The Dilema: Do I get a manicure?

I really need a manicure.

Budgeting my every cent, glamor is being forced into the back seat of an already cheap ride. My nails look like broken glass, my cuticles are shredded and my hands feel like sand paper. If you only knew the things I've had to do lately, good lord, you would be horrified. Mortified. A woman's nails can tell a lot about her goings-on and mine say I've been slummin'.

A few of you out there, I dare say MEN, may incredulously gasp at my little admittance here. After all, how can a girl without a job can be so concerned with something as trivial as a manicure? When it comes to things like money spent on female beauty - even from your girl with a steady - you'd rather not know how much is spent to put the package together, am I right?

But there are a few things to understand, if you'll allow me to say so. First of all, you love it. You love how pretty a girl looks when everything is neat and tidy and primped. You feel she is not only beautiful but organized and successful. It's nice for you, admit it. But it's not really about you. It's about how it makes us feel. Conviction can be painted on with Shanghai Nights nail polish and matching Channel lipstick. A thrilling nerve can come from taming the unruly hair day by crafting and sculpting every follicle, like an artist with malleable clay, into exactly what we want. Charging into the dark recesses of life... applying for a new job or pitching an idea... you'd be amazed what a supreme manicure can do to even the battlefield. It's more a way of adapting to one's surroundings, like a gecko who must hide from his predator, than an indulgence in many cases, actually, okay? Well, so long as you have the dough.

Moving on to the pressing matter is: what to do now that I don't have the dough. In this state, my argument above wanes into an almost ridiculous perspective, considering the exchange rate for beauty is about a week's worth of lunch. I accepted this tumultuous path of joblessness to develop my freakin' craft and by reminding myself that I am goddamn tough enough to totally handle the lapse of a steady paycheck. These little things I adore - manicures, shoes, lip gloss - are easy to give up. They don't matter.

Do they?

I encounter the philosophical question everyone considers but can't accept or admit. Can money can make me happy?

It can be argued that, although money in itself does not make a person happy, it's what a person uses and sometimes what a person needs to get to their places of HAPPINESS. I no doubt need money to get to my places of happiness: traveling, filming, writing... wearing Wang and Choo.

The existentialist says that money doesn't exist any more than a manicure exists, but that we have made it what it is, and what it's worth. Is the worth of a manicure really what I have made it out to be? The experience of traveling can be worth the "money"... but colored nails?

In other words, my manicure dreams are bullshit.

My attachment is metaphysical, an association, nothing more than a chemical endorphin sent to my puny, needy brain. I can get over it at any point if I chose to and accept it because I can live without the brief, one-week pleasure it provides.

And so I will. For a while, anyways....

Because I don't mean to say that beautification doesn't have it's place in my world. Unless I become a Buddhist monk and brilliantly chose to live entirely outside of society, then the vice of creating an outside shell to help me move through this crazy world is valid. I think so, anyway. Not everyone believes this, of course, but it's who I am, it's in my bones. I have to accept my fate.

Another fate has moved higher up the list for now, that's all.