I walk the line ... with ugly toes

Last week, I was standing outside in the street, talking with two (female) neighbors. One of them looked down at my (bare) feet and commented, "Gillian, you need a pedicure."

"I'm always telling her that," the other said.

My toes started to curl, like an oyster closing over an irritating grain of sand.

(I'm trying out the "use a lot of simile and metaphor" style of writing. I've been buying writer's magazines that tell me I should ditch adverbs and go with the simile and the metaphor.)

I admit it, I have ugly toenails. I suffer from a nail fungus. My toenails are like twisted, discolored bits that have been scraped off and discarded by the carver of a piece of baleen.

A few years ago, I went to the doctor and got a prescription for that medication that's all over TV ads during the summer. It's a fungicide. You take it for something like 12 weeks, you can't drink or consume certain foods while you're taking it, and it has some nasty side effects.

Despite mine and the doctor's best efforts, my toenails continued to grow in disfigured like ... oh, hell, it did not work, OK?

So I'm stuck with unsightly toenails - and I don't care anymore. No pedicure in the world is going to help with the rampant raging of the furious fungi.

This condition should not be confused with the other complaint I used to get about my toes, from my (now ex-) boyfriend. He called my toes "furry."

"I love you from the top of your head down to the tips of your furry little toes," he once said to me.

I generally keep my toes covered. And I sometimes really, really miss the boyfriend. (Unnecessary use of adverbs there, you will note.)