broken_nails tender_square somewhere between scrubbing the porcelain kitchen sink with comet, and using my nails to lift dirt off the ceramic floor the mop head couldn't lift, three of my nails broke. my right ring finger split down the center. my middle finger broke in the middle, red at the nail bed, while the edges made a flimsy wall on either side. and the index chipped and began to form peelable layers. i took the nail clippers and shred them to stubs. 230307 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Blather_synchronicity of sorts! Today on the train home I was reading an article about coding word usage by gender, about how you can sort of do this, but not always, and I walked home from the train thinking about why "I broke a nail!" is the supposed epitome of triviality. So, as I stepped through scapes of snow and sidewalk, I mentally graded the seriousness of nail-breaking from worst to least: 1. A break that extends to the nail part stuck to your skin. This is painful and takes a while to heal. 2. A break to acrylic nails, esp. if you paid for them at a salon. Which I've never done, but someone who does fairly Serious Life Work had a broken nail as an issue and noted, "This IS annoying!" 3. A break to the white part. My problem today. Trivial, yes, but it's annoying and gets caught on things. I'll have to trim the whole bunch. 230307 ... raze it was a rock that did me in. the front foot of my two-wheeler tripped over a mangled bit of mineral not much larger than a lost tooth, and i was airborne. the helmet kept my skull from cracking like the egg it was. my hands weren't so lucky. the busted nails hurt worse than any of the gashes my knees and knuckles suffered. i was surprised nothing else broke. when i told them what happened and they saw how hurt i was, they laughed. 230308 ... e_o_i Oh, ouch!! A few years ago, I dropped something on my toe, or jammed it in something, cracking the nail. Even when that healed, the blood must have dried under the nail bed, because the nail was purplish for weeks - not from bruising, I could tell, because the pattern of purple-ation moved up as the nail grew. That purple-brown marbling reminded me of the inside cover of a mini sketchbook I'd cherished as a kid. Out of pain came nature's art, even if I found it gross at first. ...Switching topics, I'm not quite happy with what I wrote on Tuesday. Saying that Erin got her nails done DESPITE doing Serious Things in Life reveals an internalized misogyny - the "feminine is frivolous" mindset I was supposed to be criticizing. Also self-centredness. Just because I don't do something doesn't mean Erin has to not-do the same thing. YOU CAN GET YOUR NAILS DONE, ERIN!! I GIVE YOU PERMISSION!!! (She needs my permission, you see.) Silliness aside, do I also have some latent Calvinist prejudice against self-indulgence? Because I'm going to another friggin country just to help my slow-ass mind absorb a language. If that isn't self-indulgence, I dunno what is. (Hey mind: you start with broken nails and you end up at "latent Calvinist prejudice against self-indulgence"? Apparently.) 230309 what's it to you? who go blather from