Isolation: a good reason people believed Howard Hughes was insane...

I've been writing about my self-imposed dissertation isolation, and as the days roll by as I sit before this keyboard and screen, I slowly began to think I was losing my mind. "I used to type better than this?"  "What's up with all the typos in my first drafts?" I type things and sometimes can't even read what I've written... why, you ask? Well, it seems that even though I try to take care of myself, this can become a hindrance. Although I haven't left the office in a couple of weeks, I keep my nails nice and sometimes paint them. I realized last night that my nails have grown too long for me to function, and it's time to cut them off. I remember seeing a film about the final days of Howard Hughes when I was a kiddo and wondering, "How does he move around like that, with those super long fingernails?" Mine aren't super long, but you can tell I haven't been playing guitar, haha!

The thing is, I used to bite & peel my fingernails, and I'll admit it here to no one that as a kid I even bit off my toenails-- I was limber, and I still am--but no, I don't bite my nails anywhere any longer. When I was a kid, my father's fingernails freaked me out. He kept them groomed and well cut, but he kept one pinkie fingernail really long. No, pops wasn't a coke-head, he used it to turn slot screws, clean out tiny grease-filled grooves on some mechanical part, and I think he picked his nose with his hanky-- yeah, a hanky-- that's what we called those cloth, environmentally-friendly bits of cloth one blows one's nose into. So the point is, I grew up my entire young female life not knowing what to do with fingernails. As we grow older, they don't seem to stop growing, do they? And toenails? In the summers when I wear sandals, I forget to look at my toes after I paint them and the next thing I know they're poking through socks or bending my toe up painfully when I suddenly decide to boot-up and take a ride on the motorcycle. My nails are frequently used accidentally as weapons of destruction on some random thing they cling to.

Therefore, I'm ritualistically removing them today so that I can type better, and perhaps pick and grin a bit on breaks, but here's my eulogy for them: Goodbye purple tips!
I-solation