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FingernailsSeptember 22, 2006 Until recently I didn't pay much attention to fingernails. They'd grow, they'd break, I'd smooth the jagged places with my teeth. Sometimes I'd use the nails of my right hand to pick the dirt out from under the nails of my left, and then I'd vice the versa. When waiting on hold or sitting in traffic, sometimes I'd start pushing the cuticles down, down, down. I vaguely remember some axiom about how the half-moons were supposed to show. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't. I do still remember the cashier at a late-night deli near my college dorm. Her nails were at least five inches long and she still managed to work the cash register, whose keys resembled those of a manual typewriter, not like the touch pads you see on the modern version. In those days, circa 1970, the keys had numbers on them, not line drawings of edible objects. I think her name was Rose. At least we called her "Rose the Fascist Finger Lady." I don't have the foggiest whether she was a fascist or not; I don't think we knew anything about her politics, but "fascist" alliterated so nicely with "finger lady." Maybe her name wasn't Rose after all. Years later I learned why lesbians were supposed to have short fingernails. Rose may not have been a fascist, but I doubt she was a lesbian. If she was, she was probably celibate. If she wasn't, I can't imagine what she did in bed. (I'm working on it.) Lately I've been paying more attention to my fingernails. You can blame it all on learning to play the guitar. Keeping the nails on my left-hand fingers short isn't hard: when they start to interfere with pressing down on the strings, out comes the emery board (I did learn about those somewhere along the way; I think my mother told me about them) and wwishh wwishh wwishh the nails get shorter. The right hand is the challenge. I love fingerpicking, and to fingerpick you need sturdy nails of a certain length (nowhere near as long as Rose's). Mine keep getting too long, then they break and I bite them off and my attempts to pick the strings in certain patterns sound pathetic. (Finger picks work for some of the patterns I've learned, but not for all.) So I'm trying to nurture my right-hand nails so they'll grow to a useful length, then I'll try to manage them so they don't get raggedy and split and have to be bitten off. One of these days I'm going to survey lesbian guitarists about how they handle their fingernails.
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