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Miami Student > OpEd Page

Siblings serve good purpose

Column: Media Bias

By Steve Markley

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Published: Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Updated: Sunday, February 14, 2010

One of life's small joys is discovering new, inventive ways to piss off your parents. I thought I'd gone through everything: I went to conservative, fratty Miami instead of liberal, female-armpit-hair Oberlin, I stopped checking my grades on Bannerweb a year ago, and I finally got that full-fledged sex-change operation. Thankfully, a brand new opportunity presented itself last week. My impressionable 18 year-old sister, fresh off her high school spring break, came to stay with me for the weekend, and I decided what could be better for some sibling bonding than to get her a tattoo. So my parents are going to kill me. As if they did not have enough problems (like being old and useless to society), they've had to deal with my own body art the past few years. They handled it when I came home with "Thug Life" tattooed on my chest as a freshman but were considerably less enthusiastic the next year when I got the "Playaz Paradise" on the underside of my scrotum. They dealt with it because ruining my already sorry excuse for a life is one thing, while irreversibly scarring my younger sister is another. I felt I owed her, however, because back when we were kids I treated her like a younger brother, constantly punching her in the shoulder to let her know who ran the show and occasionally waiting until she had to go to the bathroom so I could sit on her until she wet herself. Therefore, I felt it was my duty to say I'm sorry all these years later by having her permanently disfigured by a guy named Doug whose passions include stabbing people with needles and pirates. My sister and I used $80 of the $100 my dad gave her upon placing her in my custody (I took the other $20 from her later for beer) for a small design on the small of her back that I probably could have etched on there myself given a needle, a Bic pen and enough tequila. My dad must have some kind of meager psychic powers because he called three times while she was getting it done (or "inked" as we pros call it - unless we're around someone with more than two tattoos, in which case we keep our heads down and pretend like watching The West Wing makes us real gangsta). Some might say, "Why would your parents care so much about a little tattoo?" And they're right. Neither my mother nor father will freak out or start screaming or beat me with socket wrenches like they did when I was young, but that tattoo will bother them. I could have done something uninteresting and un-permanent for my younger sister like load her up on beer and vodka until she vomited or have one of my friends get her pregnant, but where's the constant reminder of my irresponsibility in that? A tattoo, like a sex change, is forever.

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