Pierced!

I had my ear pierced on Saturday night. I've been wanting an earring for some time now, and was planning on asking my wife, Molly, for one as a Father's Day gift. (See my earlier blog posting, "Mid-life Vanities.") But there we were wandering through Crossgates Mall - Molly, myself, and our two small children - and there was Claire's Boutique, a chain jewelry store. (There's probably one in your area.)

We were about to pass the store, but I suddenly stopped in front of it, pointed inside, and made a few whimpering noises.

"Get one if you want," Molly said with a sigh.

"It can count as my Father's Day gift," I told her. "How long do you think it will take?" She was a woman, she should know about these things.

"Probably about 15 or 20 minutes," she answered, and then explained that she and the kids would be in the Disney Store; I should meet them there when it was over.

"You do ear piercings here, right?" I asked a salesgirl. She told me they did, and then handed me a piece of cardboard with various "starter" earrings listed, along with their prices. After looking at the prices for awhile - knowing that Molly wouldn't really be supportive of this if it cost more than $20 or $25 - I decided on a 4 MM white gold post. The salesgirl, however, steered me towards a 3 MM post, explaining that it was even cheaper, and they sold them singly, as opposed to in pairs. Good catch, salesgirl!

(I don't know what the salesgirl's name was, but from here on, I'll call her 'April.' I like the name, and I liked her; she was about 18 or 19 years-old, and cute.)

April began filling-out a form of some kind, from a pad of forms she'd pulled from beneath the register. She took my name and address from my driver's license, then asked me how old I was.

"Thirty-eight," I said, and snickered.

"I'm sorry," she said, putting my age on the appropriate blank. "But I have to ask." She leaned over the counter as she scribbled, giving me an eyeful of her ample cleavage.

"Oh, I don't mind telling you my age! I just... don't you think it's old to be getting your ear pierced for the first time?"

"Nah," April said. She turned the pad of forms around to face me, and had me sign my name in two places, and initial six others. I was agreeing to follow their post-piercing ear care instructions, acknowledging that I was aware of the possibility of infection, and agreeing that I wouldn't hold the store liable if something unseemly should happen to me as a result of the piercing.

April took a copy of the signed form and crammed it into a small gift bag, along with ear care instructions and two 4-ounce bottles of antiseptic. The gift bag was hot pink in color, and bore the legend, "JUST GOT MY EARS PIERCED AT CLAIRE'S." For a moment, I imagined traipsing through the mall with my cute pink gift bag, like Little Red Riding Hood on the way to grandmother's, carrying her cute little basket of goodies.

"We can put that bag into a white plastic bag," another salesgirl (not April) said. And she promptly did just that.

"Thanks," I told her. "It is a tad... dainty." I was trying to come across as masculine as I could. These were two very attractive girls, and here I was buying an earring - for myself - in a store marketed towards women. It would serve me well to portray myself as close to a biker dude as I could, as opposed to an effeminate girly-man.

April charged me $17.84 for the piercing and the earring. I paid by check. Then she asked me to follow her, and we headed towards the front of the store, and the mall. There at the store's entrance was a stool and a four-foot tall cabinet unit. Apparently, Claire's Boutique likes to make a spectacle of their ear piercing practice, performing the piercing in full view of passers-by in the mall. The idea, I suppose, is to attract more customers to come in and get their ears pierced. I sat down on the stool as April dug some things out of the cabinet.

"Okay. Which ear are we doing?"

"Oh, the left!" I said. Did April think I was gay? If so, I wasn't doing too good a job at being 'masculine.'

"I have to ask," April explained. "Some people don't know." That is, some men don't know that left means straight, and right means gay. But these aren't hard and fast rules anymore these days; many straight men choose to get both ears pierced, or have two piercings in the left ear and one in the right, etc.

"I'm thinking right about here," April said, and made a small pen mark on my left earlobe. Then she held up a mirror. "Whaddya think?"

I looked at the spot where April had made the pen mark. "Looks right," I said. Surely she had done quite a few ear piercings, and knew a good spot to place it. I trusted her judgement.

"This is your first piercing?" she asked, still fiddling about with things from the cabinet. I told her it was. "No tattoos?" she asked. I told her no. "Well, I'm honored to be the one to be your first!" It was an intimate thing to say to me, could easily be turned around into something sexual - the loss of my virginity. I muttered something in response, and probably turned red.

"Here we go," April announced. "It shouldn't really hurt." Peripherally, I saw her come at me with something that looked like a staple gun. Click. I felt just a brief second of pressure-pain, and then it was over. "All done. Did that hurt?"

"Nope," I said. Again, I wanted to seem like a tough guy. To tell her it hurt like hell (it didn't) would've been the whining of a pantywaist.

April explained the after-piercing ear care procedures I'd have to perform for the next six weeks at home. I had a couple of qualifying questions - making sure I understood her correctly - and she answered them. Then I said goodbye. I felt as if April and I had shared something intimate together.

I took a couple steps into the mall, and there was Molly. She had wheeled the stroller back from the Disney Store just in time to see the deed being done. "Did it hurt? It looks good," she said.

We continued shopping in the mall. It was another half-hour before I braved a look into a mirror.

It looks good. Damn, I'm cool. I think.

Mid-life Vanities

As my brother Doug neared his fortieth birthday, he got a bit vain about his appearance. Maybe it was a mid-life crisis or something, but he suddenly exhibited this unnatural behavior, aimed at making himself look younger and cooler. He began laying out in the sun every day to achieve a sort of tan, or at least a coloring of his skin, and before he went outside he doused his hair and beard with Sun-In, which gradually turned his brown hair blonder and blonder throughout the summer. Blonde hair, a blonde beard, and golden skin – that seemed to be the intended result of his uncharacteristic behavior. My family and I thought he was just nuts.

I’m thirty-eight now, and can feel forty fast approaching. I’m now getting vain about my appearance too, and from the outside, my attempts to look younger probably seem more than a little weird. I guess it started about a year ago, when I began shaving my head. I was already nearly bald, but by completely shaving my head, I changed overnight from a geeky bald guy to a semi-cool shaved-head guy. Shaved heads were sort of “in” then, and still are. In my imagination, I was on my way to becoming stylish and hip.

More recently, my vain attempts to look cool (I’ve been telling people my goal is to look “young and edgy”) have been cranked up a few notches. For one thing, I’ve explained to my wife, Molly, that I seriously want an earring in my left ear. I've thought about piercing my ear in the past, but now I finally feel that the time is right – I think I can pull off the "earring look" without coming across as a geek trying to look cool. Now, I figure, I’ll just be cool.

We really can’t afford the luxury of buying an ear piercing and new earring right now, so I’ll have to wait until Father’s Day for my earring fantasy to come true - you know, receive it as a gift. (I’ll keep you posted as that time nears.) In the meantime, there are other things I can do to look younger and cooler: for starters, I can maintain that “shaved head look” as best I can. A co-worker recently explained to me that he shaves his head every other day, and while I’m unwilling to shave that much, I can at least do it more often than I presently do. If your aim is to look like a young shaved-head guy (and not an older bald guy trying to look young), it doesn’t help to have five o’clock shadow around the back of your head.

And perhaps I should wear my glasses less and my contacts more; glasses make everyone look geeky.

Here’s where my mid-life vanity gets cranked still further: When I last shaved – on Thursday night, in preparation for a friend’s wedding – I chose to do something funky with my facial hair. (See pictures below.) I shaved the moustache portion of my old goatee, but left the hair on my chin untouched. I’ve seen this look successfully pulled-off by a number of younger guys, most recently and famously by Chris Daughtry, the edgy Alt Rocker on this season’s “American Idol.” Molly at first thought my new facial hair thing was too weird, and even labeled it “Abraham Lincoln,” but now she reports that she’s gotten used to it. I would've thought Molly of all people would like my hipper look; in the past, she’d always encouraged me to become more fashionable, by buying stylish clothes for me that I myself would never have chosen. So far, though, I don’t think she fully appreciates my newfound “coolness.”

My physical vanity continues. On Saturday afternoon, it was time to get ready for that wedding I mentioned. I showered, got dressed in a well-ironed white shirt and colorful tie, trimmed my nose hairs, trimmed the long hairs coming out of my ears (more on that later), removed my glasses, and put my contacts in. My current “cool” look was nearly perfect - save for the earring I won’t have until Father’s Day - but still something else was bothering me… my eyelashes. I was aware of the problem before, but it came into sharp focus when I took those pictures of myself below. I have exceptionally long eyelashes, particularly the bottom ones. (I think the lashes are made longer still by the prescription eye drops I take for glaucoma.) My long lashes make me look feminine, or like Malcolm McDowell in “A Clockwork Orange.” So I grabbed a pair of small scissors intended for cutting toenails, and made my lashes shorter. Yes, I cut my eyelashes… how vain is that!

“I’m losing hair where there’s supposed to be hair, and I’m growing hair where I don’t want it,” Mitch Robbins (Billy Crystal) says in “City Slickers,” a great film about mid-life crises. You could blame most of my physical problems - the hair-related ones, anyway - on that male hormone, testosterone. Excessive amounts of testosterone have caused me to go gradually bald since I was nineteen; to have a hairy chest (a source of pride for me, but usually not appealing to the opposite sex); to grow nose hair; to grow long hairs from my ears, a problem only well rectified by electric nose hair trimmers; and – despite the ostensibly he-man traits of excessive testosterone and excessive hair – to grow womanly eyelashes. Except for my proud mane of chest hair, I’m working on all these problems, testosterone be damned.

Now if only I could get laser eye surgery to eliminate my need for glasses! Unfortunately, I think my glaucoma - a disease usually only beset upon the elderly - precludes eye surgery. Besides, it costs a lot.

All my vain attempts to look “cooler” may just be the early portents of a forthcoming mid-life crisis; as I get older, it’s becoming increasingly important to me to look younger and edgier. For now, I'll keep up the charade - I'll keep shaving my head, trimming my nose and ear hair, clipping my long bottom lashes, and keep that funky facial hair thing going. And on Father’s Day, I’ll get that earring.

“Have you ever had the feeling,” Mitch Robbins asks a co-worker, “That this is the best I’m ever gonna do, this is the best I’m ever gonna look, this is the best I’m ever gonna feel… and it ain’t that great?”

"Happy birthday," the co-worker replies - his only words of encouragement to mid-life crisis sufferer Mitch, who'd just turned thirty-nine.