There's Nothing Catchy About the Life of a Saint

ETA: Nail Bitin’

Nail biting. A lot of people do it. It is one of those habits that we are told on and on again by our ever loving parents not to do. Of course, as kids who are sick and tired of listening to our parents or feel the need to rebel, bite them anyway.

I, for all intents and purposes, don’t. This might be a weird thing to talk about and most people will find this post random but today in class I felt the need to state my confusion of nail biting. Of course, this kind of urge comes at me often and I rarely act on these impulses, however, I haven’t written anything for anything in such a long time, I thought, what the hell, I’ll talk about biting nails.

Frankly, I don’t get it. Sure, it’s pretty straight forward but I don’t get it. Do you bite through the nail? Do you chew on the nail till it eventually comes off? Do you suck the finger a bit before you concentrate on the nail? In books and cartoons, whenever they wish to portray nail biting , show the bits of nails flying off of their fingers. Now, I don’t expect a steady stream of nail bits flying out of my hands whenever I attempt to bite my nails. That would just be horrifying. Still, I don’t see any real benefits from trying to rip off parts of your body with your mouth.

I’ve never been able to actually do it. It know I should bite harder to try and actually penetrate through the nail but I have this uncanny fear of ripping off my finger nails and the pain generally associated with it. Seriously, it would hurt, a lot. It’s one of the things I would do if i had to interrogate someone and trust me, I would not want any of the techniques I would use in an interrogation used on me. It would involve a lot of belly button touching and having a guy dressed up like Batman throwing me across the room while screaming, “Where is he?”

Getting side tracked. I can’t exert enough pressure on the nail to actually cut through it. Maybe I’m doing it wrong and I need to wear it down before I can tear it off, like a lumberjack chopping down a tree. But the time it would take for the nail to come off easy, and for someone who finds no pleasure in keeping one of his fingers his mouth for an exteneded period of time, it’s dirty, I doubt I’ll ever accomplish the task.

Maybe I’m taking this whole thing wrong. Maybe it is a lot simpler then I make it out to be. Heck, I don’t know, it’s not as though there’s a book out there that contains all the bad habits of the world and how to perform them correctly. None of us really learned how to do stuff like this from being taught. We watched and imitated.

I would like to randomly point out that I find biting my nails a bad habit because of a Berenstein Bears Book that I read when I was younger. I don’t know why I decided to tell you that for some reason, college has made me super nostalgic. Really, I’ve watched and re-watched a lot of old cartoons via youtube. It’s sad but it beats studying.

All in all, I don’t understand the mechanics of Nail biting and can only assume certain facts about it from personal observations. If I wasn’t such as shy baby when I was…well, a baby, then maybe I would have been able to establish some sort of way to do it but as a sophomore who finds no pleasure in the idea of Nail Biting, I doubt I’ll ever care enough to try and bite through keratin that’s growing out of my fingers.

(This has been a completly random post by a kid who really needs to sleep. I apologize beforehand about random assortment of ideas. When I’m tired my arguments rarely make sense nor do they follow any logical flow)