The Apprenticeship: A Hole History

Call me crazy… (crazy)…Hey!  Well, like I was saying, call me crazy, but I am starting a self-apprenticeship.  This term doesn’t really make sense, I don’t think.  I’m not even sure it is proper, and I’m only talking about semantics.  I’m also not sure my apprenticeship itself is proper, because it isn’t a proper apprenticeship.  I remain, however, a self taught woman.  I am schooled, yes, but most of the things I deal with in my business and most of my skills or talents have been self taught.  I seem to work better that way.  The hermit learns better alone, go figure! 

What are you TALKING about, you say?  Lend me your ears, friends, or perhaps, just your lobes, for I am embarking on a journey.  I debated chronicling it, but then decided, eh, what the hell.  My blog is I, I am my blog.  I like to document my progress with everything.  I like to see progress.  I like to see where I need to improve or note things of importance.  Perhaps it is my fear of my encroaching senility?  GET TO THE POINT!  Alright!  I am taking up body piercing.  There, I said it.  Crazy, right?  Here’s the back history.

When I was a teenager, at the tender age of 14, or 15, I can’t quite remember, I was VERY into Green Day.  This has a point, trust me.  Billie Joe Armstrong had a nostril piercing.  Teen girls obsess with boys, well, I wanted to BE them.  I wanted to be pseudo neo punk with colored hair and quirkiness---AND A NOSE RING! 

I remember watching Green Day’s performance at the 94 Woodstock (aahh, we have a year…14) and basically rocking out in my room, which consisted of loud music and hyped up feelings of excitement and euphoria…which begot the idea “I’m going to pierce my nose.”  I don’t know if I used ice or anything the first time I did it??  I may have.  I just remember going to my mother’s dresser and getting into her jewelry box and choosing a red rose lapel pin.  It was a decent gauge, in retrospect.  Figured it would work for a piercing!

I sterilized it with alcohol and also lit it with a lighter I’m sure and all those crude things that you know about sterilization when you are 14 years old in the 90’s without the internet.  I then, listening to Green Day, popped that lapel pin through my right nostril!  It was ridiculous.  I think the next day to school I wore the only jewelry I had to put in it (I didn’t even have a hoop).  What I had was a simple ball earring with a cross that dangled from it.  Ridiculous.  In a nose?  I was 14, give me a break!  So I wore it.  I think some people thought it odd.  No, I’m sure some people thought it odd, but one thing holds true today that was true when I was 14.  I’m out to find myself, not please you bastards!  ;) 

So I eventually changed the jewelry and yadda yadda.  I really didn’t have a good ability to get any jewelry suitable for a nose, lack of funds and “allowance”.  My mother hated my hair dying and piercing-capades, obviously.  Anywho, that’s the history of my FIRST piercing.  Onto the point.  I ended up doing my own ears a couple of times, even my top cartilage, as well as my own navel.  The navel I did have problems with, but hell, I did it with a large safety pin.  I simply left the safety pin in at one point!  (CRAZY!!)  Hey!! :/

Like I said I pierced myself multiple times and then pierced my best good friend, Hilary!  I pierced Hilary about gazillion times up her ears and such.  So began my piercing history.  And then it laid dormant.  I did get my own tongue pierced when I was 18 and had it in for about 5 years.  I have my nose pierced today, still.  I rarely wear earrings though, but it’s mostly because I am lazy and didn’t like sleeping with them.  But that was before I knew of awesome jewelry, also.

So a couple of months ago I was hanging with my tattoo artist pal and mentioned to her how I used to pierce stuff.  It made total sense at the time, seeing as how we were hanging out post bar time.  I just said it was something I could see me getting into possibly.  Later she had someone that was interested in a piercing.  I wasn’t about to do anything crudely.  I decided to order supplies and everything proper to do piercings the right way.  It would be different then a lapel pin, but it looked slick as hell the way the hollow needles worked!  I watched some YouTube videos.  Found a good kit.  A good book.  A good professional How-To DVD.  I’m doing this!

It seems crazy to delve into something like this out of the blue, but there are roots to this in my early adolescence.  I’m mentally regressing, it makes perfect sense!  I’m exploring who I thought I was or was meant to be back then…and dividing that by who I am now, maybe?  Split the diff=piercings.  (I’ve said before, math is not my forte, if I have one at all!)  14 year old Missie would be proud, but “I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now…” as Mr. Dylan would say.  Let the hole thing begin! 

Me to You,

Missie (Crazy!) Sue

Towers of Terror: Falling Bodies Over Coconut Cream

Remembering is important, especially for traumatic events.  While we strive to get over the event we also want to honor it by remembering it for all time.  9/11 was a very traumatic event in American history so it only makes sense that Americans should want to “remember” it.  Why must we remember 9/11 through the eyes of Fox news?  I was trying to enjoy some pie and coffee tonight at the truck stop and I was inundated with TV footage from the past.  I understand the REMEMBER mindset of Americans, but bodies dropping from buildings while I’m working on some coconut cream is really unnecessary! 

Where were you that fateful day?  I’m sure you have heard that.  I was sitting in an Integrative Art class taught by multiple professors in the theater at college. My one teacher kept coming in and out because he was watching it on the television screen that was in the hallway.  I think they may have even let us go early and I remember some of us gathering in the hall way in front of the tv and looking up in a mix of horror and disbelief.  I returned to my off campus house and informed my boyfriend and his cousin who was spending the week with us that we were being attacked!  They had seen and we continued watching about it together all day in between my classes. 

9/11 is a hell of a tale.  There are still even some discrepancies about it to this day, depending on who you are.  It can be a touchy subject.  A lot of people lost their lives, their loved ones, their security.  Tonight when I caught footage of the “REMEMBER” propaganda on TV (I basically otherwise try to steer clear of the news), I wondered what those people felt about “reliving” this event now.  I jokingly told my friend that people with Alzheimer’s could possibly think it was happening for the first time.  Ignorant citizens would be living it all over again!  Mass panic could ensue, War of the Worlds style!  Okay, probably not, but it was a muse. 

It may just be something to blog about, but it also brought tears to my eyes having to sit through that again.  I watched a body plummet to the earth from a massive building, like a rag doll, limbs flapping almost ridiculously, over coffee and a slice of coconut cream pie.  Media.  I can’t believe it.  And it was Fox news of all sources.  I wondered why it seemed that they were focusing so much on the terrifying side of the event.  Not that there is really a pleasant side to this, but there were a lot of positive ceremonies for the victims and their families, there was a decent humanist patriotic movement that ensued.  There were certainly more positive things to focus on!

11 years later and that’s all it was to Fox news.  It’s still bodies falling from buildings.  Why?  Why do they have to show the falling bodies?  Not even just a little clip, but a haunting long drop where the body really has some time to be played around with by the air.  Who was that?  Specifically?  Do they know?  That’s a person, God dammit!  Act like it, FOX NEWS!  Let’s remember how 9/11 made us remember how we can come together for each other in times of need, for help or support.  Remember the victims with a photo or something, but not a poor person free falling to their death because they are so terrified by what was happening that was the only logical option in their mind.  THAT is terrorism.   

It has been 11 years and we still can’t get those images out of our heads, and I doubt that we ever will. Lucky for us, we don't have to try to forget; Fox News will always be willing to remind us of that moment, that plummet, that free fall drop that changed our American lives forever.