Nail Biting : Cigarette Smoking :: Cable TV : Internet

Home from college at the end of my first year, I was hanging out in my parents’ yard with a small group of close friends who still lived full-time in the town where I grew up. I’d just come outside after a long shower. Fumbling for a cigarette, I asked Nat for a lighter. Sometimes a gentleman, Nat lit my cigarette for me. Sometimes not a gentleman, he also commented on my “gnarley” fingernails and cuticles, whose long soak in the shower exaggerated the damage done by my teeth.

“Dude,” he asked, “Why chew your nails if you’re gonna smoke cigs?”

I couldn’t answer him. I shrugged, hoping the conversation would quickly turn to making fun of someone else in the group or, just as likely, someone’s mother.

I quit biting my nails that summer. It took me another dozen to quit smoking.

Part II

I stayed home tonight to write; and I’ve successfully alternated between blogging and dissing. I just took a break to heat up some split-pea soup on the stove, which I intended to eat in front of a 10-minute TV news broadcast at the top of the hour. I sat down to eat, discovering only then that the cable was out.

“Dude,” I asked myself, “Why watch cable TV if you’re gonna surf the ‘net?”