It has not been a good week to be one of my nipples. I mean, I don’t know as I can say that it is ever a good week to be one of my nipples anyway, but if by some cosmic fate you had to be one of my nipples for a week this was definitely not the one to choose. If I haven’t managed to completely put you off by now, please allow me to elaborate.
Okay, so I started back to work like 4 weeks ago. Every couple of years, I go crazy with the back to work clothes: I buy a lot of stuff I don’t per se need, but get anyway so as to prevent people (people like me) from becoming bored with my wardrobe. Anyway, this was my year, so I went crazy at the Macy’s. I don’t really need any pants because I am already the nation’s strategic reserve for khaki and I am keeping the (feeble) hope alive that one day I will decide to get up off of my rapidly spreading ass and go work out at a gym and make my waist just the teensiest bit smaller. I could do a whole riff on my eating disorder and poor body image, but who really gives a crap for a), and for b) it’s not like this is some after school special. So. I bought a lot of shirts.
A lot is ten. I guess for the sake of specificity, I could have just said “I bought ten shirts” but that is so flat: “I bought a lot of shirts” allows you to create an image of me flopping around in a sea of couture, kind of like Scrooge McDuck does with the money in his vault, if you go in for that sort of thing. Anyway, I bought some really great Florida-y kinds of shirts. A couple of my favorite ones have these cool embroidered designs down the front, and I wore one on Monday.
It was funny, the choice to wear that shirt. See, with the laundry room still being just a dream on an architect’s sketch pad, I’m continuing to run down to mom and dad’s house to do laundry every weekend. What I haven’t done (with good reason, as I will soon justify) is fold or put away any of that laundry for approximately a month. Well, (here’s the justification) I been real busy. First couple of weeks back to work I had meetings or events every night, and then Fridays and Sundays with the family, so I have not been real disposed to spend my few luxury minutes on putting this laundry away. So, here’s the heap of clothes and then there’s me looking for something not too wrinkled to put on and wear (I know, if I liked cooter even just the teensiest bit, I would be such a typical hetero pig) and I pull out of one of the embroidered shirts. I think “Hey, this would be swell to wear.” Right next to it is an undershirt. I think, for no apparent reason “I might want to wear an undershirt with this.” Then, much to my great regret, I decide not to listen to what was clearly my nipple sense tingling. I pull the shirt on over my enormous gourd and make my merry way to work.
Everything is moving along smoothly: no classes to contend with, so I can actually finish and be ready for the next day when I start classes. About noon, my chest starts to hurt in a very localized sort of way: my nipples are on fire. And when I say fire, I mean it was like the twin suns of a binary system blazing on my chest. Like someone had snuck up while I wasn’t paying attention, used an orbital sander on my teats and followed it up with a quick squirt of alcohol. I heard recently that red-heads have a higher tolerance for pain, and that must be true for me to have been oblivious up to the point where my poor nubbins had been worn down to the, well, nubbin. My nipples had hurt that badly only once before in my life, and that had occurred during a day at the beach in my childhood. I had a canvas (!) raft that I was trying to body surf (read: stay afloat) on. Basically, I spent the entire day rubbing my poor prepubescent nips on that rough canvas and then dousing them with salt water. Yeah: good times.
Back to the present: having finally recognized the signals for pain, and slowly made the connection to the unlined embroidered shirt (said emboridery being the cause of said nippleary exfoliation), I was ready to tear the evil demon torture device from my body and ice down my lil' pink rosebuds. Which of course I could not do, because somehow I think that act would have been frowned upon at my work. Anyway, I am SO ready to stop the pain, that I am willing to do anything. I think to myself, “I know! I’ll get some of those little round bandages and put them on! That will stop the problem!” But I did not have any of the little round bandages in the first aid pack the office gives us each year, and I didn’t really feel like making the trip up there and then trying to explain why I needed them. I knew I couldn’t use a regular bandage because my chest is hairy and their eventual removal would only compound the pre-existing pain. I finally happened on to the idea of using some of my quality dots.
Quality dots are just plain little round stickers, much like the ones you would see used at a tag-sale. I call them quality dots because we use them for a variety of quality tools (a management thingie that isn’t really vital to the story at this juncture). I had some dots. Or I did have some until I loaned them to someone else at work. I quickly skipped over there, got my dots back, and applied them. Yes, I put little blue round stickers on my nipples. As I said, I would have done anything to ease the pain. It wasn’t until about an hour after I had applied the stickers that I remembered I kept a t-shirt in one of my drawers just in case I needed to change shirts for some reason. Of course, the t-shirt smelled a little funky and I couldn’t decided if it was because I had worn it and then shoved it back in the drawer or if it was just because it had been in there for so long. I didn’t care, as the sticker treatment had not been as effective as I had hoped. So I put the shirt on. Hey, I smelled a little like a street person, but my tits didn’t hurt anymore, and isn’t that what it’s all about?
That problem solved, I figured that my areolar agony was concluded for this portion of the program. Oh, how sadly I was mistaken. A couple nights ago, I almost ripped my left nipple off. I guess I was sort of scratching it in my sleep or something and then flopped my arm in such a way that the nail caught underneath the skin. Talk about a rude awakening: I fully expected to see the tip of my nipple in my right hand looking like a bloody stub of a pencil eraser. It was only a flesh wound, though: a mere crescent of a scratch, visible only under the highest scrutiny. I put some ointment on it, and I think I am finally in the clear. But I'm keeping my dots handy just in case.
