I am currently in Orlando. Yes, Florida. I never thought I’d see the day where I would be on the East Coast, soaking in the summer sun… er, November rain. Our exit off of the plane on Tuesday night was a humid and rainy one, and while there was a brief patch of humid warmth yesterday afternoon, today has been nothing but cold and windy.
I’m surrounded by hundreds of optometrists, proudly displaying their name badges (there’s an exclusive conference going on at this hotel). We’re having a ball with the outfits- at dinner we see the guy in the yellow polo shirt, tucked into khaki shorts, with tennis shoes and socks rolled halfway up to his calf. During the day, all the doctors either have a nice suit or a fancy dress with a classy cardigan.
Strangely enough, they all look the same. The men are either white or Asian. They’re mostly old, and none are attractive. The women are either white or Asian, all between 30 and 40, all plain. The white women have the awkward in-between stage haircut, where they can’t decide if they should just go all fifties perm style, or if they should keep their youthful long locks. The Asian women are just kind of ugly.
I got the last attractive optometrist!
The hotel we’re staying at is beautiful. It has a tennis, volleyball and basketball court, and a hundred acre golf course. There are about five different pools, some indoor, some out, with cascading waterfalls, and spas. The bottom level of the hotel is mainly shops and food (aaah, hotels, place of the $1.60 Krispy Kreme donut). Needless to say, I’ve spent a lot of money that I don’t have while trolling around here.
I’m alone most of the day, as the purpose of this trip was so that el boyfriendo could spend time learning. Much to my chagrin, however, I soon discovered that Orlando could have more aptly been named “The City of No Sidewalks or Free Wi-Fi” rather than “The City Beautiful”. The hotel was very clever, very clever indeed. They shuttle us fools into the city of Orlando, drop us off at a motel, charge us $15/day for wi-fi, so we can’t afford to map our position, and then say, “Sorry, there’s no sidewalks, I think you’ll have to take one of our concierge cars if you want to get to CVS”.
Well, said I, “Fuck that shit!” Bored out of my mind, I decided that it was high time for me to permanently ink myself. So, to spite the corporate greed of the Marriott World Center, I called a cab instead of the concierge car, and asked him to take me to the nearest tattoo studio. It turned out to be exactly fourteen dollars and seventy-five cents away, on a seedy highway. I thanked the cab driver, who was Haitian, and thoroughly delighted to hear that I had two brothers from Port-au-Prince, and handed over some more of my hard earned money, and watched as he drove away. I wished myself luck on figuring out how to get back to the hotel, and wandered into the tattoo shop.
The man that greeted me looked fairly normal, unlike his shop-mate. He only had tattoos up and down his arms, and some on his knuckles. His counterpart had tattoos for eyebrows, piercings to show where his eyebrows should have been, nose plugs, ear plugs, and no remaining visible skin except for his ears. Thankfully, it was the first guy took me back into his little room. I showed him what I wanted done (a word that my boyfriend assures me means “God” in an ancient Tagalog script), and he seemed completely baffled.
“What the hell is this?” he asked.
“Some old Filipino word,” I answered.
The other guy came waltzing by and stopped and studied it for a minute. “It means, ‘I hate Florida’,” he said with a grand air.
Glad he cleared that up for me.
I showed him where I wanted it- centered on my neck. Sadly, he ended up extending it a little bit further, (eliciting a “OH MY GOD, THAT’S BIGGER THAN MINE!” comment from my ever supportive fiancé after I returned to the hotel, but GODDAMNIT I like it!). He said, “Ok, let’s do thi- fuck who keeps talking to me!” (Facebook was open on his laptop.)
Sitting me down, he applied his initial sketch, I said it looked great, and let’s do this shit already. I was getting kind of nervous, and I just wanted to be done with it. He took out his needle gun thing and started it up. As it drilled away behind my ear I realized tattoos don’t really hurt at all. While it didn’t make me want to scream “Oh, yes! OH GOD, GIVE ME MORE!” it certainly didn’t hurt like how people had told me it would (especially since it was on my spine). But while the fear of the pain quickly dissipated, my fear of suddenly sneezing only continued to increase until the tattoo was finished. He had started the procedure with a stern warning of “Whatever you do, DON’T MOVE. I’m resting on you- you move, I move, the tattoo sucks for the rest of your life.”
So there we were, him etching away, and me terrified of accidentally inhaling anything that would make me sneeze. But before I could muster up a sympathetic sneeze, he wiped the last trickle of blood from my neck and said,
“Ok, all done.”
And with that, I was finished.
Here’s a photo for anyone who’s interested:

And yes, I'm aware I have the neck of a giraffe. Ah well.