The anecdote is only one sentence long, but first, some backstory.

A year an a half ago, a man with tattoos up and down his arms chest, back and neck, with studs and bars and rings up and down his ears, face, and who knows where else, leaned in very close and told me to “breath in…and…OUT” as he drove a needle in and out of the flesh above my left eye. I faked a smile while he held the bar in place and screwed the ball in place. In the past eighteen months, my eyebrow ring has come out on various occasions, but never unprovoked: sometimes it was too speedy a removal of a shirt, sweater, or goggles, once it was a run in with a volleyball net, and then there are the less graphic occasions when I absentmindedly fiddle with the ball until the threads loosen and the screw pops out.

Unrelated to all that, it’s been well over a year since the second-to-last time I used a screwdriver. My Ikea bookcase (third picture down) requires a laborious amount of dis- and re-mantling in order to move it. Unfortunately I seem to move a lot, and also unfortunately I love that bookcase. So the second-to-last time I used a screwdriver was the last time I moved, sixteen months ago, down to Palo Alto. The last time I used a screw driver was two weeks ago when I moved again, into a new PA apartment.

Two weeks ago, I’m sitting on the floor of my new apartment, screwdriving the final screw into my beloved Ikea bookcase, when the ball of my eyebrow ring cosmically unscrews itself and falls out.

I’ve since decided this is either evidence of balance in the universe or my fairy godmother’s sense of humor. Anyway, these are the only theories I’ve come up with so far to answer the question I posed to my empty apartment at the time it happened:  “What the fuck?”