Down in the office, talking with my friend D., the secretary, and the secretary's very glam (adult) daughter. The secretary's daughter was sowing off her super-mod new sunglasses, and one of the other people told her she needed to glue some rhinestones on them to make them even more fab.

She then mentioned a new type of pedicure (Italian pedicure, maybe?) where they put a line of rhinestones along the edge of the nail - as she said "where the white part would be on a French manicure." (indeed.)

I looked down at my dusty grubby feet (I'm wearing Birkies and no hose again. And as an aside, I can totally see now how the washing-of-the-feet was an important gesture of hospitality in Biblical times. I mean, I don't even go outside much, let alone walk miles down a dirt road in a desert country, and my feet are all grubbed up. But anyway). I commented that my nails would never be long enough for that (And, that it seemed kind of counterproductive to get pedicures when my feet spend a lot of time crammed in field boots).

Oh, that's not a problem, said the secretary's daughter. My friend just gets fake toenails put on.

Fake toenails. Fake toenails, y'all.

I pride myself on being a girly girl - at least in some aspects of my life, but bless me, I've never even heard of fake toenails (Fingernails, yes. I've been around long enough to remember the tacky advertisements for Lee Press-On Nails of the 1980s).

Is this, like, some expression of extreme girlieness, or am I slipping?

I mean, I already have somewhat of a girlieness-inferiority complex when I see a female impersonator on television - the really GOOD ones, like RuPaul in his prime, could out-femininity me any day of the week. I mean, I suspect RuPaul looks more glamourous doing the laundry than I looked on the most serious date-night date of my life....

But fake toenails? That just boggles my mind. (Then again, I could never really have a manicure - you can't play in the dirt with painted nails, you can't use them to pull bits of bark off a tree to determine if it's an American elm or a slippery elm, and with the way I cook - well, I'd flake polish into the tortilla dough or lose a nail into the soup pot.)