putting the earrings in and realizing these photos in the mirror frame were of the same era as the gifted earrings.
shooooooooot. it’s been a while.
lots going on. but i’ll catch up on that later. i have two posts (three counting this one) in the draft stage. just need to add this and that, edit a bit, and we’re good to go. oh WELL, i guess i’ll just start a new post now, instead of resolving what’s there. but right now i want to write about the earrings i just found.
found them in my jewelry box, rather. they’ve been in the same jewelry box for…well, about sixteen years. wow. sigh. i guess so. that jewelry box has been in a few different places since then, but the earrings have been in there the whole time. which i guess is what it is. i mean, i don’t use my jewelry box much. i do keep things i want to save in there, but very seldom look in it. pretty much i wear the jewelry i wear all the time so it doesn’t come on and off. or i grab something off my bench on the way out the door. and then put it back when we get home.
and it doesn’t help matters that for me if i can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. so you know. it keeps things a combination of cluttered and exciting. sure. i’ll go with that.
point being. we’re trying to get rid of a bunch of stuff so i’m going though all kinds of tucked away treasures and consolidating/organizing. more or less. and i found these earrings from sixteen years ago. gil and i were living on se belmont in pdx. we’d take the number 15 downtown work-a-day mornings and then home again in the evening. during some span of the more than a few years that we did this, i had a bus pal – we only saw eachother on the commute. she was about my age, maybe a bit younger, and also an office worker of some sort. so we’d talk about this and that – usually easier on the way home as fellow busriders thinned out after we left dtown and inner southeast. she had really thick earrings, and considering it was 1995, i hadn’t seen a whole lot of that yet and thought it was pretty cool. so it was in our rotation of topics of conversation. one morning she brought me some titanium earrings with little onyx rounds and explained that these were a starter gauge and i should give them a try. start with these and then every few weeks go larger and larger – there was a whole routine i was to follow.
and after a while we didn’t see eachother on the bus. who knows. in 2000 gil and i bought a house farther out on se washington (still on the number 15 line, tho) and changed jobs…she prolly did, too. but i never tried the sortof (not hardly at all) thick earrings — kind of intimidated. not sure why — stretching seemed owier than piercing? who knows. at any rate. there they sat in my jewelry box. and now i can’t even remember my friend’s name. just a general silhouette of what she looks like…brown, shoulder length hair, pulled back and efficiently purchased office wear to keep her tattoos covered and work-a-day honest. back in the day.
see? they’re not thick at all. but still my ear is all red…!
so today, june 2012, sixteen years after the fact, on a whim, i put them in. i was going to look for a series of hoops to start wearing again, found these…and all of a sudden was pushing them through my earlobes. the left one went in almost no problem…the right one took a lot more work for some reason. which made me queasy at a couple instances. but i persevered. whatever.
and what’s funny, as i’m looking in the mirror wiggling the sharp end through – i realized the two photos stuck in the frame are from that moment in time. the belmont apartment, working in the admissions office at the art school. raja was a tweener/preteen. gil’s studio was set up in the basement. we were doing the thing.
so not that i’m intending to go any larger. it is what it is. a moment in time. awesome.
xoxo
coco
lovinganvil 