Septum Piercings, Techno & Chex Mix Biohacking

A day in the life in Anchorage, Alaska | February 2025

10 a.m.

I sign off of my morning Zoom call and my work friend texts to say that she loves my new septum piercing. My mood skyrockets.

This is my first work week after getting the piercing and so far responses have varied –“I’m always so curious why people get nose piercings,” “I never let my daughters get nose piercings,” and “Are you trying to make it clear you didn’t vote for Trump?”

Lol. Yeah, probably!

Truthfully, I realized that on days I don’t spend much time on my hair and makeup, I look a lot like a homeschooler. This is a sensitive topic for me as for a four-year fever dream I was a homeschooler. I fear this awkward past self lurks just beneath my surface.

My work-from-home uniform is best described as “corporate jammies” (plain sweater, cozy pants). Factor in frizzy hair and an unadorned face and I look like I’m ready to attend weekly band practice for kids who don’t go to a real school and have to join the shitty band for nerds. (I played the trumpet. My sister still bursts into laughter when she recalls attending our “concert.”)

With the piercing, I feel like I’m protecting that sensitive, 6th grade self; controlling who gets to perceive her.

Don’t mess with me, the piercing says. I’m tough. I respond to rude comments with irony and eye rolls. I can’t blow my nose any more.

All this to say, I appreciate my friend’s compliment.

2:30 p.m.

I take a break from work and open Instagram. I watch a video of a woman being forcibly dragged out of a town hall meeting by two private security members. I watch it again a few times and slump further and further down in my chair.

I think my mirror neurons must be firing, subconsciously causing my body to become heavier and heavier, dropping to the floor like the woman in the video, noncompliant.

3:05 p.m.

I stress-eat the dregs of a Costco-sized bag of Chex Mix while doing calf raises.

Some lady on the internet said that this exercise is a good way to lower blood sugar after eating. To my knowledge, there’s nothing wrong with my blood sugar but for the love of god, let’s try to control something! I figure calf raises WHILE eating Chex Mix makes me some kind of biohacker.

To really show my blood sugar who’s boss, I dance in the living room to a playlist titled “Berlin Electronic Underground.”

3:07 p.m.

I see myself reflected in the dark tv screen and open YouTube to search “how to dance to techno.” My friend and I are visiting Berlin next month and are going to try to get into Berghain (or any club that will take us) and I know fuck all about techno music and even less about dancing to it.

I watch for a bit and consider myself lucky that phone use won’t be permitted in the club. At the very least, my calves of steel are going to be up for the challenge.

4:00 p.m.

It’s sunny outside so I take my techno playlist for a walk. We’ve had an unusually warm and snow-free winter and February, usually bitterly cold, has almost felt like spring.

Each day, I walk by the lagoon near our apartment and see the spring melt begin to creep along its perimeter. Each day, more water flows freely below the pedestrian footbridge. Each day, people continue to skate and walk and ride their fat tire bikes across the lagoon’s melting surface. They completely trust that the ice will hold their weight, their children’s weight. I’m baffled, despite the fact that they are obviously right.

I wonder what secret metric I’m missing that allows the others to confidently calculate how much strength is in the ice. I’m sure that if I stepped out to join them my lack of faith would betray me and I’d start to sink, like Peter stepping out from the boat.

I like rules so I follow the implied rule of the sidewalk, taking the long way around the water instead of crossing the shortest-distance-straight-line afforded by the frozen surface, where all the cool pedestrians are walking.

My fears are clearly unfounded as no one is punching through the ice but I can’t help but feel that they are overly confident that this place will continue to hold us. Don’t they know this is all so precarious? Maybe it’s not.

5:30 p.m.

My husband is home. I make dinner, we queue up an episode of Succession and try with all our might not to reflexively pick up our phones while watching tv.

6:45 p.m.

With the dishwasher on, our studio apartment is too loud to hear each other or the tv so we salute one other and retreat to our respective corners of the couch and our respective algorithms, headphones in place.

9:00 p.m.

I untangle myself from the nest of couch pillows and blankets where I’ve passed the last two hours watching old videos of The Kennedy Center Honors, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductions, and Nirvana on MTV Unplugged.

Clearly, my period is about to start.

As I review my day I realize that there were other clues: thinking I look like a homeschooler, inhaling Chex Mix dust, having overly complex feelings about ice skating…But spending hours watching old musicians get misty eyed thinking about their dead bandmates is a surefire sign that my hormones are on the move.

I log my symptoms in an app that the government will probably use to track my fertility à la The Handmaid’s Tale and take a melatonin. My bio well and truly hacked, I go to bed.