I vent to you here about my Paul Complaints, so it seems only right and fair that I should also praise him here when he deserves it, not that I usually think of doing so when it happens, and not that it makes for very interesting reading anyway. But I have one such situation fresh in my mind, and it is this: he helped me change my cartilage piercings.

I see it has been nearly FOUR YEARS since I last attempted it AND ESSENTIALLY FAILED. I’d been too nervous to try it again. But this week I have been having hives again, and my eyelids reacted to a product and got all rashy and itchy, and my knee was hurting, and anyway something about all these physical woes made me freshly determined to at least TRY to make my cartilage piercings more comfortable to sleep on, by using the flat-backed earrings I ALREADY POSSESSED.

I asked the family at large which of them might feel capable of helping if I got stuck again and needed assistance. And to my surprise, Paul, who was not present for the births of any of his children because he is A Fainter, and who cannot bear to hear stories/reports of anyone’s injuries, and who has to yell for me through closed eyes if he gets any sort of bleeding injury himself, said he thought he could do it. “Really???,” I reallyed. “As long as you don’t keep talking about it,” he replied. “Okay, I will let you know when I’m ready to try it!,” I said. “Why not right now?,” he suggested. AND IT WAS ON.

First: one swift shot of bourbon each, just as in pioneer surgery.

Then: I got out the teensy baggie of flat-backed earrings and chose two of them and put them in a little dish of rubbing alcohol. Paul and I both washed our hands. I splashed a little rubbing alcohol on my first cartilage piercing, braced my resolve, and popped out the lock-back earring. I wiped the area with a little more rubbing alcohol, and then Paul was up to bat.

The tricky thing about flat-backed earrings is that they go in from the BACK of the ear (the front part screws onto the post). And Paul felt confident in his ability to handle this, until he saw the ear and did not see any hole, so there was some jabbing around, and some bending of the top of my ear back and forth, and I was starting to get a little queasy, but in the end he found it. There was a teensy spot of blood from the jabbing, but he persisted womanfully and did not faint or falter.

The next challenge was getting the front of the earring screwed onto the post with his giant muscular man fingers, but he managed that as well and we were halfway done!

At this point I looked in the mirror and did not really like the way the new earring looked. It’s a flat little disc, while the old earring was a gold ball just like the ones I always wear in my second lobe-piercings. I didn’t like that it was less noticeable; I didn’t like that it didn’t match my second lobe-piercing anymore. But we were halfway done and I thought I should at least TRY the new earring type: perhaps the ease of sleeping on it would MORE than make up for the appearance of it, or perhaps in time I would get used to the appearance of it, or perhaps I would like the flat backs but need to choose new fronts. In any case, no sense being HASTY without giving it a CHANCE. This was after all going better than expected.

I splashed some rubbing alcohol on the second cartilage piercing, got a firm grip—and, just as before, it was much harder to remove than the first one, and I wasn’t sure I could do it. I didn’t want to irritate it by dilly-dallying, but I almost broke a nail trying to pry it out; it did at last yield. More rubbing alcohol on the newly-bare cartilage, and then over to Paul.

This one went far more easily than the first one: the first one was pierced at an angle, which makes it more difficult to aim the earring, but the second one is pierced straight through. (I will not let this bother me for the rest of my life, I will not let this bother me for the rest of my life, I will not let this bother me for the rest of my life.) This one was done before I even had the chance to start to feel queasy.

For an hour or so afterward my ears were an outraged hot-pink, but now they have settled down. The new earrings are not bothering them at all so far. I still don’t like the way they look: I can see the post part of the stud sticking some ways out of the front, and then the little disk floating there. But I also remember that when I first got them pierced, I thought the stud looked OVERSIZED AND FAKE-GOLD AND WEIRD, and now I look back on those photos and think it looks perfectly normal, so.