Funk-shun

written August 9, 2010




Big news. I finally chewed off the last stub of acrylic from my fingernails. I hate fake nails, but I hate the way my hands look in photographs even more. When you get married, Photographers zoom in on things like the rings or the bouquet, which are both, unfortunately, near my fat fingers. The day before my wedding in St. John I went to a salon and endured the stink as a woman glued a plastic tip to my nail, then used a mixture of liquid and powder acrylic to sculpt and cement some “pretty” to the tips of my short, chubby fingers. 

It helped. It gave my paws the illusion of delicate femininity. Something I don’t really have. As much as I wanted to look dainty in my wedding dress, I just couldn’t pull it off. Shoulder muscles and boobs spilled out of the top and most of the pictures show bad posture and “mah guns”. Now, I’m not fishing for compliments here. I generally like the photos. I’m just saying… I’m stocky. I’m no wimp. My husband knows he can count on me to help carry heavy furniture up three flights of stairs without whine or incident. It’s the way nature made me. Durable.

This isn’t to say that I don’t have grace. I’ve been told by friends and supervisors that I’ve handled certain situations very “gracefully”, but that has nothing to do with being a woman. Diplomacy is a skill genetically dealt evenly to both male and female genders. I’m glad I have that. I just wish I had grace in the form of long, slender calf muscles and elegant ballerina arms as well. 

I say that, but then I think about who I am. I’ve always picked function over form. I didn’t like to wear dresses as a little girl, not because I didn’t think they were pretty, but because I’d wanted to do flips over the high bar at recess. If ballerina arms meant I couldn’t throw a curve ball I wouldn’t want them. I can appreciate something nice looking, but if it fails to deliver what it’s selling, then I send it back.

My hands looked prettier with nails, yes. But, I couldn’t type with them. I couldn’t open the plastic thingy on my phone where you plug in the power cord. Couldn’t pick my nose properly, couldn’t pull a magnet off the fridge and could NOT get a satisfying scratch going. I needed my paper-thin, brittle nails back. They are definitely ugly, but pretty nails contributed to 90% of my typos in the last couple of months. I just can’t live like that. Long live function.

PS: Spell check is letting “thingy” get by? Really? Spell check... you're starting to lose your pretty.