Cultural Survival Skills

Piercing Observation 2.

After an abnormal psychology lecture on various personality disorders, I found myself in the elevator with a young female student from my class.

She was a walking pin cushion of exhibitionism. She sat in the front row with low-cut tattered jeans and a high-cut tight tee shirt which displayed her bare midriff. Her pierced navel sparkled before me for the whole semester. This was only mildly distracting to me. But it was very difficult not to be troubled when she dug and pinched the inside and rim of her pierced navel, extracting what appeared to be small amounts of effluent associated with healing or, perhaps, infection. Though I would never do so (wink), others may have wondered if she had also inflicted other, less observable, piercings upon herself.

The enclosed space of the small elevator enlarged the young ladies features. Her face was festooned with several pierced gold rings through one of her eyebrows, her ears were rimmed with many decorative piercings, there was a pierced gold ring at the flair of one of her nostrils, and as she spoke to me silver flashed from the center of her pierced tongue.

She was dead serious as she explained the she understood the lecture, but there was just one thing that was not clear: She wanted to know what was mean by the term “masochism”.

I struggled mightily to maintain my composure. I had a job to do, after all, and I did not wish to embarrass the young lady. I did not want to be unkind.

My poker-faced answer was: “Masochism is a word used to label a condition in which an individual finds pleasure in recieving pain. In some cases, the receipt of pain can even be sexually arousing”.

The young laddie’s eyes widened, the door opened, and she exited muttering an elongated and fading, “ooooh, I seeee.

I don’t know if she really saw. But I do know this:

Its hard to learn in a lecture class while contemplating your belly button.

VTM, 12/30/01

Tags: belly button. learning, body piercing, exhibitionism, masochism, psychology

This entry was posted on July 30, 2009 at 11:59 AM and is filed under Thoughts from Natalie's Child. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.