Facing my Worst Habit: It's a Nailbiter!

All my life, I have hidden my hands.  Just don't look at them.  Please, just don't ever look at them. 

I feel this way about my hands for two reasons.  One is within my control.  One is not. 

First, I am a nail biter. Not just a now-and-then nail chewer, but an all-the-time, down-to-the-quick, bite-it-till-it-bleeds/hurts nail biter. The only time I ever managed to stop biting my nails enough to be willing to present them at all was for our wedding, 31 years ago.  Even then, I bit the thumb nail. 

That thumb nail. 

Which brings me to the second reason that I feel as I do about my hands: I have a birth defect that, while not all that obvious otherwise, becomes quite obvious when you look at my right hand. I was born with three thumbs - one on my left hand (duh!) and two on my right hand (huh?). 

The rouge right thumb was removed when I was 18 months old.  This is the only existing photo that shows it… kind of.

Fast forward fifty-seven years later, to yesterday.  Kat came home for the weekend and suggested that she and I “get our nails done.”  Apparently, this is something that her friends in junior high and high school did with their mothers and Kat always envied them.  So, she decided, it was finally time.

“No WAY am I going to willingly show my hands to a stranger!” I protested.  But Kat would have none of it. “It’s time to face your insecurities and to confront this habit,” she told me. 

(Is this the beginning of the child parenting the parent?  You know how that ends, don’t you…?)

So off we went.  But first, the before photo.  It was hard enough taking the damn photo, but attaching it here is…

OK, fine.  I can hardly look.  And you should just take a quick peek and move on.

There you go.  Move on now.

Yes, you may call me Stubby. (Pretty bad, eh?)

I pretty much wanted to turn around and leave.  Instead, we did this:

Yes, I freaked out when she put those dragon claws on me!  But Kat reassured me that they’d cut them shorter. 

I started by telling myself that this woman had probably seen far worse than my stubby nails, and that she really didn’t even care about my nails.  That made it easier to stay in my seat.  Once I relaxed into it, I even liked it!

And the best part?

LOOK!

(My hands sure look older than I had realized.  But look!  I have fingernails!)

(And possibly arthritis?!!)

Even my retarded thumb doesn’t look all that bad!

  

I just might replace that biting habit with a new habit of getting my nails done!

Thanks, Kat!  Cheers to you!

Heartbroken. (Boo is missing.)

Last Saturday evening, four nights ago, Boo joined me as I read a book on the bed of our new travel trailer as it was parked in our driveway. 

I remember saying jokingly to Boo, “Geeze! Can you purr a little more quietly?  I can hardly hear myself read!” He was so content in the crook of my arm, his favorite place to be when we’re hanging out together – which was all the time.

A while later, Boo and I, along with Simon, Quinn, and Shasta, left the trailer.  And that was the last I saw of my beloved Boo boy.  He just never came in that night – or the next, or the next. 

Tom and I fear the worst because Boo NEVER stays away from home for more than a night.  Needless to say, we are absolutely heartbroken.

I’ve put up signs around the neighborhood and our vet (who is a half mile away) was nice enough to post a flyer, but so far we have had no news at all about what might have happened to sweet Boo.  My guess is that a coyote got him.

This is how I’ve been feeling all week:

I just want my Boo-Boo back.

Six benefits of blogging over facebooking

About five years ago, I joined Facebook.  Coincidentally (NOT!), about five years ago I stopped blogging with any real consistency.  Because Facebook is so easy, it’s been hard for me to go back to blogging. Not because I don’t like blogging – I actually love it – but because it seems that I am a damn lazy communicator. 

‘Listen up, Carol,’ I’ve told myself recently. ‘You really should get back to blogging – if for no other reason than that you LIKE it more than you like facebooking.’  And then I proceed to tell myself why:

1. Because you’re making a point, telling a story, or recounting an experience, you have to actually write when you blog. Facebook – at least the way I’ve been doing it -- doesn’t require the ability to write. In terms of expressive language, Facebook is usually more of a grunt to blogging’s strung-together words that form actual sentences.
2. The only people who read your stuff on Facebook are people you deem as “friends.” The people who read stuff on your blog are people who decide you have something interesting to say.  (And then, if they actually like enough of what you have to say, they sometimes they become friends because of it.)
3. Blogging is like journaling.  Facebooking is like texting.  When I’m long gone, my journals will give far more insight into who I was than my texts will.
4. In term of cataloging, it’s a whole lot easier to find a blog entry you wrote three years ago than it is to find a Facebook post you wrote three years ago.  I can hardly find a Facebook post I did three days ago!
5. Blogging is often like going to a foreign country, in terms of the comments and feedback I get, while facebooking is more like going to my high school reunion.  This can be both terrifying and gratifying.
6. Blogging requires me to stop and think, to be mindful, careful, and detail-oriented, and to review more carefully what I’m sending out to the world. Posting to Facebook is much more impulsive for me.  ‘Hey, my cat’s being cute…’  Snap. Navigate. Attach. Post. This is neither bad nor good; it just is.

All of this said, I found myself posting to Facebook a few times today. 

I mean, seriously, am I really going to blog about an unexpected make-up-in-a-store-with-a-delightful-gay-man-who-made-me-feel-great-about-myself experience, which ended in me buying an unprecedented $112 (gasp!) worth of make-up? 

Ya know, now that I think about it, I really should have!

Sigh.  This re-focus might take a while…