Knots Untied

The Halloween weekend brought three undoings with it.   

A few weeks ago, I bought some blue dichroic glass earrings.  They sit closer to my earlobe than my original green zircon studs, are less pokey than my silver star earrings, and less dangly than my crescent earrings.  And they flash between sapphire and cobalt.  

I have a tendency to fiddle with whatever earrings I'm wearing; Saturday night, I reached up and discovered that the blue glass sphere on my right earring had fallen off of the post.  (At first, I thought the glass had been partially pulled through my earlobe.) Presumably, it's somewhere in the house.  

Later, I was eating a power bar in preparation of going out dancing with Mark—it doesn't do to have a carb crash thirty minutes into the night. I regularly consume a power bar about an hour before working out to keep from fading out during exercise sets.  After three high-protein bites, the sticky mass of the power bar lifted a crown off of my lower back molar. Luckily, I didn't swallow the crown and my tooth wasn't causing any pain.  (Although at first I wasn't sure if my molar was topped with tooth decay or decades' old dental adhesive.  Thankfully, it was failed adhesive, and the dentist glued the crown back on Monday.) 

Mark and I went dancing anyway and got back home shortly after midnight and before the change to standard time.  

Sunday, I slept late, and had a lazy morning in the bath reading The Two Towers.  I wondered what the third thing to come undone would be.  Would it be something connected to my elderly parents?  Would a button pull away from a dress shirt?  Would it be another inconvenient loss?  Would one of my unicorn socks develop a hole?  Would it be a sudden memento mori punchline?  

I wouldn't discover until I found a parking citation (for nine times the cost of a daily permit) on my car Tuesday.  I typically order parking permits Sunday—it's apparently a universal law that university parking is complicated and a pain.  Somehow I missed reminders on various devices and failed to order a parking permit Sunday (and Monday) morning for Tuesday (and Wednesday).  

An earring, a crown, and a permit undone on Autumn's cross-quarter.  It sounds like a nursery rhyme or fairy tale.  Fingers crossed for a happily ever after ending.

New Accessories!

As an early 60th birthday present to myself, I’ve just had my ears pierced. Both. Apparently men just getting one ear pierced on “the gay side” is so 1985. I now have two sparkly, dark green training posts in the center of my earlobes. I’d like to think that they’re topped with emeralds, but I’m pretty sure they’re green zircons or something.

If I don’t think about them, I don’t notice that there’s some metal lodged in my earlobes. When I do focus my awareness, I can feel a slight pinch where I’m supposing the swollen flesh is pressing against the posts. I will conjecture that my body will attempt to reject the titanium implant for a week or so and then line the hole with a layer of skin. Or scar tissue. Or something. In any case, I’m suppose to rinse the holes in my earlobes with saline daily.

These are my first—and most likely only—piercings, and I’m not going to be forcing increasingly larger posts into my lobes. I held off on getting any kind of body modification because dealing with my contact lenses and hair and beard can be time consuming and it seemed easier to have one less thing to maintain. But I figured an ear piercing is another way to accessorize! So why not start now. I aspire to have a dangling Vermeer Pearl after my three month break-in period is over. And pirate hoops. And a small pink triangle of quartz.

I think most of the time I’ll have simple chrome studs or something subtle. But I do look forward to sitting down before a mirror and saying, “Bring me my studs of lapis lazuli!” or “I shall wear onyx today!” or “Adorn me with auroras set in crystal!”

And then my very long hair will fall down and cover my ears and wearing earrings will be my little secret until I tie my hair back or the wind exposes me.