I Am In The Pit For Badflower!!! I Am So Hyped!!

I am in the pit for Badflower!!! I am so hyped!!

Oh I have a youtube notification wonder what it could be--

Oh My Chemical Romance -- they -- um -- oh -- new music. New music happened.

Um... It's good... It's really good... I'm...

*Explodes*

So I’ve been thinking I’ll probably do sharpie tatts again for my MCR show next week, and it’s a little soon yet to be drawing the ones I’ll actually have on for the show, but it’s gotten me yearning to draw on myself again, and with all the excitement about Badflower tonight (or last night now I’m posting it, but they open again tonight too), I thought, what if I just... gave myself a Badflower sharpie tattoo. For funsies?

So if you’re unfamiliar with their band logo, it looks like this:

So I started by attempting to draw their signature flower on my wrist. I decided to do it in blue rather than black just because I prefer to have some color in my sharpie tatts, even if they’re monochrome. It didn’t exactly turn out super accurately, but, well... the band’s not called Goodflower now are they? Lol. Then it just worked out that I put their name underneath rather than attempting to go on top of the flower, which would’ve required more planning and less coloring in the center. So then it looked like this:

but I wanted to do a little bit more, and incorporate some lyrics into it too. I started looking through some of the lyrics of my favorite Badflower songs, at which point I remembered, oh yeah, a lot of these are really quite grim, lol; I did come up with a few potential selections, but none of them were Vibing just right. But then I was looking at 30 and I saw “so raise up your glasses to going out of fashion!” and it just clicked into place. I mean, one of the great things about doing sharpie tatts instead of real permanent tattoos is that the things one draws on don’t have to be your only all-time favorite absolute best picks from all possible options; I considered going through more options after that, but I felt good about that line, so I went ahead and added it in. 

It felt energizing and defiant, full of weird-and-proud energy; it also seemed a bit appropriate after the night’s twitter dramas. Of course, I have trouble planning spacing and I’m just freehanding this (all the more reason I’m glad this isn’t a ‘real’ tattoo), so the “to going out of fashion” part wound up on two lines, and my script is kind of funky and hard to read in places, but you know, it’s probably not going to last a full week, and I like it. Actually I fell asleep while writing this earlier and I just woke up at like 5:30 and looked at my arm and went “what the-- oh yeah I did do that,” but this is another good thing about sharpie tattoos, that it’s okay when they just sort of appear on your arm in the morning, lol. The text in a circle around the roughly circular logo also reminds me of the Red Hot Chili Peppers logo, come to think of it, but that’s not a bad thing I suppose. Anyways, I am really quite fond of it, so I wanted to go ahead and show off my pics while it’s fresh. “Raise up your glasses to going out of fashion” indeed! I love Badflower, I love their music, it’s 6am now and I want to get back to sleep and this post is probably messy and in need of editing, but I’m going to go ahead and post about my funky little Badflower tattoo now because it’s weird and I like it. 

Occasionally I check twitter, and occasionally there are interesting things there...

[Image ID: A screenshot of a tweet by Gabe Saporta reading "Pretty stoked about Riot Fest. Any special requests?". The first reply is by kal (bat emoji) @/DecaydanceBats and reads "Snakes on a plane with William. Do it for the gays Gabriel this is our last shot". Gabe Saporta replied "You know I would do anything for you, right?". The first tweet in the exchange is from 4:41 pm on 17 May 22 and the replies are marked 1 hour ago. End ID]

Putting on eyeliner this morning for the My Chemical Romance concert and thinking about how many other fans might also be doing this at the same time; thinking about how many fans have done their eyeliner for a show over the years in the past. Thinking about Gerard doing his own eyeliner. Achieving spiritual union with the MCR fandom through slightly messy eyeliner.

The show I’m currently in with my theatre company opens tonight (I almost missed making my customary opening night eve post, but I think it still counts as long as I do it day of!), but since it’s an original work written by our director, I couldn’t just search up the show on here like I usually do. So, since the show explores themes of home and what it means to be home, to go home, to have a home, and what makes a home, I decided to search up pictures that remind me of the place I still think of as home--the Blue Ridge Mountains. 

I haven’t lived amidst them for nearly a decade now, but there’s still something in me that only settles when I feel the arms of the mountains wrapped around me. I still felt it immediately last summer when we were driving out through Ohio--there’s a point in the state when it passes from flat lands to hills to the edge of the mountains proper, and the embrace of the mountains always feels like a homecoming to me. When we moved while I was in high school, I was sure I’d move back to Virginia as soon as I became an adult, but now I’m 26 and I still live in the Midwest. Most of the people I know back home have moved away; all my closest friends from the street I used to live on are now off in New York or California or Oklahoma seeking their own life dreams, and though I still love the place, it’s harder to return when I no longer know the people. The things that made up my home have been scattered, divided and strewn across the country, leaving me to choose between the places and the people I’ve thought of as home--and often, I choose the easiest thing, staying where I was planted. Home is a difficult thing to find. I don’t mean to get too philosophical and sad; where I am has its own charms, among them the theatre family that sparked this whole post, and there are things I’d miss about here too. 

But when I think of home and what it means to me, I can’t help seeing images like this in my mind’s eye--softly rolling mountains bathed radiant violet in the setting sun’s light, fading to misty periwinkle in the distance beneath pink clouds. If I could stick my face through the screen and breathe that crisp mountain air, take a sniff of those pretty flowers (phlox I think?)--well, my nose would already be deep in the screen, haha. When I mutter wistfully to myself “I miss home”, this is what I’m picturing. I love this gorgeous photo :)

Anyways, we open tonight, and two people dropped out of the show last minute so I’m going to be doing a quick change to a scene that I have only rehearsed with the other actress twice now, so... wish me luck and broken limbs!