Shnawr, shnawr, shnawr, shnawr.
Yes, that's the sound of me gnawing away.
It's a nervous habit. Sometimes it goes away, sometimes it comes back and makes my fingertips bleed (well, wait. Not my fingertips, per se, rather the top of the nail bed? Sure. We'll go with that), but not really. My best friend in elementary school used to literally chew her nails down to bloody stumps. Gross. My father and step-mother still remind me to keep my fingers out of my mouth. I'm 23. Sometimes my older brother chimes in, and then I cut him with a jagged - half-filed by mouth - nail. That's what ye get! Yes, I'm a cockney-ed scaliwag!
Also, whenever I do manage to get some suckers growing, I get hangnails. My toenails grow faster than my fingernails. (I almost wrote "handnails" -what?! A disturbing image if you can imagine nails on your knuckles, not necessarily sticking up like Wolverine, but covering the knuckle, protectively, as only a nail can do.)
I like having long-ish nails, though for aforementioned reasons this is hard for me to attain.
Also, I play guitar. This requires my left fingernails to be shorter than average so I can zip and zoom (or rather fumble) along the frets and notes.
When I was a little girl, my Grandma Dorothy (Dad's Mom) - we called her Dot - would pay me $5 if I had nails when I saw her. I never got those $5 bills... if I did, I can't remember, and I probably spent it on candy. (I LOVE CANDY!) This is the same Grandma who lived in California, loved bowling and Boston Terriers.
She loved those little Terriers so much in fact that she had one after another (no, she didn't give birth to them, but bought) and named them all "Boots" I-VI - sequentially - (she was a knitter, too, and had little knit portraits of them on her wall - she was a widow) I think it got up to 6, yeah... and then there was "Terry" the Boston Terrier, too. Towards the end, "Boots VI" developed a cataract, which made it hard for him to play catch. One Christmas he ran straight into the sliding glass door - hilarious! This was the same Christmas he knocked down my li'l baby brother and humped the hell out of him. My older brother and I thought this was the funniest thing we'd ever seen - so did everyone else in the fam - but my step-mother freaked the fuck out, and was nooooooooot happy. She screamed, "Get off my baby! Get off my baby!" As she ran to shoo Boots off of a gigglin' and confused baby, causing everyone to clutch their sides. She collected her baby and shot us all a look that said, "This is not funny." After the laughing subsided and Boots roamed outside to eat butterflies, we all breathed a sigh of relief as we wiped the happy tears out of our eyes. FAMILY!!!
Grandma Dot also took me and my brother to see "A League of Their Own" (I think I cried and didn't know why I was so sad, ahhh the emotional capacity of a 7-year old, and then I wished Madonna was my aunt, if not my cool babysitter) when I was a small girl, and I remember she sat on a phone book as she drove us to the theater and could barely see over the wheel, let alone through the haze of cigarette smoke that circled around the maroon crushed velvet interior - she shouldn't have been driving. She also drank a tall glass of iced buttermilk every morning, paired with a cigarette, while she helped us pick the best oranges to juice - OH, CALIFORNIA!!! What fond memories I have of you during Christmas-time. She also had a slug problem in her garden, so, sometimes after lunch, she would set us loose in her yard with salt shakers. It was fun watching 'em squirm around.
There are many more stories I have of the funny things Grandma Dot did, and I've seriously thought about attempting to write a book of short stories about the people and places that've influenced me over my short 23 years on this planet. For Grandma Dot I would do a comparison/contrast storytelling-style paired up with my Grandma Arlene (Mom's Mom). Arlene & Dot it would be called. The name of the collective work? I don't know yet. Both of my awesome, and very different, Grandmas died before the turn of this century. Yeah, it's sad, but not as sad as it is for my parents. How horrible would it be to lose a parent, let alone both. Grandma Arlene died in '97, '98?, I can't even remember, but occasionally my Mom still cries about missing her - I probably would, too, Grandma Arlene was incredible and the best storyteller! Luckily, my Momma still has my Grandpa Bill. My parents are never going to die, ever. I keep them in Foreverware (from "Eerie, Indiana" - doiy!!) to keep 'em fresh.
Oh yeah, so I started this post around pre-lunch and still had a thumbnail... but I gnawed it off. No nail tapping in boredom for me!!
Modest Mouse's "One Chance" is a pretty song. It always makes me want to live a better life, and it reminds me of my family, and my friends, and my habits, but mostly my family, and ships. I like it. Prolific description, huh? Eyeaaaaaaaah.
