Blather on Bad Habits

I don’t really feel like writing today, but I’m trying to make myself. So I’ll be brief. I spent $92 at the used bookstore on Saturday and all I want to do is read. Today I finished Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, and lord, let me tell you, there is nothing better than fiction for reluctant young adult readers. I’m eager to move on to The Count of Monte Cristo (which is, I think, 1844’s answer to fiction for reluctant young adult readers—people didn’t live to be much older than 30 anyway, right?), so I’ll be brief with the following:

A Meditation on The Number One Activity I Do When I Sit Down to Write: Nail Biting

It’s amazing how satisfying biting my nails is. And time-consuming. And complicated. Nails that did not previously need shortening suddenly begin SCREAMING for the knife…or the tooth…when I sit down to write. I know it’s kind of gross. I don’t bite them to the quick or anything, just the tiny half-moons that are ready, well-clear of the skin. I started biting my nails as a conscious decision. Precocious 8-year-old that I was, I knew that all interesting people had bad habits, and I didn’t have one. I guess I didn’t consider reading too much or preferring the company of adults to that of children a bad habit. This meant only one thing: If I didn’t have a bad habit, I needed to adopt one. But what were my options? Nose-picking was just nasty—at times, a practical necessity, I’ll admit, but definitely not a cool bad habit or one you could do in front of others and get the fascinating-points I was hoping for. And of course all the adult bad habits—drinking, smoking, passive-aggression, serial monogamy, soap operas—were still a bit beyond the pale.

The characters in books who bit their nails always had exciting lives. They bit their nails from nervousness, yes, but this meant they were the kind of people who had things to be nervous about! Which meant their lives were exciting! Full of passion and scandal! Which meant people were fascinated with them. And that they were well-rounded. If I started biting my nails, I would be all of these things too.

It was a little weird at first, and harmless enough. I suppose it still is. I don’t like having my nails long anyway because I feel like my hands are unusable—like Edward Scissorhands or something (Katherine Nailhands…hmm. Not the same ring to it…). Or too delicate, like the porcelain hands they use to display rings. So if it’s a matter of having short nails, it doesn’t make TOO much difference whether they’re short from cutting or from biting. Although duh, they look worse when you bite them. And I never wear nail polish on my fingernails either, partly because I hate how it feels (it makes my fingertips feel like they’re wearing a mouthguard) but also, admittedly, because as dubious as the health and hygiene of biting one’s nails is, it is grosser to bite painted nails than non-painted nails. But I totally don’t understand how people keep fingernail polish pristine. I only know one person personally who does this as a matter of course, and that’s Cari. That means it must be a myth that such things are possible for ordinary people.

Speaking of nail polish, an interesting tangent: long before I ever used it for its intended purposes on a regular basis (toes only, of course), as far as I was concerned its primary uses were medicinal (curing chigger bites) and practical (nipping runs in your stockings in the bud). It seems like half the world (or rather, half the people who even know what the heck chiggers are) firmly believes that chiggers burrow inside your skin and stay there till you suffocate them—with nail polish, of course—and the other half believes this is hogwash and they just bite you like normal beasts. What is the truth? Mythbusters should do a show on this. While the former does sound a bit alarmist and like something that only happens in the southern hemisphere, I am here to tell you that nail polish works. Maybe it just keeps you from scratching, or maybe it actually suffocates the microscopic parasitic invaders. But it works. And then, of course, the pantyhose use = brilliance. Just be sure to use clear if the run is in a visible place, or else you risk looking slightly mutilated.

Another tangent: hangnails. And why the bejesus do they hurt so much? How can something this big: , hurt SO MUCH? And where do they come from, and what purpose do they serve? Rarely do I experience such satisfaction followed immediately by deep regret as I do when I just yank one out. ‘Cause you know, when you don’t have nail clippers with you, and it’s just hangin’ there, hangin’ out it true hangnail fashion, whispering like the devil on your shoulder, “You know you want to. You want to so bad. Just pull me. Forget the week of inflammation you will suffer. Forget the blood on your hands that will make perfect strangers think you forgot to wash your hands after changing your tampon. Just yank. Like you’ve never yanked before.”

So…wow. Gross. Three pages on nailbiting, hangnails, and chiggers. These seem like things that only an overly-talkative teenager could blather for so much time on. Perhaps I do have a future in young-adult fiction, after all…

Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

The last time my whole family went to the beach together was, I believe, in 2004. As always, we chose the small stretch of beach in the Alabama panhandle (what? Alabama has a panhandle? Indeed, a little-known fact that may prove quite useful at cocktail parties). We used to come here every year during my childhood, but there had been a hiatus for several years due to my grandfather’s illness and everyone’s mismatched schedules. So on this, the Thompson Beach Reunion Tour ’04, after my grandfather’s death, we revisited old haunts by staying at Vista del Mar, a vintage relic that evokes all the charm of 50’s Pleasantville perfection, though now of course with a coating of decaying grandeur. It’s not a bad place, and, although a high-rise, it’s the last of the strip, so that walking down the beach east of the building there is soon nothing but dunes, seagrass, and the big blue sea.

I don’t remember too much about this particular trip. I remember trying to walk all the way to the end of the beach, but never quite making it. I remember playing stupid games with Robin in the pool and laughing so hysterically that the other poolside guests had to have been made quite uncomfortable. I remember heading to the highest level of the building to try to get phone service in order to talk to Jodi. There was my cousin Margaux’s wedding, which is the subject of another story for another time. As usual, there was the overabundance of seafood and the dread of the blast of air conditioning as you walked inside while soaking wet. Other than that, the trip blurs together in a montage of blonde and blue, sand and sky—except for one evening, which began like any other but ended in something akin to the final scene of Lord of the Flies.

So, among our age-old beach traditions is that of buying a Florida lottery ticket. When we started going to the beach, Florida was the only state in the southeast that had a lottery, so we saw it as a once-a-year opportunity to squander a hard-earned dollar or two on a raffle with impossible odds. We always stayed in Alabama, as previously noted, but being only a few miles from the Florida border, we would drive into Pensacola on occasion and usually stop for a lottery ticket at the Florabama—a dive bar that straddles the border (read about their legendary Mullet Toss). During the week before purchasing the ticket, we would all put our best efforts into channeling the supernatural forces that would cause us to win, and write down numbers that revealed themselves to us through divine intervention—the number 27 appeared to us in a dream; we saw 43 on 3 different license plates in a span of ten minutes, the numerology behind my birthdate was 3, etc. We would choose our six fateful numbers this way, and wait. It was always exciting, especially when I was really little. I knew that we faced impossible odds, yet to a child (who thinks $100 is a sum akin to the riches of King Midas), impossible odds still seem just possible enough that it’s worth waiting with bated breath as the numbers are drawn.

So, again, in 2004 it had been several years since we had last played the lottery. By then, I think Georgia had its own, but we never played it, having the irrational (yet fortunate) attitude that the lottery was something only to be done in Florida, and only on special occasions, one week a year while vacationing and channeling numbers through divine inspiration. For some reason, I suppose disinterest or disillusionment, we did not buy separate tickets—one for my family, one for my aunt and uncle, one for my grandmother—but my grandmother, instead, bought one ticket and casually declared that if it won anything we could all share it. I think we all contributed our special numbers, reasoning that the force would be stronger if everyone’s paranormal prophetic abilities were pooled.

We bought the ticket, and, with the drawing the next day, began to playfully imagine what we would do with the winnings.

It began as idle dinner conversation. Simple hypotheticals. The eternal question, what would you do with a million dollars? I believe we began this way, not considering practicalities but simply dreaming, desiring—my parents would fix their fallingdown house that is currently caught in a race between their retirement and its own decay. My grandmother would travel to Paris again, or Sweden, or be set in the event of a medical situation. Robin could pay for school, I could travel, get Jodi a green card, my aunt and uncle could settle the legal dispute over their land and finally have time to finish their house. How wonderful, how perfect, how problemless our lives would be if we could have these simple things! But then, someone, and I don’t remember with 100% certainty who (although I could guess), asked the fateful question: Well, wait—how are we going to split the winnings, anyway?

I am of the opinion that it was not the question itself but the semantics that screwed us: note the certainty of the future tense, the rhetorical step that took us from the realm of the hypothetical, the conditional, to the certain. Talking about money you might win (when really you don’t have a chance in hell) is a different beast than talking about money you have won. That was the mistake. But words are so small, their complexities so hard to notice sometimes, so easy to spit out and so impossible to retract. So we all continued the conversation, oblivious to the deadly turn it had taken, discussing how we were going to split our millions.

I think everyone in my immediate family just assumed we were splitting it seven ways—one for each of the people involved. It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be another way to split it—I mean, it should all rightfully go to my grandmother, since she bought the ticket, but if she chose to share, and, I mean, since I had contributed my divine number to the ticket, surely I was entitled to something? But another party objected to that, claiming it wasn’t fair for our “household” to get 4/7 of the earnings when both the other “households” would get less just because there were less people in them. I thought it was rather fair, because more people cost more money, and my sister and I don’t technically even belong to my parents’ household anymore. Well, maybe Robin does/did, as an eligible dependent, but I certainly didn’t. Yeah, so maybe Robin shouldn’t get her share, but I should (haha, more for me!!). But my grandmother sided with that faction, saying it wasn’t their fault that they didn’t have children. Which is true, but not the issue at hand—it’s not like Robin and I would be sharing our millions with our parents, and it definitely wasn’t the case that my mom and my aunt would share theirs with their parents. Parent. Why would we share with those who shed their blood, sweat, tears, and, well, yes, money, on us anyway? It’s not like we asked to be born. They got themselves into this pickle. Just thinking about it sends me into a frenzy a la Finding Nemo, “Mine! Mine! Mine!.”

My mom made a halfhearted attempt to stick up for us, saying that we were people too who should be included in the group we’ll call, for these purposes, “family.” We were over 18 (well, I was), and therefore—but the opposition was too strong, and, while I value my personhood and would have valued my cut of the winnings, after a point it wasn’t worth the fight. My memory of how it ended is unclear. I’m sure someone sullenly did the dishes, plodded through putting away the food. I think I gave up and said that however they chose to split things would be fine. But we went to bed, if not angry, then miffed, disgruntled, off-kilter, wronged, betrayed, misunderstood. As my mom and I were getting ready for bed, we looked at each other with the eyes of doomed puppies. “Oh, my God,” Mom said, “I sure hope we don’t win.”

Do you remember the story by Shirley Jackson called “The Lottery,” which you undoubtedly read in high school? If not, I won’t give it away, but you should read it here. Someone undoubtedly knew something about the macabre dynamics of chance—or, more to the point, of human nature. But we proved, that night, like the best of the deceptive psychological experiments on the demonic nature of humanity (the Stanford Prison experiment, the Milgram obedience experiments, Jane Elliott’s blue-eyes v. brown-eyes shenanigans—don’t tell me the IRB approved that shit!), not to mention Mean Girls and The Devil Wears Prada, that love is a logical fallacy based on the premise that altruism exists. Maybe I’m being harsh. But even without being quite that harsh, I can say with certainty that money (read: greed) will ruin people. You don’t even have to have the money, you just have to pretend you have it for about half an hour to start seeing the effects.

The next day we looked at the paper, or watched TV (I can’t remember now how we heard the news), with dread, for once praying—I was, at least—that we would not win the lottery. Suffice it to say, we didn’t. We breathed a sigh of relief and moved on, stuffing the uncomfortable dynamics under a rug for the time being.

As an epilogue, I should note that following that debacle, my grandmother supposedly (I’m going on hearsay) reapportioned her will so that both her children are considered equally, rather than taking into account the children (i.e. Robin and me) of one of her children. It doesn’t matter. I think in some way she’s trying to level the playing field—my aunt was supposed to have a baby once, but a terrible twist of fate prevented it. Even after a quarter of a century, some wounds are still too fresh to be written, and so I won’t go further, but I think my grandmother is doing all she knows how to make my aunt feel valued and validated as a woman in her own right, with or without having provided grandchildren. If money would provide any consolation for pain, I would give my hypothetical lottery winnings to her in a heartbeat. And my inheritance. Because I suspect she, in a heartbeat, would give all of hers to have her child.

New Year's Resolutions

A few summers back, a certain couple who shall remain nameless were fond of somewhat aggressively praying before meals in the dining hall. Although not overt proselytes, the aggression lay in the fact that if you were sitting near them, it was unignorable. For one thing, they had to sit directly across from one another in order to hold hands. If such facing seats were not available, the two would either ask someone already seated at the table to move, or, more often than not, take the more passive-aggressive approach of sighing, exchanging meaning-laden glances, and ultimately reaching ACROSS other diners in order to hold hands while they prayed, for what felt like a small eternity. Perhaps it was only a mere 20 seconds or so, but such awkwardness can feel like minutes, and in those minutes the reached-across person would be left to contemplate A) whether such breaches of manners are permissible in matters of faith, B) why the handholding part was really necessary in such circumstances, C) how her food was getting cold because, as gauche as it is to reach across someone to pray, surely it must be even moreso to reach around that supplicating arm for a tater tot and gobble it up, not to mention the risk of embarrassing ketchup drippage, and D) the fact that she, the reached-across person, was not praying, but instead spending the same amount of time and energy scheming about how to circumvent the obstacle of said pious appendage and get a tater tot from her plate to her mouth, including ketchup.

It was that lattermost point that nagged at me, long after the annoyance of the situation had morphed into nostalgic hilarity. Because as annoying as it was, the reason why it felt so uncomfortable was that, though they seemed self-important and absurdly serious, next to their devotions I felt shallow and superficial. The rest of us complained about the terrible food (and it was quite terrible), but these two thanked Jesus for it. For, like, minutes at a time. The rest of us made mashed-potato volcanoes and wrote crude words with our sandwich-crusts, and these two stopped to appreciate the bounty of heaven, in silence, three times a day.

I tried to think whether I stopped to appreciate anything in the course of an average day. Whether I had three moments of purposeful (rather than circumstantial) silence in a day. Whether I observed any sort of ritual at all (aside from toothbrushing) (which I take rather seriously). The results were not impressive. I’ll marvel at a nice sunset or a full moon, if I happen to see one, but only if it strikes me as marvelous—I don’t often, anymore, search for the beauty in ordinary things—like a cloudy day, an unfull moon, a twisted tree. I never stop in purposeful silence to catalogue the things around me, and I am certainly unpracticed in the art of gratitude. Even the nicest meals I have ever eaten have gone sans a moment of appreciation (I’ll thank someone who paid for a meal, but forget to thank the circumstances that provided it), so I would never have stopped to thank the world for the bland slop served up in the Refectory. And for that I am ashamed.

So it has only taken me a year and a half to come around to the fact that, much like divesting from Halliburton, I need to appreciate my food in order to feel myself a moral person. Not so much savor its taste, but actually nurture a sense of gratitude for the fact of it, the abundance of it, and the beings that gave their lives for it, both animal and vegetable. To acknowledge that to eat is sacred, precious, is the way I participate in the circle of life until I become ashes. It’s the least I can do. And also the most.

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It should be noted that, for all my resolve, I still have trouble remembering to do it. I have written it and my other resolutions on the large blackboard in our kitchen in order to try to abide by them. And my other resolutions are to WRITE and to proactively pursue my own happiness; i.e. stop my kvetching and try to enjoy my life, rather than focus on the frustration and isolation that so overwhelmed my autumn. It’s actually going well so far. Here’s hopin’.