On Friday night, I gesticulated wildly into an overhead hanging light fixture at a dive bar. I'm 99% sure I have hepatitis now. (No worries, I was only using my liver under the powers of evil, anyway.)
Today, as I typed away at my junk mail orders, staring down at my nearly anachronistic keyboard and my extremely rough digits, I realized that the idiomatic expression, "I know X like the back of my hand," has never made much sense to me. The backs of my hands have always been changing. I wouldn't know one if it slapped me.
A nail biter likely since long before birth, my hands and fingers have been a mutable, if not occasionally bloody, landscape for as long as I can remember. I nibble out of boredom, anxiety, and a tactile need that isn't simply oral, but that my fingers actually start to feel funny and large if I don't chew. Granted, that's the nerve endings of my cuticles and fingertips seeking familiar stimulation, but I always eventually return to chewing, even after months of hiatus. As a result, I have convinced myself that the unsanitary habit has made my immune system impervious to the common cold. I'm probably wrong.
My nail beds and cuticles are often raw, hangnail ridden blights on an otherwise haphazard individual. As I've mentioned before, I'm not exactly conscientious about moisturizing my skin; throughout my life I've allowed my hands to become so chapped as to cause my knuckles to crack and bleed during many a winter, until I capitulate to the inevitable and spend a week sleeping with old socks as mittens covering my Vaseline-slathered appendages. Vaseline apparently helps accelerate the shedding of old skin cells, essentially by killing them, and allowing the new cells to replace them. It's probably not a healthful practice, and I'll likely have the Dresden lace hands of a 90 year old by the time I'm 50 (minus the age spots because the skin won't be old enough for those to have appeared).
I have scars all over, and my hands are no exception. This is due to a determined lack of kinesthetic awareness. An old roommate told me that he was sure I suffered from a mild form of dyspraxia after a particularly comedic interaction with a few teacups and the sugar bowl. I was once accused - quite seriously - of being drunk on account of my habit of walking into tables... and walls. Bruises appear as if by magic on my person, standing out as red accents on my pale skin, slowly turning into bluish black glowers, and finally to that sickly yellow green of an injury I never really knew I received. Often, I won't even notice them until they've already almost gone.
I have scars from cats, from goats, from a particularly foul-tempered donkey, from trips, falls, overt enthusiasm, and downright stupidity. And I do scar easy. Aborted attempts to exit pools and cars and even my own damn house are written on my body. I have a scar on one of my toes from the age of twelve when I dropped my razor in the shower. There's one on my arm from a false sense of confidence regarding my whittling abilities at age ten. And there's one on my right knee from that time in Mrs. Haffner's fourth grade class when I was moving in my typically rapid and mindless fashion and managed to make a sizable gouge through my stirrup pants because my US History book was weighing down my safety scissors. A rounded pair of electric blue Fiskars is far more aggressive than you would think.
And of course, the pièce de résistance of my scars, the one I got falling down two stairs when trying to make the Tube. My ankle was so well broken from that piece of gawkish grace that I now have eight pins and a titanium plate in my right leg, courtesy of the National Health Service, and the London Underground, as a matter of course. And possibly Old Speckled Hen.
Today, I chewed my nails and stared at the little scabs on my fingers and thought about this blog. I made, not eight days ago, a serious commitment to writing every day, mostly as a mental exercise for my self, if not a small emotional one, as well. And I made it through four damned posts. I have excuses and explanations, of course, mostly of the time-related variety, but the fact of the matter is, I failed at the meager goal I set for myself. I didn't fail mindfully, but that foot slipped and down I went, with or without the help of Old Speckled Hen.
And today I was rejected from another job. This is a regular occurrence, at least weekly, and one that I should have adjusted to by now, but it is never quite normal. Rejection from a job, whether it was one I was passionately seeking or not, is a miserable experience, even if a brief one. And regardless of the phone interview I had this morning, the prospect of that position was tempered by the rejection from another. The accumulate and leave an ever-growing blemish on what I think I'm capable of.
But then, this one will fade, too, like all the others have. I've walked into that doorjamb so many times, I've lost count, and I sure as shit can't remember which of those doors I've tried. At least waving my hands at a bar to make a point only results a few scabs. And possibly a viral infection of the liver.
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