After I paid a stranger 50 bucks to put a hole in my nose, but before said nose began hemorrhaging, I tottered over to the mirror and examined my face. "God, I'm cool," I thought, an opinion contradicted by my lunatic shrieks of "It hurts! It huuuurts!" only moments before. Then the room got hazy, the dull throbbing in the right side of my face intensified, and I plopped back down into the vinyl chair to which my piercer had threatened to strap me if I didn't stop squirming, screaming or hounding him with neurotic questions like "Does nose piercing routinely lead to dismemberment, would you say, or did you just have to put that on the waiver to cover all your bases?"
"You okay?" my piercer asked. (He had very blue eyes, a pockmark on his left nostril, colorful full-sleeve tattoos, pictures of his kids in his office, but apparently, no name.)
"I have a nose ring," I replied woozily.
"Make sure you eat something today," he replied. "And don't go swimming for the next six weeks."
"I have a nose ring," I repeated. I'm told this became my irritating mantra for the entirety of the bus ride back to campus, interspersed with the occasional bout of staring into the bus's reflective window and crooning "shiny!" in the manner of Sauron or a similarly glitter-deranged five-year-old.
Yes, I - who cower before pain, needles, blood, sterile environments and men with tattoos - had willingly subjected myself to piercing my nose with what felt like a flaming saber for the sake of having something sparkly on it. Vaccines, feh - those hurt, and should be avoided at all costs. Decorative flesh-rending? Bring. It. On.
My fourth piercing, and my most painful, was also the most controversial. Sickeningly pleased with my bravery and new glittery beauty, I posted several myspace-style shots on Facebook, tagging siblings, cousins and an assortment of people who didn't care at all, captioning my vanity with a "HAY GUYZ PLZ DON'T TELL MY PARENTS KTHX." "What's next?" I could almost hear my (ultra-conservative) father lecturing. "Pagan rituals in the backyard? Drug use? Premarital sex? Or, God forbid, a tattoo?" My mother's haranguing would be more practical. "Adi," she would say. "You do realize you're a Middle Eastern Jew. Why would you draw more attention to your nose?"
But I didn't pierce my nose to piss off my parents, or even to distract onlookers from my nose's generous Semitic proportions with some well-placed coruscation. I pierced my nose for the same reason that people wear eyeliner or dye their hair or slip rings on their fingers: quite simply, I thought it was pretty. I thought it would add some spice, some dimension to an already dramatic face. I can't change the stud yet - I have to wait roughly 45 years until my abused nostril heals - but when I can, you bet I'll be using my nose to accessorize. It makes the whole, somewhat arduous, process of piercing and aftercare totally worth it, despite the annoyance of staggering home from the library at 3 a.m. and having to bathe my nose in foamy antibacterial solution before I can collapse.
I confessed a week later, scared my parents would find the charge slip from the Baltimore Tattoo Museum and assume the worst: tramp stamp, tribal pattern. I wanted to alleviate their potential grief as quickly as possible, but also I didn't want them to kill me under a misapprehension and then have no place to bury me. (Tattoos are so off limits for Orthodox Jews; that one, sadly enduring, myth claims that tattooed Jews can't be interned in a Jewish cemetery.)
I took their disapproval on the nose (oh, snap), with a stiff upper (as yet unpierced) lip, sure they would come around. And they did. I guess they realized what I hadn't realized: piercing my nose was an act neither of rebellion nor of pure vanity, but of independence. It's a choice. And though it isn't earth-shattering or globally significant, it's still nice to be able to make it. Plus, it's shiny.
