This Week in Work: The Navel Tale and More

I shouldn’t even be blogging, but I should because I want to get into the role of writing again.  I have writer’s block.  Well, I have honestly been writing a lot, just not blog writing.  I’ve been writing poetry plenty, and musings and such.  Just blah on the blog front.  So I have Blogger’s Block. 

I have a busy week ahead of me.  I have a Drifting Sun print job for Jackson’s Bar, hopefully I will be printing those Thursday.  I have to do screens and graphics for this job yet before printing.  I have a day of piercing lined up for this Wednesday.  It will be my first near full day of piercings, I hope to get a good number lined up so it is worth it. 

I’ve begun a self apprenticeship in piercing, as I said, and I had a week of nostrils and navel.  This week I am going to do lips and labrets, and possibly some others.  I’m currently still lining up some guineas.  (I mean no disrespect to people from New Guinea, or guinea pigs or anything of the sort, I simply reply to my subjects/patients/heros as guineas.  I appreciate all of the guinea pigs that are allowing me to learn on them!)  Hopefully I can get a decent day of it scheduled out so it’s worth while lining up a sitter for so long.

I will be attempting lips and labrets.  All new to me!  Last week I did two nostril piercings and a navel.  They all went really well.  The nostril, I had done before as I blogged, on myself.  These ones were done with corkscrew jewelry studs, though, which can prove to be difficult getting to turn to follow the needle through.  I have also done my own navel, I mentioned, only completely incorrectly with a safety pin.  The navel.  THE NAVEL.  That is the tricky one.  But having all the proper supplies to do it was so much easier.

The navel piercing is very popular, mostly with teenage girls.  This is one of the things that make it actually one of the more difficult piercings to do.  They aren’t always great with their aftercare and a navel can take up to 9 to 12 months or longer to heal fully at times.  This isn’t me targeting anyone, this is what I’ve read in my books/studies.  I’ve been on my subject like a hawk about aftercare!  She’s been great!  It’s doing well. 

The navel piercing itself was a little odd.  The needle pierced through fine, I just had trouble getting the jewelry to follow the needle through, as it didn’t fit into the hollow end of the needle well because they were the same gauge.  I finished it up and it went well, but there was a moment where I was almost afraid I would have to stop and not be able to do it.  I thought I wouldn’t be able to get the jewelry through for a split second, but I was determined, apologized to my subject, and lined them up and got ‘er through!  BAM! The biggest problem was getting enough of her skin in the forceps to pierce well enough.  That’s another problem with navels.  They reject and migrate often because there isn’t always a good amount of skin to be pierced there.  No two navels are made alike and there are some that just simply can not be pierced!  You must assess the situation.  I decided she was capable, although hers was a little elongated (like a coin slot) which we joked about. 
  

I need to line up my guineas and be aware of which piercings they are interested in so I can prepare myself properly.  So hopefully everything goes well Wednesday and I am able to get my printing done while still being able to write a few things here and there.  Mondays are so crazy.  I sat down last night (on Sunday) and actually tried to plan my week out some and contacted people about this week.  It was good to start ahead, so hopefully I can keep up with that momentum.  I’m already hittin’ the coffee hard, and I’m gonna need it for this week! 

Piercing Through,

Missie Sue

I Write Amongst the Dead: Ejaculating My Word Load

Sometimes I get so solemn, so low I swear I can relate to corpses.  So low I feel the worms feeding.  Why are graveyards the best place to write in?  I stopped in at the graveyard on the way back home from an errand today.  Celie had fallen asleep while we were driving home so I swung up around to the Old Log Church for a pit stop for a few minutes.  There’s just something about that place.  I’ve been going there for a good amount of my life, either to walk around the grounds, visit dead relatives, hang out inside the building, take pictures, or to connect with nature, self, spirit.  I have always felt very peaceful in graveyards, comfortable there.

I always get in a writing mood when I am there.  I sat there today and wrote about 3 poems, just basic train of thought quick poems.  Not super quick train of thought, but very little thinking or editing.  Just what came to me. A nice little release on the dead before returning home.  It's weird, it's like I'm cumming on them, a money shot for the dearly departed.  Pardon the comparison, but I just have to get this out of me!  An "abrupt discharge" of thought.  Ahhh...that's better. A passage of necrophilia. 

It’s a good feeling to be able to experience a place like this that makes you feel so serene on the inside and reflective and inspired.  I write in graveyards.  I write amongst the dead.  Maybe I’m writing to them?  Maybe I’m writing for them?  Whatever the case, I dig it.  Yes, it's definitely October.  

Musing Through,

Missie Sue

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.

What's Been Happening?

What’s happening? What’s happening?  A lot has been and nothing, all the same.  My husband is home because he had an accident recently at work; one of the scariest days of my life, last Wednesday.  Celie’s 2^nd birthday is approaching insanely fast.  I can’t get my house together; story of my life.  I need to focus more on Drifting Sun and Musing Through.  I haven’t painted in months.  I haven’t played the guitar in weeks.  There is definitely dust on my guitar, you fuck (The Murmurs - You Suck), but it’s all my fault.  I had a family reunion in July.  That month came and went.  The 4thof July, our 5th wedding anniversary, the Biannual Wilson Family Reunion, and then at the end of it my husband almost dies.  It was a HELL of a month, to say the least, with an excellent ending, actually.  I am happy to have him home.  I’m going to try to document some things quickly in the blog.  I guess I use it as a sort of timeline of my experiences also…although, not properly because I still have to blog yet about Stevie Nicks who I saw perform June 29.  Geez.  Get WITH it, Missie Sue!  I think I’m doing well considering I spent a good part of July thinking that I was losing my mind.  Depressed and so explosively low, and having head pain and taking ibuprofen daily.  Discovered I had a blockage in the sinus.  Neti potted with peroxide, there’s a blog right there!  Cleared it up and I was hungry and thirsty for the first time in 3 weeks.  Yes.  Busy month.  Blogs to come.  I’ll try to tag this with tons of them.  I’ll just post them when they occurred?  Sure, why the hell not.  This is my blog. 

The Boss, While Only Here,

Missie Sue

What Happened to July?

So I fucked over July like the rest of my life so far, letting it slip through my fingers, screaming the entire time while still looking the other way?  What’s wrong with me?  I just put too much on my plate; I’m like the guy at the buffet line with the salad and beans in his mashed potatoes, tiny spoons of multiple food dishes because he wants a taste of everything.  I need to get with it.  Or just start eating something? 

A lot has been going on and I NaBloPoMoed for half the month like a boss that embezzles money from their employees pensions, but I digress.

I need to take myself seriously, is what it is.  I could also use a comma and some change to that sentence.  I need to take myself, seriously, it is what it is.  There.  I just spit out the quickest forms of creations when I do anything anymore.  I wing it should be tattooed on my forehead.  It’s my motto as a mother, that is for certain!  I need practice with my writing, that is one of the points of my blog anyway, so I need to take this more seriously and use it for what it’s worth.  I need to blog it the hell up!  I have many things that I could blog about, but I’m sure I’ll just use my “wing it” attitude. I wing it with a lazy, self-sabotaging perfectionist's mind, that is.

I need to take more hobbies more seriously.  I read, I write, I paint, I draw, I graphic/web design, I photograph, I play guitar, I print, I scrapbook, I sew, I crochet, I dabble in candle and lotion making, etc.  I need to start tasting these dishes if I’m ever going to fill myself.  I need to find who I am, to let go and let it be without judgment.  Judgement.  I am the only thing holding me back from anything.  I am my worst critic; I’m such a bitch.

"The Phone Call" or "The Scariest Day of My Life!"

July 25, 2012 will go down as the scariest day of my life…SO far.  I am sure there will be many more, after all, I only JUST became a mother, but I suppose it was probably the scariest I have had to date, pushing into Second Place that time in Puerto Rico when before my eyes a killer hurricane-inspired wave almost knocked my husband and my father into the ocean to be beaten against the aggressively sharp rocks we were ignorantly standing out on the edge of.  In retrospect, had I not received “The Phone Call” from my husband himself, I would have spiraled into a frenzy that day that would have seriously changed the course of events, I’m sure. 

It was basically like any other Wednesday, home with a toddler, just trying to survive.  She was napping, it was around 2:30 and I received a call from my husband.  There was a heightened tone to his voice, but he was fairly calm, and even though it was serious, it was reassuring I could hear he was okay.  He said he was in an accident and a 30 foot rebar wall he was attaching into place had fallen with him on it and it had landed on him.  He said he was okay, but he was hurt pretty bad and that they were calling an ambulance for him.  I told him to let me know what was going on and call me as soon as was possible.  I then hung up the phone to sit and worry with vomit ready to spew out of my face. 

I felt nauseous.  I couldn’t believe it, or was in a state of shock or something?   I had heard his voice, I talked to him myself, he was okay, but there was still an incredibly possibility that he had internal bleeding from the fall, or had something broken that he was not aware of because of the adrenaline, or his head injuries were worse than he thought.  This is what rattled through my head while I sat and waited. 

I was in the middle of paying bills but I stopped.  I let Celie sleep and with my mind going I started text family and friends.  My friends Hilary and Dave came to sit with me and hang out while I waited.  Meanwhile, I had received a reassuring call from a man my husband works with.  After that, however, I got a call from the hospital and it was a stranger and they gave me the whole “are you Mrs. Hoover…” blab la shpeal.   My head dropped.  “Why is a stranger calling me?!!”  Finally the man on the other end of the line got out the information he meant to convey to me.  He was one of EMTs on the Life Flight and had a conversation with Joey; my husband had given him my name and number and asked him to call me and let me know he had arrived at the hospital.  Phew!  Good news, because if he is having conversations with people he must be pretty aware and not out of it, thus the head injury must be superficial (lack of better word). 

This was the last call I got, so then I was just waiting for them to run all their tests at the hospital.  I was waiting for the call to tell me that my husband didn’t have a serious head injury or internal bleeding.  Finally he called me from his cell phone and I got to talk to him.  He was obviously medicated at this point, given the sound of his voice.  He amazingly had no broken bones other than two of his transverse process, which they determined later was only one place.  After a CATscan and tons of X-rays they determined he was the luckiest man ever. 

Joey fell approximately thirty feet with a rebar wall weighing approximately 900 pounds.  He rode it down to the ground and at the end it almost whipped his body to the ground, he said.  It ended up on him; two workers had to lift it off.  His new hard hat that he had just purchased was thrown from his head.  SO THANKFUL that we had just paid 85 bucks for it!  The wall actually fell onto another rebar mat, also.  The size 6 bars that it was made out of were tied on approximate 6 inch centers.  Had they been farther apart, he could have had serious lacerations.  The mat also gave a little, as it sat just above the concrete below, so he didn’t land directly onto the concrete the surrounds them.  He also was tied off with a standard harness and not a retractable one, which would have pulled back and snapped him into the wall, possibly injuring him worse.  He said for a split second he thought about unhooking his harness and jumping from the wall, but then he saw the rebar dowels below and fearing probable impalement he decided to hang on and ride the wall down.  CRAZY!

My husband is now resting on our recliner chair, where he has also been sleeping for the past week because he can’t get into bed.  He is still in a bit of pain moving certain ways, but he is doing well and recovering quickly, although it is unclear how long it will be before he is cleared for work.  We are enjoying the time together while he is home.  It’s horrible he had to throw a wall on himself for a vacation, but hey, I’m grateful.  I’m grateful for my amazing man of steel!  He took a nasty hard fall/beating.  He says he feels like he got his ribs kicked in, but I have never been so grateful in my life that he didn’t end up impaled, paralyzed, broken, or dead.  There, I said it; he almost died.  I try to block out how terrifying his line of work is because if I focused on that every day I would be locked up.  But I still have worried about just such a thing in the back of my mind since we got together, only with a worse outcome. 

Worrying doesn’t help anything.  For a completely terrifying close call, everything seemed to go just right.  I got that call that I have ever been worrying about getting, but instead of a stranger on the end of the line it was my husband telling me about his accident.  I am grateful for that.  That is the only thing that saved me from being a complete emotional wreck during this entire ordeal; I heard his voice.  My husband was more concerned about us than he was about himself and knew that I would go insane if I heard about the accident so he called me before anyone else had the chance to.  I am grateful for that phone call and everything that I have.  I love my husband so much, I really don’t know what I would do if anything ever happened to him, but we got close this time, and INCREDIBLY lucky.  Grateful for life and all of my many blessings!  I will inhale deeply every fart that comes out of his wonderful ass!  I love you, Joey Bear.  You’re my peaches, I’m your pear.  <3