I just caught myself in the act of chewing a fingernail. It had a little tear in one side, and now it's gone.

This upsets me because my new year's resolution for 2006 was to stop chewing my fingernails. It's a habit I'd had since I was a kid. I bit my fingernails all the time, and my hands never looked pretty and womanly. They always looked beat-up and rough because of having terrible fingernails. So I quit. I reallly, honestly quit. I spent all of 2006 trying to figure out how to care for fingernails because I'd never had them before. They'd get long and I'd say "Wow, look at my long fingernails!" My husband would say, "Yep. Here's the nail clippers." It took me almost a year to use the clippers because I was so upset about the idea of cutting down the fingernails that I had been so good about growing. I was filing, filing, filing constantly.

This winter I've learned about nail brittleness. Almost all of my fingernails have started to get cracks on the edges, fairly far down. I tried to glue a couple of them, but that only held for a few days at the most. Plus I messed with them absent-mindedly. Yesterday I realized that so many of them had those cracks that I'd better just cut them all down. I cut them to a reasonable short length. A little white crescent moon on the ends of my fingernails.

The problem is that now they're so short they're the perfect biting height. Earlier tonight I was feeling annoyed and irritated about something, and before I knew it I'd lost a fingernail. Crap! Now I have to go through that whole agonizing torture of forcing myself NOT to mess with my fingernails all over again until these grow out. Luckily they grow fast (I never knew my fingernails grew so rapidly until I started letting them grow -- they're like weeds!), but it'll still be several weeks before I can stop thinking "DO NOT BITE FINGERNAILS!!!" in the back of my mind at all times.

But, hey. If a bitten fingernail is the worst thing to happen to me this week, that's a damn good week, in my book.