On Facebook, finding old friends, & the Quest for long, beautiful nails…

After much prodding, we have finally joined the 21st Facebook Century, and now have a page, photo albums, & tons of other kewl stuff on Facebook! And I now have 21 friends! One of them is M., a friend from high school- I think she may be my Only friend from high school!- who found me, the way people do on Facebook, & yes, after some 30 years, this was fun & very cool! Back in high school, in Forest Hills, Queens, NYC, M. not only had totally Gorgeous Farah Fawcett hair, she had Gorgeous nails- I remember them as always being long & perfectly polished, & that I was So jealous of those nails! I think I’ve tried Everything over the last 30+ years in a seemingly never-ending Quest to have Nails Like Hers: Hard as Nails, Wraps, Paste-Ons, drinking gelatin, eating calcium tablets, salon-done Acrylic Nails- you name it, I have put it on my nails- pretty much to no avail. I just have crappy, thin, ridgy, weak nails, & while they do grow, they invariably crack & tear off at the quick, & usually look like crud. And it’s not like I ever wanted Really long nails; I Never aspired to nails like my friend Margaret has: she has complete island sunsets airbrushed on hers! (Margaret is Amazing- I have actually seen her type 100 wpm with those Dragon Lady nails. I couldn’t even pick up a pencil when I had acrylic nails done…) I simply wanted my nails to be long enough to cover with hot pink polish and not look stupid- a humble aspiration, yes? I work with my hands as an artist, I was a soldier, I like to garden- all things that don’t really mesh with long nails & beautiful hands- & I’m rather proud of my callouses… But I also love wearing Big Rings, & so a sporadic but endless Don Quixote-ish Quest For Nails continued throughout the years… And it once almost killed me, taking the old adage “suffer to be beautiful” to its truly idiot extreme. In April of 1988 I had salon nail tips done in NYC, and they were done with “nail glue”, also known as Crazy Glue. Polished hot pink, they looked Really good, and were Really strong, and I finally LOVED looking at my hands! (This sounds really stupid, but I clearly remember looking at my hands a Lot, & for once really enjoying what I saw…) FINALLY I could buy Revlon Red polish, & not just for my toes! I decided to keep them, in an attempt to finally grow out my nails… but how do you keep glue-on nails? You keep putting Crazy Glue on them… On October 31, 1988, me & my beautiful nails wound up being carried into the Franz Hospital ER, in Duelmen, Germany, massively dehydrated, with Pancreatitis (my pancreas simply stopped…), blisters on the palms if my hands, no hair, & one day from death. I spent 2 weeks on an IV, being tested for Everything, & the conclusion was that I had suffered a massive toxic reaction to Crazy Glue- cynoacrylate- which got into my bloodstream via my 10 little nail beds… (If you get a magnifying glass & read the microscopic directions on the little tube of Nail Glue, you will see it states that you’re only supposed to put it only on the Tip of the nail- Not on the nail itself, or on the nail bed. But how do you hold the fake nail tip on when you don’t have a tip to begin with? By putting the glue on the nail bed itself, that’s how…) I survived, & my hair grew back (6 months later), but that was where Me & Long Nails parted company. This would have been, I decided, a Really Stupid Way To Die.
And then, as I was sitting here last night, putting another layer of NailTek on my nails, in a new attempt to, yes, grow out my nails (and it’s working! I now have 7 nails that actually have little white tips!), I thought about M., and wondered if, now that she is a landscape designer, she still has those gorgeous nails! I will have to write on her Facebook “wall” and ask her…
I asked her! And she Does still have Serious Nails!