Socially Distant

There’s a line from the 2009 movie Zombieland that has been going through my mind now for days.  For those who haven’t seen it, Zombieland is a comedy set in a post-apocalyptic America besieged by the ravenous undead.  Jesse Eisenberg plays Columbus, a nerdy introvert and borderline agoraphobe whose ultra risk-averse and rules-oriented approach to life and death (and un-death) has him convinced he may be one of the last human beings left on the planet.  He’s wrong, of course; Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin soon join in on the post-apocalyptic fun.

But before he meets the trio who will go on to form his cool new functional family, he spends a lot of time surviving alone, a lot of time wondering if he’s the last man on earth, and he remarks at one point, with a great deal of sadness, that he was never much for people, but now that there are no more people, he misses them.

And that’s where I’m at right now as I at least enter my fourth week of this weird new state of what I’m coming to call Hiding From the Flu.  Not to fear, I’m in no danger of breaking the quarantine.  I’m still quite a ways from running out onto the street and madly dashing about, licking and touching everything and everyone in sight.

But I do miss people.  I miss random human connection.  I miss coffee nights with a lifelong friend.  I miss wantonly scruffying the cat who comes by our back porch to extort food from us.  And I really, really miss my parents, who are just a 22-minute drive east, and who I have not seen now in over a month.  We’re your pretty typical, not-too-touchy WASP-y types, but I’d really like to reach out and give them a hug right about now.

Here’s some topical nail art for the times.  Sending you love across the socially accepted distance, people, because I do indeed miss you.

We Found Love in a Hostess Cake

I know the actual lyric to the Rihanna song is “We found love in a hopeless place,” but ever since the Fug Girls of Go Fug Yourself pointed out that it sounds more like “We found love in a Hostess cake,” I hear nothing else. Love is fleeting, crinkly cellophane wrappers filled with sugary saturated fats are forever.

For these sweet nails featuring the classic Hostess chocolate cupcake and Tallahassee’s nemesis, the Sno Ball (little Zombieland reference for you there), I made great use out of an otherwise pretty limited use polish, OPI by Nicole’s Roughles in Rock the Look. Textured polishes, and the entire stucco-ish Roughles collection, were all the rage a couple of years ago, but have fallen somewhat out of fashion in recent times.  I think that’s because, save for an intrepid few nail artists willing to fashion them into, say, pink coconut shavings to decorate their lacquered Sno Ball designs, textured polishes really have but one use – adorning your nails in a simple manicure, and maybe also snagging the crap out of your hosiery.

Here I sponged Rock the Look, a rosy pink textured polish studded with the tiniest of matte black glitter, over a plain white creme to mimic the highly unnatural consistency and hue of Sno Balls, before adding a couple of nails’ worth of the classic chocolate cupcake (with regrettably uneven scalloped icing.  We’ll call them factory imperfects – best to devour them straightaway.)