8/15/2001

did i tell you i got a nosering while i was in london?  i did.  it’s a little silver stud with a blue stone on my right nostril.  the word nostril in conjunction with anything jewellery-related still seems weird.  i got it at metalmorphosis, partly because the name is really clever, and partly because it had been recommended to me by three people.  i brought three people with me to get it, too, although they were a separate set of three people.  at any rate, when we got there i went up to the counter and said, “hello i would like a nosering!”  the guy asked me if i had eaten in awhile, and i told him not since breakfast.  “you need to eat something beforehand,” he said.  i had a sandwich in my bag, so i told him, “i have a sandwich in my bag!”  “good, go outside and eat the sandwich for me, okay?”

so we went outside and stood on the curb of a soho street and i ate a sandwich made from nutella and strawberry jelly i stole from the refectory, while diane and matt and debra watched.  sandwiches made with nutella are really just dessert.  we went back inside and down the stairs, i picked out the stud, and the guy motioned for me to follow him into the hallway.  “can i bring my friends?” i asked.  nope, he said, and we were off down the hall to one of the rooms, leaving my friends waiting on a velvet couch next to a caseful of fluorescent labret thingies.

it was very white with mirrors everywhere and a white gurney-type bed in one corner and a white countertop with supplies in another.  the noxious smell of clean made me lightheaded, and i watched, blinded, as he wheeled over a metal tray with my nosering, a new sealed needle, and a sterilized cylindrical something-or-other.  and then it was over.  during the approximately five seconds the entire nose-piercing process took, he used no less than four separate pairs of gloves.  after each thing he did — swabbing my face with alcohol, putting a marker dot where the stud would go, moving the marker dot, piercing my nose, putting the stud in — i heard the dual *snap* *snap* sounds of latex gloves being removed and replaced.  he wasn’t too friendly, but he wasn’t unfriendly, either, and my nose is well and truly pierced, so i cannot complain.

if i close my left eye and look towards my nose with my right, i can see it, a big blurry dot at the side of my nostril.  does it make me a conforming nonconformist?  probably.