Dirty Sunshine

Not fifteen seconds ago, as I pushed my spiral bound notebook into my backpack, I caught my middle finger between the backpack and the chemistry book that was already inside and shoved the skin back up away from my nail. It hurts a lot, and it doesn’t make my hands look any more presentable. I like to keep my nails a little on the long side, and I do make some effort to keep my cuticles healthy and neat, but at times like this I feel it’s all for nothing. I have two broken nails, and three which are in the process, and there are several places where the skin has been chewed basically off because of my nervousness (I am the only person that I know of who chews the skin next to her nails instead of the nails themselves). On top of everything else, my hands are grungy. We’re not talking a little dirt or ink-- I’ve got orange chicken residue, probably soda, hairspray and Baby Christ only knows what else. Thinking about what it must be doing to my keyboard freaks me out even more, too.

My desktop keyboard is gray, and when I did a thorough clean up of my bedroom, I sat down with a washcloth and a bottle of counter cleaner and cleaned up every single key. I was completely disgusted to find that the keys on my keyboard, which I touch every day, got that rag dirtier than dusting my entire bookshelf and all my knickknacks did. I haven’t been able to find the courage to pop off the keys and clean underneath them, and I think I may just buy a new keyboard instead.

Lotion kills razor blades. Either that, or I suddenly have titanium leg hairs. While it might be kind of cool if that were true, I have my doubts.

Often I see a bad situation coming, and I know that I’ll suffer if I don’t do something, but I just watch the train getting closer and closer anyway. Just as an example, I recently broke a pen. Not the inkwell inside the pen, mind you, just the plastic part on the outside. Did I get up and throw the whole thing in the garbage and move on with my life? No. I put it in my backpack. Did I put it in a little compartment where the damage when the inkwell breaks will be minimal? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know where it is. Will there be any effort made on my part to locate the broken pen before disaster strikes? No. I will suffer.

I sat in the sun for almost an hour today. I wasn’t reading or typing, or drawing, or talking… I just sat. It was wonderful. I’ve heard that people get addicted to sunbathing, and at the time, I thought that was a ridiculous thing to say, but after today, I completely understand. What was really neat was the way the top of my head and my legs got really hot compared to my arms, which I think was because my jeans today are very dark, and my hair is darker than my skin. Unfortunately, I think I burnt my nose, but skin cancer is a small price to pay for that amount of joy and warmth.