This weekend, I scratched a couple of things off my long-term to-do list. I went on a consultation to see about finishing my stargazer tattoo, so I will be in pain next Sunday. This guy’s fast, too. If the artist who started the stargazer and then fled town with my money were to finish it, it would probably take him another three hours. This new artist estimated he can finish it in a half-hour, forty-five minutes. I know he’s fast, because he did a back piece for my sister in three-and-a-half hours a couple of months ago. Apparently he’s been working for 22 years, and his portfolio’s beautiful.

While I was at the shop, I decided to get a new nose ring, to replace the old one I lost in my companion’s old ghetto apartment, the floors of which were covered in gappy Pergo. Other than horrible, debilitating diseases, not much is worse than gappy Pergo, with the possible exception of the young woman I saw in the University District yesterday, rocking a denim miniskirt with shiny brown mid-calf leggings, making her look like some dull variety of stumpy, greasy sausage. If anyone knows this woman, you should probably arrange an intervention immediately. I will come and stand in front of the door while you’re holding it.

Where was I? Damn. I replaced my nose ring and the guy who did the stretching for me gave me a mini-lecture about how I don’t have to take them out, I can just flip up a septum ring and no one will know that it’s there. The hole’s not going anywhere–it’s twelve years old now and will always be open, like my ear holes and tongue hole. He just didn’t get it. Sometimes I just like it to be out, for months at a time. But he’s a lifer, covered in tattoos and earlobes stretched so far he could put soup cans in them. Of course he doesn’t remember the pleasure of feeling invisible.

Before I took a trip to body-modification land, my companion and I decided to go for one of our big walks. We walked through Wallingford to the U-District, with stops at a pet store and for breakfast so Strudel’s nose could thaw out. She seemed to enjoy the fish, and later the wheat toast, the most.

After breakfast we walked around the UW campus, which is absolutely dreamy on Sundays, because it’s so dead. It was so dead, in fact, that a crew was filming a commercial in the Arts Quad for a Giant Local Software company. There was a camera attached to a couple of balloons and many students, who looked real, along with professors, who looked like actors, were made to walk randomly and repeatedly across the paths of the quad.

“Holy crap,” said my companion. “Look, they got everyone in there. African-American guy, pigtailed Asian girl, a white couple….”

“The male and female grey-haired conservative professors,” I added, noticing the woman with a camel coat, briefcase, and low pumps.

We had spent many hours in the quad as graduate students, and I hung out there a lot as an undergrad in the art building. A real scene in the quad would have featured idiots playing Frisbee in the mud, cel phone yammering, people making out under the cherry trees, and students literally bumping into each other. Also, a large number of my professors, especially on the graduate level, wore jeans and obviously dyed their hair.

Still, it was fun to watch the PAs shouting, and this representation of student life was a lot more aesthetically pleasing than the heifer stuffed into shiny brown leggings a few blocks away. Those TV people, they know that.