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My hair is brown.  My hair is free.  My hair has not always been free.  When I was five, I was moved from foster care in Virginia to an orphanage in Washington, D.C.  Immediately, my hair was sheared with an electric clipper.  I was humiliated.  I looked like a boy.  As my humiliation intensified, so did my determination.  One day, my hair would be free.   When I was ten, I was moved to a different home.  My first question-“Will you let my hair be free?”  The answer -“Yes.”   With each passing year, my hair grew about six inches.  By the time I was the tenth grade, my hair was below my waist.  My hair was finally free.  My best friend, Jude, had free hair too.  We would meet at her house to iron our hair before we went to school.  The straighter we ironed our hair, the longer our hair appeared to be.  When Jude got her driver’s license, we started making trips to Georgetown to shop the boutiques.  We bought Mexican peasant tops, embroidered with bright colored flowers.  We bought leather purses, boots, and belts, and silver jewelry.  We were so free.  The last time I saw Jude, her hair was still long, but she wasn’t free.  I cut my hair five years ago.  My daughter cried.  I am still free.

I’ve spent my entire life covered in freckles, from head to toe. When I was younger, my round face resembled the top of a celebratory cupcake, covered in flesh-toned sprinkles. However, as I got older I developed the habit of wearing sunscreen on my face everyday- and gradually,the tiny adolescent specks faded away. Unfortunately, this Coppertone themed remedy did not work for the rest of my freckles. Though I would cover myself with Spf 40 at the pool, or wear long sleeve shirts and jeans on sunny 70 degree days, I could not eradicate the population of freckles on my arms and legs. They were like a band of persistent troops, eager to invade any vacant areas of skin. To date, I’ve probably got thousands of freckles on my arms alone. Some of them I hate, and some of them I’ve become quite attached to. One gathering resembles the Little Dipper constellation, while others form geometric shapes that seem to float across my shoulderblades.  My favorite though, is a trio of freckles that are strangely symmetrical. One is on the left corner of my right hand, another on the left corner of my left foot. A freckle on the left corner of my right knee marks the midsection of the invisible diagonal line they create. I’ve always been strangely fascinated by this symmetrical duo, probably much in the same way that Shelley is fascinated with her scabs and scars. Like her, I’ve also come to embrace the “curiosity” of my natural flaws- and now my freckles aren’t as much of an annoyance as they are just another piece of me.

I can only describe the process of going out and getting my first tattoo as awkward.  I initially wanted it above my right hip bone, but the tattoo artist suggusted that I place it lower, so the tattoo wouldn’t stretch out if I ever would decide to have children in the future.  His reasoning sounded logical to me, so I agreed. To be honest, however, having children was the last thing on my mind at that moment.  I had to unbutton my jeans and expose my underwear, which was a little embarassing. After all, I was showing my underwear to some random guy that I had met just a few moments ago.  He was like a dirty roach moving in on my personal space with every vibration of the needle, although I had no one else to blame but myself. 

It’s funny, because although the process was exposing, the tattoo wouldn’t be visible to anyone else but me, and that’s the way I wanted it. The only thing that mattered was that it held some meaning for me.

Learning to play the guitar is very different depending on which type of guitar you begin with.  Starting with a nylon-stringed classical guitar is preferable, as its strings are softer and its sound somewhat more welcoming to a newcomer.  An electric guitar has a more abrasive voice and a slightly more painful set of strings.  But nothing is worse on the guitar amateur’s virgin fingers than the steel strings of an unbroken-in acoustic guitar.  I remember the first bit of blood to come from my fingertips onto those strings, a piercing pain that felt like the guitar had ripped to the bone but was ultimately a surface wound, something you’d have to deal with again and again.

My eyes are blue. I’ve always been told how striking the shade of my eye color was, ever since I was a little girl. Ever since I was in first grade I’ve worn glasses that have covered up my striking blue eyes. In sixth grade I finally convinced my mother I was mature enough for contacts. I sat in the optomotrist’s office for 2 hours trying to put my contacts in. The concept of touching my eyes and feeling their gooey wetness sent shudders down my spine. I wore contacts over my eyes for eleven years. Every morning and every night I would cleanse my contacts with solution and put them in and take them out. This summer I got lasik eye surgery. I worried that I would finally be able to wake up and see, but I wouldn’t recognize my own striking eyes.

My back is pretty much covered with ink. Days before my birthday about 3 years I ago, I decided to get a tattoo. I didn’t want just any random tattoo with no sense of meaning so I decided to get the one I had been wanting to get since I was in middle school.

On my back is a cross. It extends from the top of my neck straight down my spine and the edges touch the tops of my shoulder blade. It’s not just any cross. Draped on it is a banner that says “Protect me Father for my back is blind.” It took me forever to decide what I wanted it to say, but after a pretty crazy summer, those words just sort of dawned on me as I reminisced about my past.
They say tattoos are addictive – and I can’t say they’re wrong. Months later, I decided to get 2 more. One on each bicep with the initials of my best friend who had passed away and the initials of my nephew whom my sister had a miscarriage with. I plan to get more, but not sure what or when.

Everytime I see someone on crutches or with a cast on their leg, I am thankful that I have strong, healthy legs. Broken or damaged legs remind me of when I was in elementary school. Everyday at recess, my best friend and I would go on the swings. We would pump our legs to get the swing as high as they would go and then jump off. If we landed painlessly, we were disappointed. We wanted a cast and crutches so badly. I have heard how horrible crutches are, so I am now thankful that all of my attempts to break my own legs failed.

I broke my first bone when I was twnety-one years old.  I was in Florida on Spring Break with my girlfriend, and as per the custom of Bike Week in Daytona Beach, we were pickling our livers on the sunny beaches.  After several hours of drinking, and massive increases to my BAC, we were in an Irish Pub with many locals discussing the greatest month in sports, which is March Madness.  The University of North Carolina basketball team is very dear to me, the tarheels are the greatest team ever, and I will defend them with my life.  Well being sloshed out of my mind, a Florida native was quick to bring up winnings consecutive national championships by Florida, and proceeded to speak quite poorly of UNC.  The blasphemous remarks were quick to make me fly off the handle, punches were thrown, and subsequently, bodies were thrown out of the bar.

I woke up the next morning with my hand the size of a large grapefruit, I had broken the fifth digit in my right hand, which they call a boxer’s fracture.  Quite unpleasant.

In the summer, they’re fine and they behave themselves. When the temperature drops, they lose their healthy pink color and turn white. What is this phenomenon called, what is wrong with these toes of mine? I do not recall this happening when I was younger; it is something that only occurred relatively recently. It is much different from your foot falling asleep, there is no tingling but rather a complete loss of tactile sensation; however, the ‘coldness’ still seems to grip the toes as the warm blood is sucked out of them via the capillaries (I believe). What is the fix? Start walking, do something to get the blood flowing once again and to get the pesky little toes back to normal.

What is this called?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raynaud%27s_phenomenon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raynaud_disease

I’ve always had small hands. Soft small hands. People have used them to try to emasculate me, or point out how little work I do and how easy I’ve had it in life. This is likely why I decided the scar, whose origin is a mystery to me, on my index knuckle of my right hand would be known as a fight scar. Throughout much of my early high school life, I would tell people that noticed it that I had split my knuckle on the forehead of a bully pushing around my girlfriend. Not only had I never been in a fight, I had never had a girlfriend. It was an odd defense mechanism, but I wasn’t content with having a scar, and not having a cool story to go with it. Otherwise, it would simply have been an abomination of my flesh, and that was useless to me.

I still get some phantom pains on occasion. Comes with the territory, I guess. After all, nine plus years of year-round competitive swimming will really wear your arms out. My shoulders just don’t function like they once did. Looking back, I’m not sure which I burned out first, my mind or my body.

Anyway, I remember the one moment when I knew my right arm would never be the same. I arrived at practice and coach informed us that our session today would be an all-butterfly one. That’s the stroke where you move your arms in a curved motion above your head. After about 75 minutes of this, my right arm just had this shooting pain moving down from my shoulder to the tips of my fingers. I knew my body well enough to know that something was seriously wrong and pulled myself out of the next set to talk to the coach. He told me to stretch it out, but it was no go. I was done for the day. I visited the family doctor the next day when I couldn’t get my arm to reach above my head. I must have looked odd with my khaki pants matched with only an undershirt. He ran some range of motion tests and it was determined I had a torn rotator cuff. Splendid. Two surgeries later, I was back in the pool, finishing out what would prove to be my last year of competitive swimming.

I went back and forth on my feeling for the Bomar Gene. As I interacted with it I for the most part liked it a lot. I found the stories to be very interesting and fun to read. They reminded me of things like Unsolved Mysteries and Ripley’s believe it or not.But as much enjoyment that I got from the readings I got almost the exact opposite emotion from the games that supposedly correlated with them. I wanted so badly for the games to give the stories more meaning or to add something more to them. But the more I played with them I only found myself getting frustrated with them.
It wasn’t till our class discussion that I felt like I got something from Jason Nelson’s piece. As we all talked about it and what we thought of it, I began to rack my brain and came up with a conclusion that I was satisfied with. Most of the stories in the “Bomar Gene” hint that these characters had an almost superpower, an ability to do something no one else could because of a certain gene. This got me thinking that maybe we all have a special gene. It may not be as distinctive as the ones Nelson plays with but maybe it’s something as small as the impression we get from his work. Maybe we have a certain gene that will change the way we look at the “Bomar Gene” or interact with it. It just got me thinking of how everyone is different and everyone’s opinions of things can be different and maybe it can be correlated to our genes. This concept also got me thinking back to Michael Joyce’s afternoon and his idea on matching minds. Most of these hypertexts we interact with are hard to explain to say the least. You could spend hours interacting with them and never come to the conclusion the creator originally aimed for. But I feel like that’s ok. I feel like the creators put this art out at a halfway mark between them and you. It is then our job to meet them halfway. We do this by interacting with their work and attempting to get some message, meaning or life lesson from it. I think that as long as we take something from their work, whatever it maybe, that as artist they have succeeded. And I think everyone, creators, and interactors can be content with that.

I thought that this was a rather interesting way to compose a memoir, or at least I think that was the purpose of the piece. It seemed like each listed body part had it’s own little story for her to share with the reader and the accompanying artwork really drove him the whole “oh, that’s what we were talking about” idea. I wasn’t quite sure if I’d be able to get to every single part at first, but when I found that there were links within each page to other parts of the body, it actually ended up going by quite fast. An odd dynamic that I stumbled upon was the fact that a few pages like “shoulders” were divided into two paragraphs that each had their own distinctive and unique tone. The first paragraph would be a straightforward story while the second paragraph would deal with things like “mutilation” and self-exploration.

I also found the cabinet page to be of note. It serves almost as an author’s message and tells you that there are some hidden parts to the story, some that you may never find even if you’re looking for them. I was reminded of the interactive fiction unit that we did; the idea that I have to explore the world that the author created and that I wasn’t exactly going to be helped every step of the way. I was on my own if I wanted to explore her memoir.