rj_anderson | Adventures in Ignorance (Reply)

sarahtales has just been regaling her readers with her ill-starred (and hilarious) attempts to find jewelry and other gifts related to her book, and I was suddenly reminded of the time in my mid-teens when I was working on my first novel (a.k.a. The Terrible Mary Sue Fantasy Epic of Doom) and decided that I absolutely MUST get earrings that looked like swords, because my ~~golden-haired warrior princess cursed with fatal beauty~~ heroine had them.

I looked through a hundred jewelry stores in vain, and then lo, I wormed my way into a seedy little shop I had never entered before and there at the back, were my sword earrings! However, my beautiful shiny swords were arrayed beside a lot of skull-shaped jewelry (and in some cases, full skeleton jewelry), snakes and the like, and for some strange reason the earrings were sold individually. How silly, I thought as I searched through the rack for a second sword to go with my first one, and finally emerged triumphant.

As I turned toward the cash register I was much intrigued by the collection of oddly shaped pipes displayed along the back wall, as I had thought that smoking pipes had gone out of vogue. And then there was this strange herbal smell wafting toward me from the back of the shop... incense, perhaps?

Anyway, I somehow managed to buy my biker earrings and make it out of the shop that sold hash pipes and marijuana. And then I took the ugly looking wires out of the sword hilts and replaced them with silver studs, and I wore my new earrings proudly for about three hours until I realized that they weighed approximately ten pounds each and my earlobes were rapidly descending toward my kneecaps.

I didn't let that stop me from wearing them, though. I just wore them for shorter intervals. :)

P.S. If my reasoning in this anecdote seems almost impossibly naive, try to remember that a) this happened around 1985-86; and b) I am a preacher's daughter. :)