I've been staring at a computer screen all week at work; it's crrrrrazy.
In lieu of a more thoughtful post (I have one or two in the works, but they're a little more in-depth and therefore time-consuming), I'm going to write about fingernails.
My maternal grandfather's best redeeming quality is his fingernails. They're indecently long, strong, smooth, lovely. I always glare at his hands when I visit, irritated with my DNA for throwing out that gene and handing me the ridged, brittle, flaky fingernails that were a horrendous plague to a teenaged girl learning about obsessions with nail polish.
The best and most socially acceptable solution was to take piano lessons, which required the short, stubby fingernails my hands naturally seemed to favor. Fortunately my nail beds are deep and well-shaped enough that my fingernails still look elongated and slender; applying nail polish was just a bit messier for me than for other girls.
I found, in the end, that ingrained habits are like ivy, working stubborn little prying roots into the cracks of girlhood wishes: I prefer short nails. My undressed fingertips are more readily in control of what they're doing, and I have fewer calluses where the nails embed themselves in my palms when I write.
But if ingrained habit is strong, busyness and laziness are even stronger. And so, for probably the first time in my life, my fingernails are, for me, long (for the rest of the world, there) and strong (I must be eating properly), and all day as I've been typing dictations and murdering my eyes on the computer screen, my fingernails have skittered over the keys threatening me with typos and carpel tunnel.
And, true to form, and the dilemma that is modern womanhood, I'm torn between following my preference and cutting them off, and vainly preserving the prettiness of their social normalcy.
1 comment:
My maternal grandmother (my Nana) had the strongest, thickest, most beautiful nails; I was always envious because mine are thin and brittle. I, too, kept mine short for piano lessons, and devoid of polish, since I always managed to spill acetone on my hands in chem lab. I will occasionally paint them now, though it's rare. Often, I keep them short and bare, functional but not too pretty. If I try to grow them even a little, they break. *sigh* In any case, you've gotta keep short fingernails if you're doing rectal exams. I guess it's just as well. ha ha.
It's so funny that you'd write about this now because just 2 or 3 days ago, I was thinking of my Nana and her lovely fingernails.
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