Think of the noodles!

So I was hosting a prospective graduate student earlier this week, which basically entailed spending $100 of the department's money on dinner and making sure she got all her questions about grad life answered, more or less.

We went to my favorite Thai restaurant for dinner, along with a few of my colleagues/cohort/friends (we wear many hats) from the department. Discussion was going along pretty swimmingly; we had heard about the propective's boyfriend, about her apartment hunt, and answered some questions about workload and so on. Very normal.

I had turned aside to talk to Mrs. K. about...I don't even remember, probably an assignment for class or our one classmate who keeps getting arrested. Something. And then I heard, "Yeah, if they do it wrong, you can totally lose all sensation."

I thought this was rather a weird sentence to hear from a prospective out of the blue—were we talking about some sort of surgery, a bizarre homeopathic remedy, or, most likely, some sort of medieval torture procedure that she had been reading about?

No. We were talking about clitoral piercing. To be specific, her clitoral piercing.

I will allow the women to pause for a full-body shudder right about...here.

Now, why would you get a clitoral piercing, honestly? Is the risk really worth the reward? I think it's pretty clear the answer is "hell, no." More important, though, is this question: if you had such a piercing, why in the name of all that's holy would you talk about it to people you've just met? People with whom you're going to be working in a (semi-)professional capacity for the next six years? It's beyond the pale, really. Although it was enjoyable to watch the dinner table's only male try to repress his repulsion.

I think this falls in sort of the same category as the phenomenon whereby strangers feel free to talk to me at all times for reasons I don't understand. Do I emit some sort of pheremone that says "tell me anything; I've got time for your crazy"? If so, I need to find that switch and flip it to "off."

Clitoral piercing. For the love of little green apples. I may never eat pud thai again.