Holy Sweet Mother of Nipple Miracles

Everyone who reads this blog is aware that miracles bestow themselves upon me with incredible frequency, and so it will be no surprise that when I walked into the English Office yesterday morning and one of the female teachers-- who will remain nameless-- said to me "That's it! I can see your nipples again! I've been biting my tongue since September, but every morning when you walk in here-- maybe it's cold outside-- but your nipples are hard and poking through your shirt!" and this started a large-scale-nipple-dialogue with the other teachers in the room and we determined that women have to worry about protruding nipples but men do not (someone remarked that the teacher that made the comment about my nipples had thought far more about my nipples than I ever had . . . because men don't worry about their nipples) and this coincidentally tied in to the Susan Sontag essay we were reading in class, called "A Woman's Beauty: Put Down or Power Source," because Sontag claims that beauty is an "obligation" for women and that they are taught see their body in "parts, and to evaluate each part separately . . . breasts, feets, hips, waistline, neck, eyes, nose, complexion, hair, and so" and they need to fretfully and anxiously scrutinize each of these-- and protruding nipples are verboten-- while in men good looks are "taken at a glance" and have to do with the "whole" and so after we read a bit of Twelfth Night, where Olivia expresses the same sentiment, then I showed the class the infamous Mean Girls clip, where Cady learns that there's far more than fat and skinny, and that your hairline can be weird, you can have man shoulders, your nail beds and your calves might suck or your pores might be too large . . . and I had forgotten-- miraculously-- that the scene starts with Regina's mom and her boob job (they're hard as rocks) and her incredibly sharp nipples, that stab Cady . . . bringing the discussion full-circle: a miracle in every way, shape, and form!