I was driving down the street the other day when I saw a sign on an empty storefront that read, FISH PEDICURES COMING SOON!
It was the kind of sign that got me thinking. Do fish need pedicures? You’d think they would do without, in this economy.
Unless they were goldfish.
I went home and plugged “fish pedicures” into Google, and I learned that this is a new kind of pedicure for women, whereby you plunge your feet into a tank of water and fish eat your dead skin off.
I’m not joking.
The article said that fish pedicures use doctor fish, who evidently love this sort of thing. You have to wonder why they didn’t put their medical degree to better use. To me, the only thing more disgusting than putting your feet in a bucket of flesh-eating fish is being a fish who has to eat dead skin for dinner.
Yuck.
I don’t have time to get pedicures, though I love them. The last one I had, my feet came out clean and smooth as a saint’s, except for the red nail polish. I opted for red because if you’re going to get a pedicure once a year, you have to make it count. Red toenail polish signals that you’re single and ready to mingle, at least in your mind.
Otherwise, the sight of a middle-aged woman’s foot is not for the fainthearted, especially in mid-winter. Only women have the constitution to deal with it, like childbirth and diaper genies.
I can barely stomach trimming my own toenails, which I do with one of those cheapo stainless-steel clippers from CVS. I try to cut them evenly, but they always end up pointy enough to qualify as a lethal weapon in most jurisdictions.
Plus, my scientific observation is that nails thicken with time, so that a fifty-year-old toenail has the thickness of a ram’s horn and is almost as pretty. My toenail trimming would go a lot faster if I replaced the clipper with a chainsaw.
And then there are calluses, which are fun. I can’t imagine a doctor fish eating through my calluses, unless he was a surgeon fish.
Or a sturgeon fish.
Plus my calluses have toughened as the years have gone by, adding layer after layer, like the Earth’s crust. Sometimes the calluses sprout cracks like fault lines, and when they finally split open, I have my own personal earthquake.
My feet are a natural disaster.
Daughter Francesca is grossed out by my feet, but they have their advantages. I don’t have to wear shoes, as I appear to be growing my own pair of wooden clogs.
I don’t need a pedicurist, I need a blacksmith.
Of course, my toes are no picnic, either. I don’t know when this happened, maybe at about age 40, but all my toes have been become one. In other words, where I used have five vertical toes on each foot, I now appear to have one toe on each foot, but it’s horizontal.
Please tell me this happened to you, too.
And what’s up with our little toe?
Do you even have a little toe anymore? What happens to that little toe, when we get older? Has it been ignored for so long that it simply decides to vanish? Does it say to itself, I wonder if anybody will even notice that I’m gone?
If you ask me, that little piggy is going to market and never coming back.
The saddest thing about the little toe is the littlest toenail.
Can you even see yours, ladies?
I don’t know if you have the Amazing Disappearing Toenail, but I do. About 10 years ago, it was normal size, then it magically cut itself in half, then in half again and again. Now it’s a toe sliver. If I could lose weight like my littlest toenail, I’d be Lindsay Lohan.
Bottom line, the fish pedicure isn’t for me.
Even a shark would throw up his hands.