Ear Piercing Shriek

A few months ago the young and hygienic Chloë made me feel very old in the Lathe of Hedonia by making holes in my ears, for which I had bartered the generous and marvellous Vanilla Rose some herbs so that I could avail myself of their services.  This was all very very good.  As the needles went through my earlobes, for the first time I experienced matter passing completely through me, entering and exiting, over a period of less than a few minutes, and in my mind's eye I saw an image resembling Dali's Soft Self-Portrait as it happened.  I ended up with two of these, although I don't normally think of them this blurrily:

You try taking a photo of the side of your head while sitting here and see if you do any better.

I did of course have an ulterior motive in undergoing the piercings, but the less said about that the better.  I found them ludicrously easy to maintain, which was part of the experiment of course.  This was now well over thirteen weeks ago and it was problematically unproblematic.

That period, which is apparently a lot longer than anyone was expecting or than necessary, is now past, so last week I went out and bought a pair of these:

You will note from this photograph that far from being inserted in my earlobe, this earring is still on the card it was on when I bought it.  The reason for this is that I have so far been completely incapable of removing the sleeper from my ear.  I'm sure there's a really simple thing I'm missing here but have no idea what it is.  It's clearly supposed to unscrew but it just goes round and round and won't come apart.  So anyone, what's going on and how do I get it out?

There you go:  bet you weren't expecting a blog post like this were you?