My parents never saw it coming. I’m sure they thought they were sending off an innocent New England schoolgirl to the West Coast solely for purpose of higher education and meaningful life experiences.

Ha.

Little did they know that their first-born daughter, their pride and joy, would discover the illicit pleasures of alcohol, drugs, and, horror of horrors, body piercing.

I’m not entirely sure what inspired me into getting a hole punched through my navel. It made have been the after effects of the bachanalian festivities of Harwood Halloween–jug o’ wine and Natty Ice are drinks for alcoholics and college kids only. I’m sure Freud could have provided a convoluted psychoanalysis of my motivations, which would have involved my sex life (or complete lack thereof), my fixation with ’70s rock bands, and the pet goldfish I had as a kid. Nor did I have any desire to be like Britney Spears–for one thing, I don’t need a boob job, and I can actually hold a tune. But I digress.

So on October 28th, a day that will go down in infamy, I piled into an aging Toyota Corolla driven by Rashelle Rucker ’05. Rashelle was going to get her tongue pierced, while our three other friends were there to provide moral support and/or the peanut gallery. We drove to the nearest piercing studio, Puncture, located on Foothill in Upland. I’d never been to a piercing studio before. Like most suburban preteens, I got my ears pierced at the local shopping mall. Inside, though, instead of the biker dudes and ancient Playboy pinups I was subconciously expecting, it resembled almost any other waiting room. There were large cushy couches, magazines, tastefully framed pictures on the walls–until you got a closer look at the photographs of people suspended in mid-air by large fishhooks inserted through their skin. There was one picture of a young man who has spent the last years of his life turning himself into a human lizard, complete with scales, horns and fangs.I was eavesdropping on one woman who was there for a clit piercing (ouch!), and considering making a run for the door, when my name was called and it was time to go get pierced.

My piercer was named Ken, and while I don’t remember exactly how many piercings he had, I can imagine he has trouble with metal detectors at the airport. He led me into a back room. He seemed a nice enough guy, but honestly I was too busy thinking about the upcoming pain to be able to laugh at his jokes. He cleaned the area around my belly button ("to get rid of the cooties", as he explained) then marked two little dots above and below my belly button. I then laid down on a doctor’s examining table while Ken worked his magic on my virgin navel. I have never been particularly brave in regards to physical pain, but even I had to admit that the piercing didn’t hurt half as much as I expected. I felt a hard pinch, looked down, and there was now a sparkly little barbell inserted into my navel. Word.

According to Tara Anderson, who works at Puncture, I am not alone in my desire as a young college student to get a piece of metal inserted into my body. Anderson said, "For us in particular, since we’re located near six colleges, we’re the busiest during the college year, while everyone else is busy during the summer." While the most common piercings at Puncture are navels, tongues, and labrets —those funky piercings just below the lip, Anderson also said, "Sometimes people come in and ask us to pierce the webbing between the thumb and fingers, or on the neck, but we choose not to [pierce those areas] because it’s on the surface and the body tends to reject those piercings." Not unsurprisingly, there are a number of "old wives tales" concerning various piercings: if you get your eyebrow pierced, the whole side of your face will go numb, or that you will lose all the taste buds in your tongue. As to why anyone would want to get a piercing in the first place, Anderson said that "Everybody gets pierced for different reasons." Some people may just like the look, while others will get a piercing to symbolize an important event in their lives, such as a bad break-up or a divorce.

Personally, my decision to get my belly button pierced was based more on aesthetics–and probably a healthy chunk of adolescent rebellion–than anything else. It will probably not be a good idea to wear a short top at home for the next couple of years, or at least until the college loans are paid. Meanwhile, I’m happy with my piercing, ridiculously so in fact, since I can’t stop staring at it. So take that, Britney. I bet my piercing’s cooler than yours.