If All Your Friends Stuck Sharp Pointy Things in Their Ears, Would You?

Middle child, middle girl between two brothers actually. So I have eaten worms, grasshoppers, and dog food; I've sat on a fire ant hill while counting to five; and I've hung on to the outside of a merry-go-round at full speed with my legs flying out behind me.

I used dares to prove that I was just as tough as my brothers. More so in some cases, though not many because one was older, one seems to have about half the usual number of pain receptors, and both were less risk averse. What is it about testosterone that makes boys unable to do simple math; me+hill+riding with no hands=broken bones? Maybe I discovered that some things weren't worth the moment of "oh yes I can!". After the merry-go-round incident I had a doctor picking gravel out of lower lip and chin for what felt like forever. On the plus side there were sometimes gnarly scabs and pus but not always. Even though I began to developed a sense of self preservation we still dared each other to silly things: to drink six raw eggs, to eat what's in my hand without seeing what it is, to let go of the swing for just one swing. Sometimes the dares were just implied because the first rule of dares is that once a dare is spoken you either do it or you're branded, as long as it's not said out loud you can still say whatever the dare is is stupid and not be a chicken.

I still have difficulty backing down. There was the time I decided to drive through the mountains around Shasta at 1am and ran out of gas and then had to make my way up a washed out dirt road with ruts up to my axle on my 350 Honda motorcycle, simply because it was suggested, out loud, to me by my then-boyfriend. On the plus side my inability to back down is why I learned to ride a motorbike in Ho Chi Minh and why I decided to travel on my own through India with a broken clavicle. But sometimes I find myself doing something that seems so ridiculous, so dangerous and ill-conceived that I wonder about my own testosterone levels.

In Vietnam there are these guys that are street barbers. They have a really basic setup right on the side of the road, usually just a chair, a mirror, and a tarp to keep off the sun. They cut hair, shave faces and, get this, clean ears. It's scary to see because they use these loooooooong metal tools that look like what you would use to scrap tarter off of a crocodiles' back teeth if you wanted to make sure you still had your hands at the end of the procedure. (Not that crocodiles need tarter scraped because they are carnivorous and also they have a symbiotic relationship with these little birds who clean their teeth. Honest. Look it up.) Anyway these guys, on the street in Saigon, just stick these freakin' long skinny metal things right into peoples ears which, to my American eyes raised by the "never stick ANYTHING in your ears" school, looks like the worst idea ever. Punctured eardrums, deafness, staph infections that travel to your brain or eyes and make you blind or insane or, even worse, blind AND insane so you have to imagine the hallucinations you would otherwise be seeing (Does it work like that, do you suppose? Do blind people imagine hallucinations. Okay, hallucinations are imaginary to begin with but do blind people imagine that they SEE hallucinations?) Anyway, I always said never, never, ever was I gonna let some random guy stick metal things in my ears to "clean" them.

Then today I decided to get a massage with my friend L. After the steamroom, the body scrub, and the facial, there they were. Three little barber chairs and men in white shirts and bow-ties, who looked more like they wanted to get me a drink than dowse my ears for god knows what. I looked at L, she looked at me and asked "Are you gonna get your ears cleaned?" What the hell was I supposed to do? She said it, said it right out loud and she has an older brother too, so she knows what it means when you say it out loud. Of course, when I casually said "sure" and looked right at her she couldn't back out either.

No broken ear drums but he some how managed to trim the hair inside my ear! The implications are too frightening to ponder in depth but it's clear that at some point today contrary to my AMA upbringing, I stuck something pointed and SHARP in my ear.