Hangnails Are Dumb
By Cosmic Cairns on May 5, 2020 8:36 pm
So I was supposed to be leaving this week to go on vacation in Kauai, but because of this dumb coronavirus, I was forced to cancel my trip. On top of that, the Saturday when I would have been chilling out on the beach, I now have to go into work (Saturday's usually my day off) and pull an extra long shift for no extra pay. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful I still have my job and an income, but that's a pretty lame trade-off.
I realize that a lot of people are suffering a lot of worse things right now than cancelling a vacation and I know it's important to keep things in perspective, but I'm going to allow myself to feel a little sorry for myself this week. So I'm a little bummed out and grouchy at the world and not totally feeling like "Yay! Let's make music!" But I've gotta make music because I've committed to this Weekly Beats thing. I didn't want to write a track about coronavirus. Frankly, it doesn't deserve the honor and it's gotten plenty of attention anyway. So I thought I'd do an ode to something else that is dumb. I settled on hangnails.
For as long as I can remember, I've always been prone to getting a lot of hangnails. I don't know how many the average person gets, but I feel like I get a super lot of them. If I'm at home when I notice one, I'll try to cut them off with nail clippers. This usually works okay, but sometimes I can't seem to reach that very bottom section and it continues to stick up and annoy me. If I'm out and about when I find one I can't help but mess around with them until I feel compelled to yank them off. Every once in awhile they'll come right off painlessly, but most of the time I end up ripping off a much larger chunk of flesh than I anticipated and end up with a painful sore on my fingers that can last for a few days. You'd think I'd have learned better after all these years, but nope. I fall for it every time.
Seriously, what a stupid, stupid evolutionary development. I see no purpose for these things whatsoever. I realize there are many, many worse things that can happen to you, but man are hangnails dumb.
So earlier this year I seemed to be having a particularly bad affliction of them. Like half my fingers were in pain because of yanked hangnails. My girlfriend suggested I try getting a manicure. I was vaguely aware that manicures were a thing that existed, but to be completely honest I didn't know exactly what they were. I think I thought they maybe had something to do with getting your fingernails painted? At any rate it had never occurred to me that it was something I could do. Literally a couple days before everything shut down I went with her to a nail salon and got the full mani/pedi experience. For those of you like me who have never had one, I can report the pedicure part was actually pretty enjoyable. I got to sit in a big fancy massage chair and push all the buttons and play with the settings while soaking my feet in warm water and basically getting a foot massage. The manicure part wasn't as fun, but it wasn't really unpleasant either. They just went around my fingers and scraped away a bunch of skin that was probably dead already anyway. It didn't really hurt. It didn't really feel like anything. They did, in fact, offer to put nail polish on my fingers, but I decided I was good going au naturel. The good news is I didn't get any hangnails for several weeks afterward, so I think I'll probably get manicures again if things ever go back to normal. Just recently though I've been starting to get afflicted with them again and it reminded me that hangnails are indeed dumb.
As for the track I ended up making, the first section is a bunch of different electric guitar patterns that I bring in and out of the mix more or less randomly. Then after a brief interlude some different guitar stuff comes in while I made up an impromptu poem about how dumb hangnails are (and made sure to include a smidge of scream therapy). Then I pretty much close the song out just making some noise on the guitar and a few other random items I had laying around. It's not really my personal favorite track of the year so far, but it felt appropriate for this week.
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial (BY-NC)
