WARNING: long post ahead. you might need a snack.

PISCES
Every so often stage illusionists set out to debunk clairvoyants, telepaths and mentalists. Just as Houdini, in his day, took on the table-tapping seance-holders, modern magicians set out to prove that they can bend spoons with sleight of hand. Just because something can be faked, though, we cannot conclude that every manifestation of that phenomenon must be false. There's a sensible explanation for every amazing thing that's happening in your life this weekend... but that doesn't make any of it any less magical.



What's up with all the magic references this week. Weird. I hope by "amazing" he doesn't mean "bad" and by "magical" he means "unicorns."

So we had a bizarre night last night. REALLY BIZARRE. Remember John Byner's Bizarre, the TV show? Anyone? I remember that I was WAY too young to watch it but I did anyway. Where was I? Oh yeah, last night. Jeff and I have been planning on getting tattoos ever since we got our referral for little Kimchi. I'm not getting into detail but they are symbolic to his heritage and are quite meaningful to us so I've been very excited but we just haven't managed to fit it into our schedule. I decided that this week was the week, more specifically Thursday night and thus the plan was made. I've been tattooed and pierced before and I had a specific tattoo shop that I wanted to use and so that's where we headed. We pulled in to the strip mall and Jeff was like "hmmm...it doesn't look open" and I was like "of course it's open, it's a tattoo parlor" but the closer we got the more it seemed something wasn't right. The lights were on but there was no activity so we pulled up to figure out what the deal was. I was sitting there blabbing about how the sign said "open daily at noon" and then Jeff said "what's the date?" and I said the 13th and then he pointed out a homemade sign taped to the door that said "Closing at 7pm on November 13 for art show." WTF?! Seriously? SERIOUSLY? We have waited months to do this and the one night we decide happens to be the one freaking night the tattoo parlor decides to close early. I checked the clock and it was 6:54 so we were screwed. I was so mad because I had psyched myself up for it so I decided we would just head to the other place I've gone to. It wasn't my first choice because the people there aren't exactly super friendly but at this point we didn't have many other viable options so off we went.

We got down to the area where the other place was and it's in a very popular hipster area here and for some reason it was PACKED and it took forever to park and when we did it was far away and it was really windy and cold and I was getting crabby. We made it to the place and went in, armed with the printouts of what we wanted. I went up to the guy and showed him what we wanted to do. He asked me where I wanted it and how big and I told him on my wrist and about 1/4" high. It has taken me MONTHS to make this decision as this is PERMANENT and as I was explaining this to him , some other dude walked up and was like "NO, we can't do that the way you want it. It has to be bigger, like the same size as the printout," and then just stared at me with disdain. I held it up to my wrist and realized this was going to be HUGE so I had a little panic and they were staring, waiting for me to decide what to do which made me more anxious so I diverted to Jeff and said I would have to think about it. When we explained what Jeff wanted, he got assy again and was questioning us in a really jerky way. I FIRMLY told him what the plan was for Jeff again and then they turned their attention back to me, tried to convince me that there was NO way I could have it smaller so I panicked and said "fine, whatever" and signed the papers. I asked him if there was a wait and he said no but then when we gave him the forms back, he was like "take a seat and wait." HUH?

We went and sat down but the nagging feeling in my stomach was NOT going away and the more I thought about it the more pissed and anxious I got. Why wouldn't they just do what I wanted? Their reason was lame, that it would spread, but I've seen intricate designs before that weren't huge so my take is that he didn't want to have to reinvent the wheel and wanted to just copy what I had printed and be done with it. On top of this, they were going to charge us $60 per person for basically a teeny little tattoo with no color, which was also kind of ridiculous. All of this stuff was now swirling around my head and I finally looked at Jeff and said, "we should leave. I don't want to do this here because it isn't what I want and it's permanent and I'm not doing what THEY want me to do and the guy is an ass." Jeff agreed, I went back up to the dude, told him I needed to rethink my plan, said sorry for your trouble and we left. I was so damn mad because I had my heart set on doing this THAT night but I wasn't taking orders from this douche. When we got home I got out my black eyeliner pencil and drew the tattoo on me as they would have done it and it was freaking HUGE and I'm SO glad I didn't go through with it because it was not good. I washed that off and redrew what I wanted so now I am armed with plan B so tonight is round two, at the place we wanted to go all along and if all goes well, I shall go to sleep tonight with some bright shiny new ink.

Okay, so that was the first part of the night. All this rigmarole over the tattoo made me cranky and we got home I was super tired since I have to get up before dawn now so I made my way to bed around 9:45 and Jeff soon followed. I had just fallen asleep when we heard it. BEEP, BEEP, BEEP. We both shot up and Jeff was like "what the hell was that?" and I was like " it sounded like the fire alarm" but it had stopped and we didn't smell smoke or anything so we sat there for a minute until Jeff got up to go investigate. I can't explain why but this noise creeped us out badly. He came back and said he didn't think it was the fire alarm because it only beeped a couple times and then stopped but what was it? We laid back down but I just could not shake this eery feeling it gave me. He was like "that noise freaked me out" and I agreed. We both fell asleep and then and hour later I heard it again. BEEP, BEEEEEEEEP, BEEP. This time I got up because one of my many quirks is severe fire paranoia and I was convinced that there was something burning somewhere in my house. I went to the front of the house and saw nothing, ran downstairs and saw nothing. I heard some commotion outside and looked out the front window and saw an ambulance parked in the middle of the street but there weren't sirens or anything and I was like "what is that doing out there" and then I got REALLY freaked out and ran back to the bedroom. Jeff mumbled something and I told him what was outside and that I heard the noise again but he just rolled over and went back to sleep. A few hours later, BEEEEEEP, BEEEEEP, BEEP, and this time there was no ambulance so I was about to go insane because I could NOT find the source of this noise. Our smoke detectors are hardwired so they all go off or none go off and the one in Kimchi's room is on it's own but if the battery is low it makes an intermittent single beep, not these repeated beeps. It happened two more times throughout the night, I got no sleep and now I am convinced that there is some kind of beeping ghost in my house. That's super.

So, that was our weird night. I'm not sure what kind of cosmic upheaval was going on but hells bells, I hope tonight is better.