues bar downtown, and no one got ahold of me to tell me when (or if) people were getting there.  The next morning, I met everyone at a coffee place, where the directors sprang on us that we were supposed to write collaboratively, which appeared to be news to everyone, not just me, and not news we were thrilled to get, because none of us were experienced with or interested in collaborative writing.  A couple visual artists were involved, and they seemed more into the idea, but the poets all kind of went, uh, yikes.  To this day, I'm not sure I'd even know how to write collaboratively -- Poetry Band is the only creative project I've ever gotten into, and that works partly because we avoid stepping on each others' toes by working in different media.

The day is recorded in a poem in my book, called "the poetry combine: a collaborative documentary" or something.  We stood still in full Louisiana sun and listened very politely while a guy from a second-line jazz band played trombone and talked about jazz, which left me with permanently damaged skin.  My whole right shoulder and arm scarred, all these tiny white dead spots, and ever since, if I get tan at all, you can see them.  (I almost never get tan, and that's part of why -- it looks gross, so I avoid the sun even more than I would otherwise.)  We went to a plantation, stood still in more full Louisiana sun, and listened to an appallingly well-fed white woman who taught folklore at Tulane talk about compair lapin, a character who came over from Africa, where his name, presumably, would not have been in French, and who eventually morphed into Brer Rabbit.  She talked about how nice it was that families had these stories to hold them together through difficult times, like, you know, slavery. 

I'd wanted to go to a plantation since moving to the area, but because I'm an ignorant Yankee, I thought the plantations today would be run by African Americans and they'd be these probably beautiful but grave points of very ugly American history.  No -- in fact, the one we visited, the Laura Plantation, was unusual because they hadn't knocked down the slave cabins, and was considered quite daring and progressive for that.  Most plantation tourism is really about how beautiful these houses are and the "elegance" with which Southern gentry lived before the War of Northern Aggression.  Blithely, our speaker told us that these cabins had in fact been rented by families up into the 1970s.  They were joined together in duplexes, one room per family, each just the size of the cabins I stayed in during Girl Scout camp, although with wood sides instead of canvas ones and a fireplace in the middle between the two of them.  Grievous physical labor and abuse, rape, infanticide, grossly dehumanizing verbal abuse, and trying to live as a family in one room half the size of my current (small!) living room, joined next door to another family in equally horrendous circumstances -- but isn't it nice, how they told such clever stories and those eventually became part of "our" culture?  That's what these cabins are really about.  Right.  It was easily one of the most ideologically upsetting situations I've ever been in.  Our documentarians were kind of excited to have this woman on tape -- because, remember, we were filming -- saying jaw-droppingly tone-deaf things, too.

We may have done some other things -- not sure -- but our last stop was at The Hole Experience, a piercing and tattoo studio out in the sticks where I was going to get a tattoo.  I'd wanted to have iconic-to-me animals put on each foot and the back of each hand, one for each element: turtle for earth, lizard for fire, frog for water, dragonfly for air, and this was a plan I'd had for a while.  All creatures from my rural Missourian childhood.  For the combine, the directors offered to get me the foot tattoos, which sealed my involvement.  Important things this taught me: tattoos should never be free, and they should never be filmed.

The shop where the tattoo artist I'd wanted to do my designs worked turned out not to want us filming inside, which was a shame, but we respected it.  Well, we had to.  One of the students heading this up found another artist out at the edge of town at a studio with the same name -- presumably, they were owned by the same people, but maybe had different managers, because this one was fine with being on film.  The artist was a douche, plain and simple, and although I knew not to get a tattoo designed by a douchebag, I went against my better judgment and told him to go ahead and draw up designs.  I told him I wanted them to just be black, no color, and he immediately got out his book of tribal flash.  No, not tribal, I want them to look like a turtle and a lizard, not like shitty faux-tribal tattoos.  I thought I'd gotten it across to him, but he didn't have designs ready until the day of filming, and -- of course -- when we got out there, tired, sunsick, simultaneously wound up and exhausted, with the pressure that we had to do this whole thing in one day, the designs were stupid beyond stupid.  Chunky tribal-style bullshit. 

I put on the show, like this was the most fun I'd ever had in my life, and although I never saw the footage, I'm sure it came off that way, but I was so not happy from go.  At least I only got the one, but still -- any time you're telling yourself, "maybe it's not so bad," that's not a permanent change you should be willingly making to your body.  By the next day I was already sobbing about it, but there it was.  I think I emailed the students who were doing the video -- may have left voicemail? -- about how upset I was and how much it was likely to cost me to get rid of it, and one wrote me back what I remember as a very cold-fish, obnoxious response.  I've been walking around with this stupid-looking black tribal turtle on one foot ever since.  Other people did poems or drawings or whatever their thing was; there was a reading/show for it, which I believe also got filmed, but I wasn't involved.  No idea what became of the project, although Andrei no doubt gave them an A.

Yesterday, I went in for a laser tattoo removal treatment.  Not that I have nothing better to spend my money on, but this thing has continued to bother and embarrass me for years, and getting a tattoo lasered and, eventually, replaced is more achievable than saving up for the car I probably need.  It stings -- I have a high enough pain tolerance that I've had doctors comment on it, and I'll definitely admit that it hurt.  Very short-term pain, though, and holy macrophages, Batman, but about 12 hours later, when I took the protective gauze off, I could already see a huge difference.  The whole thing got lighter, even that quickly, and patches are already almost completely clear.  I thought I'd take a "before" picture last night, but it was already on its way into "after."  I'm planning to get it lightened enough to be covered over -- two big, gorgeous Betta splendens, one on each foot, chasing each other like the Pisces symbol, with stars, if we can make it work, in the shape of the Pisces constellation with half on each foot.  I have an artist here I want to work with on that, but I have to knock out this mistake of a turtle first.  I now imagine that'll be all of one or two more laser sessions.

This, and I bought myself a really nice pen (Pelikan M400 in white/tortoise) and a pretty nice bathrobe (one of those two-layer microfiber & terry spa-type ones), both things I've wanted for a couple years.  A bracelet and earrings made out of antique typewriter keys, the latter of which I improved markedly by adding a bunch of beads, because god knows nothing is ever quite busy enough for me.  During my exams, I learned that I'm one of these people who shops when she's stressed and I didn't do much of that when I was crunching my hardest on the dissertation, so I guess this is probably blowover from that.  Or it could be that it's Christmas time and I'm buying gifts for myself in lieu of having anyone else to buy them for, or anyone else to buy them for me.  Plus still no interviews, plus still nothing under me like a job I care about or a plan or a life.  Started a crochet project (Interweave's Dahlia shawl; Cherry Tree Hill Supersock merino in Spanish Moss).  Going through revisions but there's no urgency -- I found, for example, that I had several nearly identical pages in two chapters, because I was trying it out in each place and forgot it, and no one said anything about that.  They definitely didn't read it, and it's a fair bet no one ever will.  Meaningless project unless it gets me a teaching job or at least gets read (and honestly, not very meaningful if all it ever does is sit on ETD and occasionally get downloaded by some other clueless grad student).  So: lots of limbo.

I'm even thinking about paying off parking tickets with my next paycheck -- surely a sign of not enough in front of me to do.