Friday, July 25, 2008

My Dead Toenails

It all started with lunch at the rundown bistro outside Hacienda del Rio, right across the blasted institution commonly called John-B (whose studentry attempted to wake the entire neighborhood this morning as they romped and talked their way down the street in charcoal paint and weird outfits to their Punta Villa campus).

Technically, it started after lunch. I was watching the replay of A.I. Season 7 Finale, and Archuleta was singing In This Moment (I love that song!). Who would have guessed that Janet Jackson herself would call our blessed abode, and even more stroke-inducing, tell me that I have to go see her that very instant in - where else? - school.

That's just the beginning, and to think that my left little pinky toe was all black and bruised from unintentionally kicking the wall that morning. So there I was, limping my way across streets and sitting inside a jeepney with my feet all stinky and my wounded toe all, uh, stinky.

When i arrived at the blasted place (blasted is our word for the day, by the way), she told me - in the presence of the princess of the damned and the purple reptile - that we were going to have CAT! Well, assuming that you do not know this, we were not supposed to have CAT anymore for this school year! During that moment, and afterwards, all I could think of was something like "Damn, why the heck are they letting this happen?!" So anyway, we had our training for three days... blah, blah... (this topic deserves a separate entry). Now it's what happened after the training that's really the meat of the matter today.

MY BIG TOENAILS DIED.

I do not know how it happened, and why it happened. Do not ask me about it (it's a touchy subject). All I know is that the day we officially became CAT officers, those nails were already dark black and violet and blue with shades of maroon and brown. They were dead, or in the layman's term, ba-og. Okay, so I'll stop describing them here. Take note: Those nails stayed that way for over a month.

That is, until that fateful Friday when I unconsciously slid my left foot backwards and the edge of the slipper hit and forced the right big toenail upwards and open. Didn't exactly open all the way through, but enough to cause considerable pain. A week later, it happened to my other foot.

Now, I'm proud to proclaim that the dead nails are 99% eradicated, except for a few fragments still attached to the skin and which I plan to let a pedicurist remove. It appears that when my nails were injured, the blood that was causing all the discoloration and that's stuck underneath the skin flowed out. Today, I wait for my nails' renaissance.

By the way, I'm not bitter about CAT. I just hate the fact that they decided to resume our training only during the week before school opened. But I'm loving every moment of being an officer. And I'm really looking forward - who among us doesn't - to torturing the blasted, ahem, applicants. Oh dear, it's gonna be a great starapple harvest season (evil Joker laugh).

P.S. The pinky toe's sort of well now... I think...

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