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Weird Things I don't Understand (gross!)
My neighbour's son is a nice kid. He's 17, doesn't smoke, drink, do drugs, or anything else a parent might get nervous about. He gets good grades, will go to a good university (if he can afford it), and he keeps a part-time job AND volunteers at a rest home in town. He's got a nice girlfriend who's kinda freaky-looking (punkish), but she's very polite, and is an honour student, too.
His only vice, if you can call it that, is that he's really into tattoo/piercing culture. Up here, you need a note to get tats/peircing if you're under 18, and his parents are reluctantly happy to give him the permission for each addition as long as they get approval on the artwork before it goes on. They figure that it's his body, and as long as it doesn't get too offensive, no problem (especially as he's otherwise the "ideal son"[img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img].
Anyway, he's got a few tattoos, and a pierced nose, eyebrow and probably other places I don't need to know about. I'm not personally into that scene--managed to dodge the tattoo bullet in my younger days, even in the military. But, hey, I can understand peoples' interest in them. To each his own. But what I'll never understand is this:
I'm talking to this kid today after he helped me pull a stump in my backyard. He says he's getting over a "plating infection". Plating, I soon came to learn, is this: It's performed at a tattoo/piercing salon. A plater makes a small incision in the skin, and slides a shaped piece of surgical steel under the skin. When the skin heals, it takes on the shape of the steel plate which stays underneath it--for life. So, for example, you can get 'devil horns' that appear to grow out of your forehead, or make a forearm tattoo 'three-dimentional'. The latter is what my neighbour's kid was doing, but it got infected and had to be removed. And, as soon as the infection is over, he's planning another attempt in the same place!
OK...I know I'm no teenager, but I'm not that old either, and I had NO IDEA that this kind of weirdness was not only possible, but becomming quite commonplace.
Wow...I got my ears pierced in highschool, and I thought that was cutting edge. The times they are a-changin'!
[addsig]
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