who needs fingernails

my right thumb is still in pain. eariler today after climbing old rag, i looked down at my thumb and realized that there was dried blood by my thumbnail. wow, i cut myself climbing over a rock or something, i had thought. but no, that would be too normal an explanation. what had really happened is that i had bit my thumbnail so short, chewing on it, that my thumb had started to bleed.

this morning after picking rebecca up for our little adventure, we gossiped and gossiped about people from new college that she had not seen in a while. we did this while driving around all of dc, trying and trying to get to brian hughes motherfucking house. what should have been a fifteen-twenty minute drive took in excess of an hour, as rebecca showed for the umpteenth time that she is the worst navigator in the world and i demonstrated my miraculous ability to just realize i need to make a turn right after we pass the street that we need to turn on. anyways, while taking our little sightseeing tour of dc, rebecca and i also talked about how it might be a weird day, conversation-wise with brian hughes since neither us had really ever talked to him that much. but, we were still very excited about our day with brian hughes.

however our excitement could not prevent our prediction of a lack of steam in conversation from occuring. shortly, the so what have you been doing over break formalities were exhausted, and it looked as if it were about to occur right then. but save! we could always talk about school, so we asked him about school shit for a brief while. however, that conversation puttered out pretty quickly too. this is probably the point at which i started nervously chewing on my thumbnail to somehow make up for the lack of conversation.

the entire trip, me and rebecca asked him about school, his family, and his friends. those were the only topics which our pathatic brains could think of to talk to him about. so, you're friends with x right? do you have any gossip about x? how's x doing? subsitute x for all of brian's friends and you will have something pretty similar to a transcript of our conversation during the hike.

i don't know why it was so hard to talk to brian at times today but it so was. there were long stretches of silence that i filled by thinking: "okay, what can i ask him? no, don't ask about school anymore! or anymore questions about his friends! c'mon charlie you can do this, just think of some normal question to ask him." after we dropped brian back off at his house, rebecca said she had the exact same conversation with herself during parts of the hike.

to think of things to talk to brian about, i started to think about what i would talk to just rebecca about, and i realized it consisted of mainly gossip: trash-talking someone i hated, telling her about my crushes, and just general gossip about who's smooching who. and for some reason, i just could not talk about these things in front of brian -- i thought that he would have thought i was petty or something, and he just seems above fun trash talking. i don't know. but anyways, brian hughes is still super cute and nice, i just wish i did not have such a hard time talking to him, however for this reason today i decided that maybe i don't have a crush on him anymore - that i just think he's a super rad person. something maybe like that.

anyways, these occasional lapses in conversation were not the hike. the hike was gorgeous views, the occasional trip over a rock, swishing through leaves, super windy weather, huge motherfucking boulders of rocks, leaveless trees, and countless other things that i will not even attempt to describe since i am tired as fuck and it will invariably end up sounding cheesy as fuck.

and there's still a bunch of dried blood under my thumbnail.