Childhood fears

I haven't worn cuffed pants since I was a kid. Dirt would collect in the cuffs and I didn't like that. When I'm shopping for pants I simply cannot try on pants with cuffs because I know that they will fill themselves with sand.

I quit eating my pancakes with syrup when I was young. I would always get syrup on the fork's handle and my hands would get sticky. I hated sticky hands. For many years I would use just butter on pancakes and waffles. I use syrup again. My fork and fingers occasionally get sticky but I just get up and rinse them off now. (Jerry makes the best pancakes!)

I was always sure that aliens were outside the house at night, hovering above the ground, looking into the house though the windows that didn't have curtains. One night I woke up and there there was a strange hum filling the room. It could only be an alien spacecraft hovering outside the room! But it turned out that I had fallen asleep with an old shortwave radio turned on and the turner had drifted off into a staticky spot. I still have weird feelings when I make a (still infrequent) nighttime trip to the bathroom. It takes a lot of effort to look out the window. I still have the feeling that a Martian will be there watching me. (Martians are perverts.)

If Izzy can do it, so can I

Another political cartoon.


For the rest of Banned Books Week, you're on your own at New Adventures of Queen Victoria.

Bless you!

The habit of blessing a person who sneezes is one of those customs, like greeting someone with "how are you?," that really isn't doing anything more that acknowledging something about the other person. As far as I can tell, nobody really thinks that they're providing any real blessing to the sneezer since nobody knows where the custom came from. When somebody blesses me for sneezing I simply make a half-hearted attempt at a smile. I certainly don't say "thank you" since, being an unreligious person, I can't bring myself to encouraging religious behaviors (even though I don't think religion enters into it in anybody's mind when the blessing is going on).

Even a nonreligious "gesundheit" seems to me to be an unnecessary pointing out that somebody had an involuntary reaction to a tickle in his nose.

To me, all this seems about as necessary as hearing "who cut the cheese?" when somebody makes a different kind of involuntary emission.

I have a neighbor at work who quietly murmurs "bless you" whenever she hears a sneeze. The sneezers can't possibly hear these blessings. If the person she's addressing can't hear the blessing, is the blessing conferred? If so, couldn't it be done completely silently? If not, what's the point?

I lied. She doesn't bless everybody who sneezes. She blesses only those who can't hear her. If I sneeze I don't get blessed. My colleagues don't get blessings when they sneeze.

Does she hate us and wish us the evils that these "blessings" are supposed to ward off? I'm miffed. Confused, at least.

Thanks but I'll just go without clothes

In the movie "The Devil Wears Prada," Meryl Streep's character explains to her skeptical assistant how elements of this year's haute couture will be incorporated in the clothes she'll buy off the rack at Macy's next year.

I hope it doesn't work that way with men's fashions.

The New York Times gadget in my Google sidebar offered me this item from their fashion blog.

I would feel much more comfortable going naked than wearing this high fashion and I would certainly draw less attention to myself.

Fingernails

I have a lot of problems with fingernails. Mostly with other people's but occasionally with mine.

Mine first

My fingernails are thin. Razor thin. I have slashed myself with my nails. This usually happens when I'm pulling up my socks and I lose my grip (how hard do I tug on my socks?). My hand flies across my other hand and one of its little razors slices through my skin. My toenails also leave cuts on my legs when they grow out the least bit and I scratch a leg with the other foot's toenails. Those long, parallel tracks down my calves are kind of interesting.

Then I have a very odd sensation in my fingertips when the nails get around a 1/16^th of an inch long and I fold towels and washcloths to put them away. I can't really describe it but I get chills up my arms when my nails slide across terry cloth. (This is what inspired this little essay.) I think the problem happens when the thin nails start eroding and get ragged. They seem to catch on the loops in an odd way. It's weird.

Even though I'm not fond of long (1/16^th inch is long?) nails, I seem to have a hard time trimming them. I smashed one finger in a door while at college. Under that nail seems to have been scarred and the skin underneath forgets to let go of the nail as it grows out. Trimming that nail usually nicks that skin. Maybe that's why I let the nails grow longer than I'm comfortable with.

Enough about my nails.

Other People's Nails

I have a major problem with fingernails that aren't attached to fingers. My mind seems to be on constant lookout for loose nails. I encounter loose nails a lot. One day while walking up the stairs at work I happened to see somebody's fingernail on the floor and that freaked me out.

Trimming nails in the stairway is one thing but in a meeting? I was in a meeting I had no interest in and one of the attendees felt the need to clip his nails. (Maybe he was as interested in the meeting as I was.) He was good at it and didn't have to look at what he was doing. At one point he had his hands above his head and was clipping away. I wanted to run out of the room screaming but I kept calm somehow.

Jerry knows of my problem with loose nails. One day he warned me that one of his got away from him in the bathroom. He tried to save me from it but couldn't find it. I later went into the bathroom and my fingernail detector instantly found it. I called for help. I wouldn't touch it.

(There are occasionally false alarms. One day I got freaked out over what turned out to be a shred of Parmesan cheese on the floor that missed its plate of spaghetti.)

Flying Fingernail

I was in the checkout line at a grocery store when a red thing came flying across the store. This was in the old days when cash registers had buttons that were spring loaded. A cashier nearby had pressed on a key and her finger slipped off of it and the button sprang back and threw her glued on nail in my direction. It missed. She and my cashier had a good laugh over this.

Long Fingernails

Long nails bother me and I don't want to be touched by them. I shudder when I see a cashier with long nails digging change out of the drawer for me. Maybe that's why I usually use credit cards now.

Extreme Fingernails

Jerry and I were flying to or from New Mexico and were changing planes in Phoenix. We spent the long time between flights being fascinated by a woman who had the longest, ugliest nails I've ever seen. They were four or five inches long if you ran a measuring tape along the surface of the nails. If you measured from the tip of the nail to the fingertip it would be much less. They curled like corkscrews. She protected them from damage by wrapping them in scotch tape or saran wrap or something like that. How could she find those nails attractive? How can she function with those nails? She couldn't possibly dig change out of a cash register drawer or even hold a pen. It must have been a control thing. Like watching that train wreck, as horrified as I was by them I couldn't keep my eyes off of them. (Remembering those is surely going to give me nightmares.)