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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2dCUS2b:
This one coming up on Tuesday is the last chicken processing day of the year.
I have not quite entirely, but mostly, managed not to sexually harass any of my chicken processing coworkers. But here’s the thing.
Discussion of animal dismemberment, don’t read if that’s gross to you!!! Also insensitive discussion of an insider (snicker) perspective on sapphic sexual relationships, and mostly I am just a terrible person why do I even have a blog.
Evisceration involves sticking one hand inside the bird’s body cavity for kind of a while. You have to detach all the organ bits and so on from the ribcage and so forth, and it involves a lot of delicate wriggling around of your fingers, and prying and prying. Inside a hot (really hot; even after the final rinse, the interior of a carcass is usually still about 103F), damp environment. For prolonged periods. Repeatedly. Most of your time is spent with one hand inside a bird.
You learn by about the second hour of your life of doing this that you cannot, cannot have any fingernail extending past the bed on the hand that goes in the bird. You just can’t. You gotta cut your nails off short or they’ll get ripped right off; they get soft, and you have to pry with your fingertips, and nails just don’t hold up. Even the tiniest little crescent of white showing on your nail will get broken. You just can’t have nails.
There is another time in my life when for reasons of heat and moisture and also tender internal parts, I could not have long nails. I cannot think of an amusing or delicate way of putting it. But it is a goddamn fact that the last time in my life I was so careful about keeping an immaculate and extremely short manicure was when I was in a long-term sexual relationship with a woman.
And I have let slip and said “dyke nails” to someone who absolutely was not in on that aspect of my life.
But I definitely have dyke nails and it’s super cute and also disorienting. And I am dying, dying to make a joke about it. But there is no one on the crew who would have the slightest goddamn understanding of this, and I am already the gross crass loud person on the crew. (I actually sometimes keep my mouth shut because I don’t want to be the chatty one all the time; I definitely am more hurt by the label than is at all warranted, because duh, I am chatty, and what’s more I often do it on purpose because I’m purposely being entertaining to make time pass. Sometimes being Little Cathy Chatterchin is a performative thing, you know?)
Anyway. I just gave myself the shortest tightest manicure and then painted my nails bright scarlet. It comes across as sort of childish to me, because as a little kid I had bitten-off nails too– actually when I was traumatically outed a bunch of people said they’d known all along that I was queer because of my nails and my long unstyled hair. (Simultaneously, my girlfriend said she knew I was really straight because of, well, it was always different things. It’s. Tiring, sometimes.)
My nails are so short that I got nail polish on the tips of my fingers underneath where there’s usually fingernail. It only adds to how twelve my hands look.
This one coming up on Tuesday is the last chicken processing day of the year.
I have not quite entirely, but mostly, managed not to sexually harass any of my chicken processing coworkers. But here’s the thing.
Discussion of animal dismemberment, don’t read if that’s gross to you!!! Also insensitive discussion of an insider (snicker) perspective on sapphic sexual relationships, and mostly I am just a terrible person why do I even have a blog.
Evisceration involves sticking one hand inside the bird’s body cavity for kind of a while. You have to detach all the organ bits and so on from the ribcage and so forth, and it involves a lot of delicate wriggling around of your fingers, and prying and prying. Inside a hot (really hot; even after the final rinse, the interior of a carcass is usually still about 103F), damp environment. For prolonged periods. Repeatedly. Most of your time is spent with one hand inside a bird.
You learn by about the second hour of your life of doing this that you cannot, cannot have any fingernail extending past the bed on the hand that goes in the bird. You just can’t. You gotta cut your nails off short or they’ll get ripped right off; they get soft, and you have to pry with your fingertips, and nails just don’t hold up. Even the tiniest little crescent of white showing on your nail will get broken. You just can’t have nails.
There is another time in my life when for reasons of heat and moisture and also tender internal parts, I could not have long nails. I cannot think of an amusing or delicate way of putting it. But it is a goddamn fact that the last time in my life I was so careful about keeping an immaculate and extremely short manicure was when I was in a long-term sexual relationship with a woman.
And I have let slip and said “dyke nails” to someone who absolutely was not in on that aspect of my life.
But I definitely have dyke nails and it’s super cute and also disorienting. And I am dying, dying to make a joke about it. But there is no one on the crew who would have the slightest goddamn understanding of this, and I am already the gross crass loud person on the crew. (I actually sometimes keep my mouth shut because I don’t want to be the chatty one all the time; I definitely am more hurt by the label than is at all warranted, because duh, I am chatty, and what’s more I often do it on purpose because I’m purposely being entertaining to make time pass. Sometimes being Little Cathy Chatterchin is a performative thing, you know?)
Anyway. I just gave myself the shortest tightest manicure and then painted my nails bright scarlet. It comes across as sort of childish to me, because as a little kid I had bitten-off nails too– actually when I was traumatically outed a bunch of people said they’d known all along that I was queer because of my nails and my long unstyled hair. (Simultaneously, my girlfriend said she knew I was really straight because of, well, it was always different things. It’s. Tiring, sometimes.)
My nails are so short that I got nail polish on the tips of my fingers underneath where there’s usually fingernail. It only adds to how twelve my hands look.
