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The hounds of Baxterville

    1: Of what I could parse from the strange verbiage used In this essay, I think that tattoos are a symbol of individuality and personal history to Baxter. She relates stories of various people throughout history using them as a means of self-identification: Anchors, pirate queens, bleeding hearts all offered something like an I.D. card. For the inked mummies of the Euro-Asian steppe and the bodies of the Iceman and an Egyptian priestess… what did their dots and dashes and their swirling chimerical animals mean to their owners? Perhaps only that they had names, even in death.

    2: Baxter tends to relate her story to people of old, showcasing how tattoos have been important to a lot of people for a long, long time. In a series of two passages I found darkly humorous (At least, I hope she meant it to be humorous), she shares the story of two martyrs who were brutally tortured via use of poetic tattoos: Over the course of two days he had their faces tattooed with twelve lines of his metrically correct although artistically unsuccessful poetry. Only to lead the next paragraph with a casual remark about a minor grievance with her own poetry-based tattoo: There is a comma missing in the poem on my left leg.
    As much as I find the essay to be too indirect with what it's saying, I do quite enjoy that sudden juxtaposition of "horrible torture" to "slight annoyance"

    3: I have... agonized... over this question, and for the life of me I can't think of a person I would quote from to describe my life. I don't even know a lot of quotes. My first thoughts were either The Stupendium or Tom Cardy because I like their songs, but I don't particularly think any of the lyrics fit me. Even when I spread my search to fictional characters, I can't find anything. I would love to be able to use Brian David Gilbert for this, but, unfortunately, I don't think "Because god has cursed me for my hubris, and my work is never finished." describes my life.

    4: To describe myself, I would research comedy, but if I had a choice of what to research, I would research marine biology. As an example: did you know that professional clowns will have their specific "look" painted on an egg for copywrite reasons? All the eggs are kept in the Clown Egg Register, located in England.

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