"Between flattery and panic"

[omnia_mutantur]

We went to a Melissa Ferrick show tonight, which was delightful even if she was especially manic, even for her.  As seems to be my pattern now, when attending Passim concerts with Light, I just took out a notebook and wrote the whole time.   And this is what I wrote (with some minor edits)

 

....

 

 

I'm at a Melissa Ferrick concert and I kind of want to stick around post show and apologize for possibly staring at her during Revels intermission.   She lives in Cambridge now, it's not surprising to think she might have been there.    I had breakfast with her once, another kickstarter reward, she invited me to her AA meeting and gave me her number to text, but I didn't try to explain my aversion to 12-stepping even when I'm assured that a particular meeting isn't all that religious.  (which usually means upon further investigation that the spirituality is more hand-wavy than protestant, which isn't the same thing as areligious at all)   

 

I've been trying to write more letters/cards these days and it mildly paralytic to try to remember what I've already said, it feels dangerous, somehow being my own unreliable narrator is totally par for the course in lj/dw, and something else entirely handwritten.

 

I asked Abundance to read a book so we could talk about it, called How to do Nothing: resisting the attention economy.   I haven't gotten more than 10 minutes in, I suspect I might need to read instead of listen, but it felt important, and felt like it might address this weird uncomfortable balance where I worry that I spend more time curating my TBR list than reading, more time looking for interesting events than actually going to them, more time working to make a community safer that I don’t know how to inhabit than trying to find one that I do.  

 

I really want like seven more ear piercings, I just need to get my ass to Allston to get them (if that piercer is even still there).  I've lost seven piercings over the year, holes closed over and/or become inadvisable.  Eyebrow, tongue, navel, 2 labia, cartilage and tragus.  I miss some more than others.  The cartilage went first, a souvenir back from the days when for $10 I could get a piercing with a piercing pagoda hole punch and a burger at what must have been the world's last in-mall McDonald's one could smoke at.  Maybe it was $20, but I seem to remember a 7.99 one-hole special.  That one got infected and I had to take the earring out and let it heal up.  This was back before I knew I had a nickel allergy, which probably explains a few things. 

 

I don't have a face suited to an eyebrow piercing, it just sort of got lost in the hair/glasses/perpetually unshaped eyebrow.  I don't even remember when it came out, though I suspect it was in the service of looking a little more like a hireale wageslave back in 1998.

 

I actually had my tongue pierced twice (same location, different times).  Once in college, and I accidentally swallowed one of the balls on the barbell and was insufficiently equipped with executive function and sobriety to deal with it before it closed.   I got it repierced years later in Northampton, probably to play into the stereotype of oral fixations and what that said about my proclivities.  Lost it the second time to dental surgery, when what was probably long-ago damage to my front chin (which I know there's a better term for) killed one of my front teeth.

 

Lost the navel piercing to the oophorectomy  (turns out you can have a navel piercing or laparoscopic surgery that goes in through the navel, not both  The labia piercings were also indirect casualties, the friability of my bits not playing well with piercings.  (I shall spare you the graphics, let's just say it was a painful year before I admitted that).  

 

I'm still hoping for an ear tattoo, and I suspect that even though I trend to the left side in non-bilateral body modifications, I think I'll probably get the right tattooed and the left pierced.  I'd love to redo the tragus, get a daith and an orbital some day.  Though it feels like a foolish thing to spend money on at the moment.

 

I wonder a lot about the permeability of my skin, about how it interacts with my perceived lack of value, with feminism, with the age of the first surgery I remember.   

 

I've had seven surgeries that involved general anesthesia, countless more dental procedures that required some sort of conscious sedation and the more things that require the routine local anesthesia.    The first one I remember must have been under local, novocaine I suspect.  It happened some time before we moved from upstate vermont to southern new hampshire the summer after first grade.  I don't remember if it was the upper or lower labial frenulum, I don't have either anymore but one was snipped when I was very, very wee and one was snipped when I was old enough to remember.  

 

For some reason I could see the suction tube suctioning blood away, and while it can't possibly have been true, something about the apparatus looked to child-me like the red and yellow striped McDonald's straw at the time and I realized that something that was inside me wasn't anymore, like the same way when I skinned my knee but on purpose.  I don't think I understood the vascular system or consciously thought of myself as a whole or anything.  I just remember that moment more clearly and more often than anything else from before the age of 8.  (it would take another fifteen or so years before I took up a razor blade to make myself bleed, but that's another story)

 

But I want more holes, and I don't know exactly why.  I don't think it's just that I'm longing for that bright moment of pain, but it might be.  

 

 

 

 

Comments

Piercings

[pygment]

I've been thinking about piercings too but I keloid at the drop of a hat. I've lost 2 genital piercings to that and I miss them. I'd like them back but I don't know how to avoid the problem. I've had to stop wearing earrings as they kept getting infected though I didn't do anything. Sorry to hear about your losses of piercings as well.