Self-Improvement and thumbs

I have the bad habit of chewing on my cuticles. I don't know quite how it started. When I was a small child I used to suck on my first two fingers. (Several of my peers sucked their thumbs, and I remember thinking that was silly. This was apparently before I understood irony.) When I was in middle school I chewed my fingernails, which I may have picked up by watching my sister. There was once a time when my sister's friend showed me how she chewed her cuticles, and I was really disgusted. But then, some time in high school, I switched from chewing my fingernails to the skin around them.

The difference is that the soft bits protected by fingernails hurt immediately if the nails get too short. Cuticle skin is dead and doesn't hurt, or show any signs of true distress, until it starts to bleed. There have been times when all of my fingers are torn up, the skin ragged down to the first knuckle, with several of them scabbing from recent bleeding. It sounds gross because it is. I'm very self-conscious about it. I'm always surprised that very few people notice.

It is a compulsion. I don't even notice I'm doing it until it's too late. I've identified that a big problem is feeling the ragged bits scrape or catch on anything. I want to cut off the offending hangnail. My incisors being the only cleaving tools available, I end up biting or tearing the skin off. Of course, this makes the skin more ragged (and harder for it to grow back). Always wanting to stop, I try to beat it with pure will. Every year I plan to stop chewing my fingers as a new year's resolution, or for lent, or just as a goal for myself. I stopped chewing my fingernails during one of these bouts of determination (and it stuck to this day), but I have never succeeded in laying off the fingers. The closest I have gotten is during my last year in Cleveland I would obsessively manicure myself while sitting at my desk. There was little left to catch or scrape. My fingers generally stayed out of my mouth, but the end results of over-manicuring weren't much better.

Recently I've been going back to a tried-and-true trick. I've been covering up my thumbs with bandaids. Every morning I put them on, every night I take them off and let my thumbs air out. I carry spares in my wallet. It's been fairly effective, as it has been in the past. The thumbs are my go-to fingers for chewing, so having them covered keeps me off of the other fingers for the most part. Seeing the bandages, people have been asking what's wrong with my thumbs and it's embarassing to tell them, but it seems to be working.

I am proud of my progress. It might be the healthiest my fingers have been in a decade. Pretty soon they will be healed to the point where the bandaids will serve no further practical purpose, and I will have to decide whether I will wear bandaids for the rest of my life or if I'm ready to try and go it alone. I am not confidant of my ability to keep it up.

This may be an extended metaphor.

Runs in the family stocking

On a break at work today I read the comics in the paper. When I came back someone asked me how my break was and I said, "it was good, I read the paper." If you only have a few minutes, glancing over the front page and reading the comics totally counts as reading the newspaper.

When I got home my dad was already back from work. He said he had a very productive day and had come home early. He was "catching up on the paper [he] didn't read this morning." When he set down the paper a little while later I took a look at it, and sho' nuff it was the very same comics page.

Between my dad and me, people have always compared our faces, voices, senses of humor, facial-hair-growing-abilities and the like, but this was a comparison that really hit it home for me. As my Aunt Kitty (my dad's sister) used to say, "no matter how you fight it, you turn out like your parents!" Of course, there are always differences, often major ones, but there are some inheritances you just can't deny.

Pictures on the internet

UltimateGuitar.com is pretty great for finding tabs, and I guess other people also use it for guitar-related news and information. They tend towards nü-metal/alternative preferences, which I find ironic considering most of that guitar work is boring power chord stuff that anyone could learn in 10 minutes. Anyway, like I said I only use it for the extensive tab database (they also have non-nü-metal), but in order to access the tabs you have to see the homepage. The other day this image spanned the page, see if you notice the same thing I did:



That's right: all the dudes in nü-metal bands look the same. They all have the same goatees, the same gross hair, and even tilt their heads at the same angle. Even these guys have more variety. Maybe when they say it's "alternative rock" they mean that it's an alternative name for the same band. "Sevendust releases new album, this time calling themselves 'Nickelback.' A follow-up as 'Chimaira' is expected soon."

Second up in the weird internet-pictures series are the following gems from myspace's log-off page:





Now, I'm single. I wouldn't mind a girlfriend. I didn't know it was girlfriend season, but I was already keeping my eyes open so I guess now it's legal. And what am I keeping my eyes open for? You guessed it: chicks tearing off their jewlery while grabbing their boobs, and chicks who are soaking wet from the shoulders down and are pointing at me with their nipples. Actually, scratch that first one. If I can't see the nipples straight up then I don't think she's the girl for me. My priorities lay mainly on nipples.

On the same goodbye page from myspace (where I am registered as a heterosexual man) I also received this reminder:



Apparently right after girlfriend season is boyfriend season. It seems strange for them not to coincide, for the sake of each other, but for me at least it gives me another chance. If "wabbit season" ends and I still haven't caught me a girlfriend, then I just call "duck season" and wait for them to find me. That's why I've been working out:











See?

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edit 4/6/07

Oh my gracious. I'm sure I'm supposed to be enticed by her perky breasts, but I am far to terrified of the rest of her. I hope this is photoshopped somehow and isn't what she actually looks like.