The other week we bought ear candles to celebrate the end of the working week, because that’s apparently how we celebrate Fridays in our office.

Some workplaces go out for beers, others shoot hoops, while apparently we’re the people who take an excursion en masse to a crystal shop and buy so many earwax products the staff feel inclined to give a group discount. I’m not entirely sure how it started, but one flippant comment about someone wanting to try to clear their ear holes of apparently useful orange gunk sent me off into a spin.

I’ve written about ear candles before. I can’t be bothered trying to find the link containing that poetic prose, but suffice to say that my enthusiasm for ear candling is perhaps on par with Pauline Hanson’s passion for hating on Muslim immigrants: it’s kind of irrational, clearly repulsive and something you should be embarrassed about posting about on social media. I know that earwax is helpful, contributes to positive functioning of the body as a whole and any harm it is causing me is purely a work of fiction flamed by an overactive imagination, but, just like Pauline Hanson and Pauline Pantdown, I don’t like it (I think I just used earwax as a metaphor for Muslim immigrants, but I’d like to point out that I didn’t exactly plan this to be a political comment; it just sort of happened that way).

I also really enjoy looking at gross things. Those videos where people pop monstrosities of pimples are my pornography. That video were a family digs out a decades-old blackhead was almost (ALMOST) a turn on for me. My brother in law has a nose that excretes gunk from the pores just by a little pressure and it’s enthralling; I’m almost certain that was one of the key reasons my sister married him in the first place.

So of course ear candling is right up there in my list of favourite pastimes, along with “being fantastic” and “having skin”.

Because ear candles bring together a great many of my interests like laying down, burning things, seeing how much wax can be packed into an ear canal at any one time and grand reveals. Seriously, the last episode of The Biggest Loser in which the contestants are all glammed up and show off their miraculous bods has nothing on what happened when you unwrap that wax cone and see the orange delights inside. I’ve never been a mother, but I imagine finding those irregularly-shaped nuggets of wax is not unlike that feeling I assume all women get when they have their by-product of their bodies thrust into their arms for the first time: sheer amazement at what you’ve created.

Then you look around and, like I also imagine all mothers do, compare your creation to what your friends have had ripped out of an orifice. That’s when things get really juicy, because expectations are always high going into a candle sesh, particularly for those who haven’t done it before. The people you expect to have wax sausages have a mere smear, while those dainty fucks in your friendship circle produce enough of the stuff to make a crayon. It can be a very revealing activity.

So I was incredibly disappointed when only myself and one other brave soul candled that afternoon. The person who suggested the idea backed out, and said they’d do it at home. Which obviously is not the point.

The point is to do it as a group. I mean, we bought the shit from a store that sold rocks for calming purposes and had oils for the soul; clearly this was supposed to be a ritualistic fucking experience. This was supposed to be circle of truth. Because we all know there are few things more spiritual than becoming one with a group by comparing how much gunk was shoved in your ears. On my sister’s hen’s weekend we set aside an hour to light up our canals and I’d have to say it really cemented the bonds of friendship. We laughed, we gasped, we dry retched, we poked excrement with cotton buds. It was a beautiful thing to watch and be a part of.

But, alas, we would have no such encounter with corporate candling. The whole thing kind of fizzled. Perhaps I’d revealed too much too soon. Perhaps I was too eager. Perhaps that kind of intimacy is something that just can’t be rushed.

Maybe I simply should rethink my friendship-building methods. Coincidentally, I’m going to take a dark orange-coloured sweet potato pie to work tomorrow.