hypochondria

i'm flying out to portland next week with the great-aunts to visit my cousins michael and sara, and to help the aunts babysit their adorable children when they leave to go to a wedding. in order to prep for the wedding, sara wanted to go get a manicure and pedicure, something that she and i aren't really all that familiar with. she invited me to go with her, and we're taking her five-year-old daughter, and it should be fun, right? i can to pretend to be a real girl for an hour. (the closest i usually come to "real girl" is when i buy boxed hair dye at drug stores and get my eyebrows threaded every six months on westwood blvd).

that being said, i'm probably the only person in the world who worries about getting flesh eating bacteria from a pedicure. i have this fear because my mother is a hypochondriac and made us all wear water booties into the ocean until we were fourteen, lest we step on any glass/hypodermic needles in the sand. she has forced me to live in constant terror that i will get some horrific disease as a result of my casual careless at the beach or the mall or the doctor's office. also, i watch too much tyra banks. she often has shows entitled "i sacrificed my health for beauty," which are real news stories criticizing the beauty industry for making young women take crazy risks for perfection, while at the same time hoping we all forget that tyra banks is a supermodel who created a reality show all about how to succeed in that very same industry. (i was just about to call that hypocrisy, and rant about that, and then i realized that i've just admitted to being obsessed with miss banks, which makes me a hypocrite too. so, no, tyra banks isn't misleading, at all. she's perfect. just like me.)

so, long story short, i'm nervous for my pedicure. the last thing i need is for some microbacteria to crawl into the crevices between my skin and toenails and make my legs break out in terrible sores that will result in permanent, humiliating scarring (it happened to some girl on tyra). that would be bad.