Do you ever have those times where you sit at your desk at work staring off into nothing, wondering how you got where you are today? How you got to be twenty-seven with all these new weird problems and not as much insight as you’d hoped, not to mention not as much money, how you got to be in a city where the fall is so long and slow and sometimes red with the changing maples but mostly and softly gray? When did you get so scared of everything, when did you start caring so much what other people thought? When did you start criticizing every move you make, when did you all of a sudden become your own superego? When did it start seeming as though you couldn’t ever be and do and have everything that everyone else does and is and has? When did it start to feel like you had to distract yourself from yourself every single minute, and when, exactly, did the idea of being the center of your own life story get to be so overwhelming yet so boring?
Do you ever have those times? No? Me either.
Okay, so this one time? I was sitting around clipping my toenails, and wasn’t wearing my glasses. I tend not to when I’m not driving or when I don’t have to know where I’m going. I’ve only worn glasses for about three years and I still can’t get used to them. I’m in the market for some new frames, actually…I want to go more for the Sexy Librarian look and less for the Grad School Tortoiseshell look. But the important part of the story is that I was not, repeat, was not wearing them, nor any other sort of eye protection, as I performed this minor grooming ritual. Clipping the toenails, didn’t want holes in my socks. Ho hum.
I don’t know how it happened, but I guess it was a combination of force and angle and torque and distance times time equalling rate, or something, but I managed to jettison a piece of toenail…let me just say it for you, EEEEEEEEEEEWWW… into my eye. Into my eye! My eyeball! Ow! Ugh! Ow!
I couldn’t get it out for the life of me, and I’m talking I went into that eye with tweezers, a miner’s lamp, a magnet, and a toilet plunger, trying to get it out. I wept and prayed and stuck my head under the sink faucet trying to get it out. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but it turns out that when you have a piece of your own toenail in your eye, it’s pretty hard to think about anything else. There you’ll be, innocently reading your Organizational Social Work textbook, or making some nice mac and cheese, or sitting on the bus on the way to work, and a persistent voice will begin to whisper in your ear: “You have a toooooooooooooeeeennnnaaaaaaiiiilllllllll in your eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyyyyyyeeee. That’s grooooooooooosss!” And you’ll stick your entire forearm into your eye socket, trying to get it OUT.
I had to go my practicum that day, as I recall, which was at the Large HMO Mental Health Agency where I was learning how to do therapy. I would be all, “Mmm hmmm. Tell me more about that pattern you notice OH LORD HAVE MERCY I HAVE A TOENAIL IN MY EYE in your life. How does this relate to your family of origin OW OW OW IN MY EYE A TOENAIL IN MY EYE issues?”
I didn’t have to go to the ER, thank heavens, although I’m sure the paramedics would have appreciated the laugh. I was about to stick the hose attachment of the vaccuum in there when it just floated up, stuck to my eyeball right below the iris. No scratching, no tearing, no drama, no nothing. It still had some red polish on it. I just took it off and threw it down the sink. And that’s the story of the time I got a toenail in my eye! The end!
I have a couple of things on my mind. Telling disgusting stories about my grooming mishaps isn’t really distracting me as much as I’d hoped, over here. I guess the ideal answer is not to update unless I have Something To Say, but I find I get sort of itchy if I don’t write here at least once a week, and, and…oh, y’all. I’m just so sad today. I’m writing this on a Wednesday morning on a chilly fall day and it feels like nothing is going right in my life. I’m having to sort of talk myself through getting out of bed and down the stairs and then back up the stairs because I can’t go to work in my pajamas, now can I, and then down the stairs again and to the bus stop and on the bus and to work and all of it, all of everything, is demanding so much attention from me, yet nothing’s really going on, but I’m just sitting here feeling small and alone and weepy, and blah blah blah. This is what it sounds like in my head. I wish all these feelings could just be pulled out and thrown away as easily as a toenail from an eyeball…and you know, that wasn’t even so easy, pulling that thing out! A toenail! In my eye!