You can get a lot more than just your cuticles under control and your toe nails tamed when you go to a nail salon. You often walk out of there feeling lighter—after you just dumped your boyfriend problems onto your nail lady or went on and on about a new diet that you started, that is making you a Looney Tune, where all you can eat this week are foods that are the color green. GREEN I TELL YA!

And sometimes you walk out of there with new theories on life you never even asked for.

Like the time I went to get my nails dazzled with sparkles in high school and the nail lady took one single look at my stretchy fingers and said, “LOOK!” Tapping the edges of her fake airbrushed acrylics onto the tops of my knuckles she said to me in a way that exhibited full credibility on her behalf, “You want to know why you no have boyfriend?”

“Excuse me? How do you know I don’t have a boyfriend?” I said in defense. It wasn’t like I was wearing my I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T women graphic tee.

“I tell you” she said. I gazed into her eyes as if I was looking into the screen of a Magic 8 ball after shaking it between my hands, “If you bite nail you won’t get no boyfriend”.

Oh, is that why?

And who can forget the time I went to get my nails done with my good ol’ pal Alli, and as we were sitting there ranting like two chimpanzees who were separated all winter, my wind-mill-like hands knocked over the brush from the Lincoln Park After Dark bottle out of the nail lady’s hand and straight onto her snow white leggings where it then proceeded to do a slip and slide all the way down to her ankles.

That day, you could say I was lucky enough to get two lessons out of getting my nails done. First, talking with your hands is only appropriate when doing sign language, serving as a crossing guard or ordering food in a foreign country. And second, there is no proper exit strategy for a situation like that. You will spend a few minutes trying to make the situation feel as though it never happened. You will offer to help her clean her pants (which only makes the stains worse). You will offer her your pants (which just adds to the embarrassment). You will even offer to buy her a new pair of white leggings (which she will tell you are one of a kind from CHINA!). And as you finally proceed to check out and pay as many sorries as your “So Hot It Berns” colored face spits out the only thing you can do is get as far away from the scene as possible with your friend, who politely tells you, that you really should never go back there.

The last time I went to get my nails done, at a different place (miles away from the nail polish incident), I vowed to be silent. I vowed to sit still. I vowed to behave for the sake of just.getting.my.nails.done. I sat there and listened to my nail lady cure the silence with tales of her love life when she said to me, “I tell guy if he can’t carry the tree, don’t cut it down”.

That was one of the most rad pieces of relationship advice I had ever heard.

It popped into my head the other day while i pressing my foot on the brake at a red light. I found myself thinking about it so intently that i was in turn chomping down on my finger nails. I took one good look in the rear view mirror and said out loud to myself, “Jenny, this why you no have boyfriend!”

I let out a good, loud, chuckle and quickly sped away before I had the chance to witness the cars beside me give me a very confused look.

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