Tattoos

Go read this article about tattoos and youth culture.

Overall, author Paul Robertson ends on a positive note:

Next time you see a young person with a tattoo, why not ask them to share the story behind it? You might be amazed at what you hear… and be better off for it.

Now back to the beginning. There were a couple fundamentalist red flags that went up as I was reading it the first time.

Every generation has had a mark that distinguished it from previous cohorts. [...] So what is left to make this generation unique when they are looked back on by history? They will be the generation remembered for creating the most personal form of media there is-a permanent story painted on young bodies.

What? Creating? I can’t believe he just said that. Popularizing? Maybe. Creating? C’mon…

And the abundance of tattooing will be this generation’s primary distinguishing characteristic? No doubt it’s on the rise, but is it the defining trend among today’s youth? I sense that what’s going on is that Robertson knows that it’s vital for the older generation to meet the youth where they’re at, and that’s why he recommends trying to engage the stories behind the tattoos. But he has a little bit of reactionary thought that creeps through. The author writes the article with the tone of one who has come (is coming) around, as one who maybe wasn’t quite so tattoo-tolerant in the past. So it would make sense, and it’s forgivable, that a little bit of that reactionist past pokes through.

Another quote:

Many of today’s youth will look back on this decade and remember it, not with fondness, but hesitation as they recall their struggles to simply survive. They will remember words such as divorce, separation, fatherlessness, abandonment, abuse and blended families. In many ways they are a generation who lost their most special place in that thing called family.

“Struggles to simply survive” … makes high school sound almost post-apocalyptic. It’s true that the family unit has diminished in value, and that such a change no doubt affects the quality of life for today’s youth. But is it a survival situation? I don’t know. Again, did maybe a little overstatement sneak in?

Tags vs. Categories

Recently WordPress has added tags as an option for classifying posts. If you check my “Post Categories” dropdown menu over there on the right-hand sidebar, you’ll see a pretty long list. Basically I’ve been using categories as tags. Click here for a pretty good introductory FAQ on the supposed differences between tags and categories.

I’d like to take advantage of the WP folks’ efforts (i.e. have accurate tags and categories). But it seems like it will be quite a long process to go back and remove unnecessary categories from posts and then re-apply those words as tags. Maybe I’ll just delete categories that really shouldn’t be categories, and then try to tag appropriately from here on out… who knows…

I can see most of my categories being appropriate as tags, but surely some of them would be more appropriate if kept as categories. That’s what I’m having trouble seeing… Anyone else spent much time thinking about this issue?

And if you’ve got a ton of spare time:

• Which categories from my current list would you suggest I retain as categories?
• Which ones would have a better fit as tags?
• How would you categorize this post, for example? And how would you tag it?