a) laughing out loud. b) it reminds me of why my mark of Cain is conveniently on my middle finger. "Anyway, I didn’t care much, actually, I could not have cared less, and when anyone asked me about what they assumed to be a burn scar of sorts, I would say it’s a birthmark, which I decided it was, sometimes with a well-timed flip of the bird." https://medium.com/know-thyself-heal-thyself/my-mark-of-cain-de5db04c5249 So far Rebecca Romanelli has informed me that she has the mark. Hers is not on her middle finger--if you want to know where, she mentions it in a comment to my story. Based on your style Julia, I would not at all be surprised if you are marked. In the words of my favorite author Hermann Hesse: “We who bore the mark might well be considered by the rest of the world as strange, even as insane and dangerous. We had awoken, or were awakening, and we were striving for an ever perfect state of wakefulness, whereas the ambition and quest for happiness of the others consisted of linking their opinions, ideals, and duties, their life and happiness, ever more closely with those of the herd. They, too, strove; they, too showed signs of strength and greatness. But as we saw it, whereas we marked men represented Nature’s determination to create something new, individual, and forward-looking, the others lived in the determination to stay the same. For them mankind — which they loved as much as we did — was a fully formed entity that had to be preserved and protected. For us mankind was a distant future toward which we were all journeying, whose aspect no one knew, whose laws weren’t written down anywhere.”