the road less-travelled

I’ve made a mistake, a wrong choice. It’s the first time I’ve had to make such a choice, and I’ve gone and spoilt it, marred things, opened the door to the necessity of further choices about what to do with that that wrong choice and its consequences.

I speak, of course, of the nail polish I chose for the pedicure I just had this morning. It’s a bright peachy candy pink, the sort of pink one might find gracing a Barbie’s Dream House, the sort of pink that I’d usually never venture within a mile of, so deep is the terror that its over-the-top pink-ness strikes in my heart. Yet today I chose to use this colour in my first-ever pedicure. What came over me, you ask? To be honest, I really have no clue. I thought it might perhaps be a bit less attention-seeking than one of the deeper reds, less visible to the eye. I thought it might blend in a bit better. But no. My newly peach nails draw more attention to themselves than they would have, had they been clad in the deepest scarlet. And the reason they do, is because they don’t go. They don’t go with the rest of my clothes, they don’t match the way I carry myself, the way I speak, the way I think. In other words, my toes have now morphed into something quite other than me, something alien to my nature. Something I don’t quite recognise.

Now that’s a heck of a burden to be putting on ten mostly harmless toes. And of course I’m not upset – I just enjoy the experience of kicking up a rhetorical fuss over something of so little consequence. But to some extent, I do regret the choice, because I really did want a makeover for my feet, and I’m now wondering whether, in addition to removing the pink varnish when I get home, I should actually buy a bottle of that deep red stuff I was talking about earlier, and make real women of my toes. (Right now they’re little Lolitas – tweenage digits peeking out coyly from my sensible sandals). But that would cost more money, and right now I’m loath to be spending money on anything that I don’t absolutely need… but then again, perhaps I do need my nails not to make me look at a sixteen-year-old on a sugar-high.

Ah. Decisions, decisions. I wonder which way the penny will fall. Watch this space for the next update!
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