Dear Amritsar,
Recently, I decided to give in to social pressure (which had reached 35 pounds per square party full of friends at sea level in the Community room temperature room) and get a tattoo. Because I'm not able to save a lot of money from my job at the tobacco ash repackaging plant, I decided to keep the design simple: a snake eating a lion with wings getting a thorn taken out of its paw by a puppet mouse whose strings were being controlled by Al Gore. (Don't think this is simple? You should have seen the design I originally wanted to get! It's a shame I had to leave out the eleven-dimensional lobster gods and Marlon Brando as a nun on roller skates, but, in these times of diminished expectations, we all have to make sacrifices.
Anyhow, when I - sorry. I meant: .)
Anyhow, when I went to Ink on the Brink to get my tattoo done, they were having a 95% off sale on nanotats. Have you heard of them? The ink is made of nanobots that can be programmed to move on your skin. Grinning skulls actually wink at you. Dice roll. Flowers bloom, wither, die, become compost, bud and bloom again. I wasn't sure I wanted the whole circle of life right there on my chest, but the nanotat was actually cheaper than plain ink, so I decided to go for it.
At first, Olivier - that would be Olivier Oyl-Derek, my boyfriend - was fascinated by my tattoo. The snake masticated. The lion roared. Al Gore...was Al Gore. Olivier would trace the outline of the tattoo on my chest, then jump back a little when something under his finger moved. It was almost endearing.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that Olivier was...less ardent in his lovemaking than he used to be. In fact, he couldn't seem to get it over with it fast enough (and, it's not like he spent a lot of time on it to begin with!) At first, when I - sorry. I meant: !). Ever since a wall shelf collapsed on me when I was four, I've had issues with brackets. At first, when I asked him what was wrong, he denied it completely. Then, when I confronted him with the time and motion study that proved conclusively that something was wrong...in bed, he just muttered: “The lion. It...it's looking right at me!”
Clearly, this cannot last. A girl has...needs. Needs that cannot be fulfilled by chocolate. Well, not on its own, anyway. Not always. I'm sure that the situation is frustrating for everybody (except, perhaps, the snake). That's right: ).
Clearly, I'm going to have to get rid of either the tattoo or my boyfriend, but which should I choose? And, why have I started hearing somebody whispering “He's a loser - you're better off without him?
Maisey Day Floop
Hey, Babe,
You'll have to get rid of your boyfriend. You won't be able to get rid of the tattoo.
As you may have read in the latest issue of the journal Dermatologists Get Under My Skin, nanotats have developed a survival instinct. When a skin doctor starts to remove them, they move to a different part of a person's body. When the doctor moves to remove them in their new position, they move somewhere else. It's like a bad physical comedy routine, except with laser scalpels.
Katz, Kuntz, Dressler and Marty-Graw, in the Canadian Journal of Epidermiology Eh, have suggested using a mild electric current to disrupt communications between the nanobots in the tattoo, giving a doctor the opportunity to remove them unimpeded. Unfortunately, the researchers do not know what the right amount of electricity would be since, to date, nobody has wanted to get their tattoo removed badly enough to allow themselves to be subjected to an untested electroshock treatment.
For all the distrust of science in the world, we may as well be living in the dark ages.
As for the voice telling you to dump your boyfriend? Katz and Dressler believe that the nanotats have learned a way to stimulate the hearing centres of the human brain, allowing them to communicate with their hosts. Kuntz argues that more research needs to be done before such a thing can be stated conclusively. And, Marty-Graw is beginning to have second thoughts about the nanotat of Albert Einstein eating a taco that she got on her left buttock.
Send your relationship problems to the Alternate Reality News Service's sex, love and technology columnist at questions@lespagesauxfolles.ca. Amritsar Al-Falloudjianapour is not a trained therapist, but she does know a lot of stuff. AMRITSAR SAYS: remember when life was simple? Neither do I...