Xenoliths Of Flesh.

Coloured contact lenses weird me out. I can understand jewelry and dyed hair, but screwing with the colour of your eyes is getting a bit intimate. It's right up there with getting things other than your nose, eyebrow or ear pierced.

In tribes, ritualistic piercing was often a sign of passage or used in ceremonies. People did not just jam things into their face because it looked cool. I recall in grade school when you saw a girl with pierced ears it was pretty cool, it somehow made her older, more mature. When I got into middle school you started to see more girls with pierced ears, and even a guy would have his ear pierced every now and then. Once I hit high school, the piercing craze was in full swing. If you could pinch an inch of flesh between your fingers then you could pierce it. I saw eyebrows, lips, cheeks, tongues, every angle on the ear, every corner of the nose. It wasn't just studs or rings either, people were using "industrial bars" which are thick steel pipes between two piercings, and others still would gauge their ears causing the lobe to stretch and open, like you'd see on an African native or something.

This was getting absurd.

I can totally understand the desire to want to stand out, I was once a teenager. I fantasized about getting a tattoo, but it dawned upon me that there's nothing I like now that I liked nearly as much as I did when I was a teenager. I'd feel silly now to have something coloured in my skin that didn't matter to me. I think when you get a tattoo you have to get into a mindset where the permanency of the object isn't what's relevant, rather the marker it establishes in your life. You may no longer dig Chinese letters, but you once did and that makes it part of your history.

I just can't get to that point.

It's the same with piercings. I know small piercings grow back over in time, but people who are getting these massive gauges in their upper and lower lips and ears are really doing damage. They say their bodies are temples and that they're adorning them. Personally I think they're putting a novelty doorbell on the Taj Mahal, if you catch my meaning. It's absurd to deface yourself in such an extreme manner, in my opinion.

I suppose in the grand scheme of things, coloured contacts are not the worst modification. Sure they hide how beautiful your eyes undoubtedly are. I can say this because if you take the time to really look at the composition of eyes, they are tiny blue/green/brown/grey nebulae. Random, chaotic and limitless, crafted by the whimsical hand of Nature itself. People get upset that they don't have blue eyes, or that their eyes don't match their hair, or whatever. I think if they stopped, and let someone they care about look deep into those soulful lenses, and were told how truly stunning they were they may think twice about colour contacts.

On a totally separate note I'd like to point out I've made a post title starting with every letter of the alphabet. Xenolith was no small task to look up, let me tell you.