More nonsense...

The sun is out! Welcome back, my burnished friend! With the sun, comes the climbing. Whoopee! For the past few weeks, I had been quite miserable because the rain had just been chucking down and I couldn’t climb outdoors. Nothing is more disappointing than when you get all geared up to go climbing, lug your stuff down four flights of stairs, contact your kakis, drive halfway across Singapore to Yishun and it rains…

I finally managed to squeeze in a couple of hours at the outdoor wall yesterday. It was lovely just to feel the sun beat down on my back. I know when I am truly climbing hard… that’s when my arms get so pumped that the veins show, when the sweat is running little rivulets down my body, when my fingers are encrusted with chalk and sometimes blood, when the kink in my back screams for a massage, when my fingers cramp from pinching a small hold. I love every single minute of it. The pain and pleasure dichotomy…

A few days back, a friend noticed that I have a metal bar going through the top of my ear. I think he was slightly disgusted. That’s my favourite piercing. It’s called an industrial and no one in the right mind gets it because it hurts like hell. More so than getting tattooed. The Best Friend and I were in NYC in 1998 and we both got pierced there. She met me in Abdn after my last paper and we were supposed to go on a European jaunt. She had painstakingly exchanged various currencies (at that time no Euros yet) and put them in little envelopes each labelled with the name of the country. We had planned to go to Italy, Spain and France. Hah! Another friend of ours convinced us to ditch our carefully planned out itinerary to go with her to New York. (It’s all your fault, CY!)

I had two days in Abdn to pack four years of accumulated junk and ship them back to Singapore, sell my car, TV, stereo and sort out administrative rubbish at Uni. It was madness. I sold my car to some dodgy dealer who didn’t know that I was just as dodgy because I had done a lot of damage to the under carriage of my car and he gave me a good deal because I smiled a lot. The BF and I took the plane from Abdn to Luton, took a taxi from Luton to Heathrow and took a plane from Heathrow to JFK. At Heathrow, the customs officer realised that I didn’t have a valid visa to enter the US. I had my boarding pass and was already at the gate. My lower lip started to quiver and I burst into tears when he told me that I couldn’t board the plane. Sometimes it’s good to be a girl. The kindly man felt very sorry for me, let me through with a slap on my wrist and told me never to do this again. Haha!

We went mad in Manhattan. We stayed at a friend’s apartment in St Marks’ Place, partied quite a bit, paid to watch men take off their clothes and got pierced. The BF got her tongue and ear pierced. I almost died after the ear piercing and decided to leave my tongue alone. We went to Johnny Depp’s tattooist but the prices were exorbitant so we went to one a few doors down. It was a lot cheaper to get tattooed and pierced there. Our piercer was this burly hairy man who looked like a lumberjack. That didn’t release any warning bells. Neither did the roaches that were scuttling about in the display cabinet. He marked my ear, aligned the barbell, took out a GIANT needle (we chose a thick barbell) and proceeded to impale me with it. I thought I was going to pass out with the first hit. I could hear my own cartilage crack. Damn BF said that the pain was all right. She lied.

I feebly told him to wait and asked if I could not do the second piercing, but he said that the barbell was already in so we might as well go all the way. All I could do was to focus on the dusty cans of Heinz baked beans (?!) he had on the shelf and not scream. The second hit did not hurt as much because my ear was already throbbing with pain. And then the blood started to dribble down my neck.

Was it worth it? Hell yes.

Again, the pain and pleasure…