Not To Be Trusted With Knives

Nails

November 9, 2009 by Beth

So, yeah, this blog posting is one in which I talk about something extremely inconsequential.  But it’s NaBloPoMo and the pressure of trying to blog every day is giving me blogger’s block. Just be thankful I’m not writing about my new iPhone yet again!

This is the longest my nails have ever, ever been ((When Sarah & Dave were visiting, Sarah actually noticed this straight away: “Your nails are really long! They’ve never been that long!”)):

Like, see how you can see white at the end of my nails?  I’ve never had that before!

For as far back as I can remember, I’ve always destroyed my nails.  Sometimes I’d bite them, but often I would just rip them – my nails are pretty thin and easily ripped, so if I ever managed to grow them any length, they’d usually split and if I didn’t bite or rip them to get rid of the split bit, they inevitably catch on something and rip right down into my finger, which hurts like a sunnovabitch.

But for reasons known only to the FSM, a few months ago I started to grow my nails.  If I think back, I think I was on a nail polish wearing kick and when I wear nail polish, I tend not to bite or rip my nails ((no one wants to eat nail polish!)).  Now that they’ve grown to a reasonable length, I kind of like them and so I’ve been wearing nail polish all the time in an attempt to keep them long ((I just removed the polish I had on right before I took that photo and will put new polish on before I go to bed)).

I do, however, have one problem nail.  The index finger on my right hand has this really annoying split in it and I just can’t get rid of it (you can sort of see it on the right side of the photo):

At first I was trying grow the nail out so that the split would reach the point where it was past the end of my finger and I could cut it off. But instead the split kept going further and further down my nail!  I even bought nail glue to try to hold it together to give it time to grow out, but the glue inevitably didn’t hold more than a day or two. My friend Kim pointed out that once my nail reached any length where there could be pressure on the nail, that pressure would, of course, make the split go further down my nail (as pressure on either side would cause it to separate more), so then I trimmed the nail as far down as I could and kept trimming it, hoping to prevent the split from splitting further.  It’s helped a bit, but I just can’t get that last little bit of the split out. Honestly, this stupid nail is consuming far more of my attention that is even remotely appropriate.  And now, if anyone is actually reading this most boring of all blog posts, it’s consumed your attention unnecessarily for a whole paragraph too!

The other thing that has come up with this whole nail growing thing is that I discovered that I must have been using up a lot of my anxious energy by biting/ripping my nails ((I never really thought of myself as a very anxious person, but maybe that was because I always had that outlet for my anxious energy)) and now this anxious energy is trying to find a new place to go.  And the outlet it has found – scratching.  If I have a cut, I just can’t resist picking the scab ((TMI??)).  If I don’t, I find myself absent-mindedly scratching at my scalp.  Seriously.  Very weird.  I feel like I should be on A&E’s Obsessed ((I should probably also be on A&E’s Hoarders, but that’s a whole other blog posting)).  Anyway.  These are the thoughts that have been floating around in my brain of late and I’m hoping that writing them out will get them out of my brain!

And so ends the world’s most boring blog post.  I’ll try to post something a little less vapid and with more substance – you know, like about hot hockey players or what I’m naming my various electronic devices – for the rest of the month.

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