On my way to church yesterday, I drove past a parked car with a bumper sticker that caught my attention. It read, in simple two-tone lettering: "The best things in life aren't things." How apt, I thought. Several lighter drawers and cleaner closets later, I'm beginning to need less and less convincing of this fact. For example, yesterday afternoon, hungry though I was, I made a deal with myself: you will not eat lunch until you clean up your room. After at least a month of watching piles of clothes, shoes, papers, and other miscellaneous items pile up along the edges of my room, it was time to finally deal with the mess. Originally, it was just that simple: time to wash some clothes and put things away. But somehow, it turned into more than just tidying. Over the course of three hours, I got rid of at least a dozen old prescription pamphlets, plus jackets, socks, underwear, hangers, Mardi Gras beads, old makeup, expired medicine, and t-shirts I couldn't bring myself to give away on day 7 but finally admitted I didn't need. All of a sudden, I was ready to get rid of everything. Opening drawers and doors and sifting through shelves, it became clearer how much stuff I have, and how little of it I really need. Of course, I had to stop myself after a large shopping bag started to overflow. If I give away everything all at once, what will I do for the remaining days of lent? Even as I write this, I am picking things up and forcing myself to put them back down.
When they say "Man, that was a nail-biter," I realize that as a kid, that described pretty much every situation. The nail-biting seemed constant. I was like a teenager addicted to cigarettes, except that no one mistakes nail-biting for something cool, not even people who do it regularly. It is at best a nervous mannerism, and at worse, an unattractive, unhygienic habit. It leaves your nails short, your nail beds sore, and your mouth constantly vulnerable to whatever bacteria was on the last thing you last touched. Thinking about it now, I'm amazed I didn't die of the flu as a child.I don't remember when I started biting my nails. In my imagination, though, it started when I was three, on the very day that my parents weaned me off my pacifier by throwing the last one I had into a tree in our front yard. I, of course, don't remember that incident, but just hearing the story makes me want to bite off a nail. I mean, imagine a three-year-old me with no pacifier to comfort her, wondering what other beloved item will end up doomed to that very same leafy fate? This is probably also when I stopped climbing trees and gained an overly-active fear of heights, a likely result of vicariously living out that pacifier's last day.
However the nail-biting really came to be, it was the beginning of a habit that could not be broken. My parents, not being nail-biters themselves, were ill-equipped to help me stop, so I had to resign myself to creative problem-solving and painful consequences when it didn't work. I remember those days vividly, those first fifteen-plus years to be exact, when I would wrap band-aids around my too-short nails as tight as I could to distract from the pain (an exposed nail bed is not something to play around with). I tried quite a few things: nail polish, sitting on my hands, ipecac, hair twirling...but nothing really helped until I set my chocolate sacrifice aside and gave my nails the lenten treatment instead.
While probably not adhering closely to the actual purpose of Lent, as a habit-forming or -breaking exercise, lent is amazing effective. If I made it a New Year's resolution to stop biting my nails, I might have made it a few days. But when nail-biting took a sinful turn, all of a sudden there were faint traces of white at the end of my nails. Like the top of a baby's head after 9 months of pregnancy and 12 hours of labor, those slivers of white at the end of my nail were a testament to a new beginning...and less frequent trips to K&B for bandaids.
Even with all the progress that I've made, I still never paint my fingernails. Sure, toenails, that's fine (As the less attractive digits, they could use a little glamming-up), but not fingernails. I don't know exactly the reason. Maybe the juxtaposition of dainty fingernail polish and large, bearish hands is just too much. Or maybe I like seeing the sliver of white at the end of my nail; it reminds me of a bad habit overcome. Either way, all this nail polish is a waste of space.
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While searching for information about fingernails (apparently the white part I was talking about called the distal edge), I came across this little gem... People are so weird.
(Modern Mechanix, 1932)
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