September 11, 2022
“Jesus, it’s like trying to manicure a baby.”
I have a special occasion coming up this week, so I thought I’d treat myself to a manicure to look nice for it. It was my first one since Christmas time, so I was very excited. I drove all the way to Pentagon City to go to the salon there because “proximity to charming nail salons” was not one of the selling features of my house in Aldie, as it turns out. So I made the journey, stopped for a SweetGreen salad, walked around the Ann Taylor shop, sighed with relief that I still felt too young to wear anything in there (no shade if you love that store – men have a Peter Pan phase and women have a Loft phase, and I am in my Loft phase). Then I made my way to my appointment. After I chose my color and sat down, the nail technician took one look at my fingernails and grimaced. “Oh no,” he said “so short.” I said “ha yeah, I like to wear them short.” A few minutes later he said “Jesus, it’s like trying to manicure a baby. Do you cut these yourself?” I nodded reluctantly. “Well you need to stop.”
I felt bad, guys. Like bad. Bad enough that I didn’t leave him a tip. That may not sound like a big deal but if you’d ever been ANYWHERE with me, you’d know how seriously I take my tip game. I once left a waiter at Uncle Julio’s a 50 dollar tip on a 15 dollar fajita just because he smiled at me and told me he liked my earrings. It doesn’t take much. But this guy made me feel embarrassed and just so bad. And what’s worse: later on I felt bad that I didn’t leave him a tip and looked up his venmo on the salon webpage and left one. Just a cycle of bad feelings caused by this encounter.
Anyway after he said these things to me, I sat there feeling my cheeks redden and put my headphones in my ears as a cue to him that talking time was over. I listened to my podcast about trashy reality tv and tried to figure out why this guy hurt my feelings so much. I looked at him – he had a mullet and an “Essentials: Fear of God” t-shirt on with blue sweatpants and the kind of New Balance sneakers your dad wears. It wasn’t like I looked at this nail technician in his active wear and thought “now, there’s a man whose opinion matters to me”. But as it turns out, it does. I tried to cheer myself up with a pretty solid joke, “Great, this is the first time a man has held my hand in months and it’s turned out like this,” which consoled me and helped me move my thoughts away from it until the final “please wash your hands.”
I cannot figure out why I reacted so strongly to someone criticizing my fingernails of all things. It felt kind of like when I was a kid and the dental hygienist would give me a hard time about drinking coke and it made me feel like such a failure every time. Like I had let her down and committed this sin of coke drinking, when in reality I was just enjoying sweet things and being a kid. I’d say having someone criticize your fingernails or teeth is infinitely better than being criticized for your character or behavior, and I’m very lucky that I don’t hear much of that – not because my character is good and I don’t misbehave, but because I live alone and no one is ever around to be annoyed by me. Maybe I felt bad because of the dentist thing- some kind of kid trauma I haven’t worked out with my therapist yet. Maybe it was because getting my nails done was part of this process I was going through to try to look nice for an outing, and was met with this attitude. When you think about it, it’s kind of fucked up. You go to a professional and ask them to help you look prettier, and while doing so, they tell you all the things that are wrong with you.
Look, I know that having short stubby fingernails is something that is completely within my power physically, but I am mentally incapable of growing them out. If they grow out beyond my fingertips, my brain starts telling me I’m the dirtiest, yuckiest woman on the planet and I must cut them SHORT immediately. Now this compulsion has made me feel bad about yet another part of my body. I have to be honest, as I age, more and more of these body part of mine are landing on that list of things that make me feel bad, but I didn’t have fingernails on my 30’s-bad-body-image bingo card. When you think about it, there are so many things that can make us feel bad about ourselves. Today alone I have fretted over my weight, the color of my teeth, my calves, laugh lines around my eyes and the zits on my face. I guess the benefit to having a nice long list of things you don’t like about your body is that you don’t spend too much time dwelling on any one of them.
One of my favorite writers (you may have heard of the late, great Nora Ephron) has a memoir called “I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts About Being a Woman”. I obviously ripped off the title from this blog post from her, so I guess I’m the worst kind of fan. I love that book. It’s this collection of little essays about her life – I guess you could call it a blog before blogs existed, except the writing is actually good and very funny. In it she says “Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of thirty-five, you will be nostalgic for at the age of forty-five.” I’m not sure fingernails apply here, but a lot of that other stuff I mentioned above does. In ten years, I may long for the days when the scale told me I was one pound overweight according to BMI. She makes a good point, but mostly hearing her take on body image is yet another reminder that everyone feels bad about some parts of their body sometimes – and that doesn’t make us vapid or shallow or ungrateful for everything we have. It just means we are people who feel bad about stuff sometimes, even when we are getting 50 dollar manicures.
Cluelessness is the Mother of Invention 