poka bean

the truth revealed

I was given the strangest compliment of all time yesterday. Whilst reaching out to sign my name on a receipt at the grocery store, the young adolescent male behind the check stand gasped and proclaimed "WOW, you have BEAUTIFUL fingers!" with such unbridled enthusiasm I thought he might just don lederhosen and begin frolicking about the Austrian hillside singing The Hills Are Alive.

Now, this compliment was odd for two reasons. First of all because what teenage boy thinks to say that to a woman he doesn't know, and with such glee? And secondly because it's categorically untrue.

See, my fingers aren't beautiful, friends. They're freakish. My fingernails grow upwards instead of down. I keep them nice and short in hopes their true nature won't be revealed and scare away all the nice people. And I have a horrible habit of picking at my cuticles. Badly. Viciously. Daily and nightly and ever-so-rightly. So much so that they are often bloody and scabbed over and torn to pieces. So much so that Emily gave me regular lectures in the days of our roommate-hood and regularly hid my cuticle clippers because I abuse them as though they are an addictive drug. I am a helpless junkie in desperate need of rehab.

But the real kicker is not my fingernails nor my cuticles. Not at all. The real issue here is my actual fingers and their abnormal bendy-ness. It's the fact that my thumbs look like this:





See that top picture? When I give Jon backrubs, I use the part of my thumbs that's pointing UP to dig into his knots, not the tip of my thumb like you "normal" people might. I'm much more effective that way.

My other fingers are also ridiculously stretchy and bendy but my thumbs are definitely the most notable. They're just a little special something I inherited from my dad and while I'm not ashamed of them - nay, I'm down right PROUD - I'm not so dilusional as to think they are "beautiful" by normal-people standards.

Apparently passing an eye exam is not required for employment at the grocery store and that's fine by me. I'll take the compliment cause it's the one and only time I'm going to get it.

Posted by Poka Bean at 7:33 PM