Perfect is the enemy of good

My pinkie was hurting. It just suddenly started, seemingly by itself. A mysterious pain at the tip of my finger.

Then I looked at my finger, and there was a tiny hairlike sliver under my fingernail.

I couldn’t move it with the thumbnail of my opposing hand. I had to use my teeth to shift it (because tweezers are for people that want to get up and walk into another room and open a drawer, and that’s not me). But it very easily came right out. And the pain stopped. Problem solved.

But it’s one of those type of ouchies that if I would have ignored it, the pain would have continued to grow, and over a length of time the sliver could have burrowed itself further under my fingernail.

If I lived in ancient times, it could have become a serious medical issue.

Or like, living in our current times where they’re trying to get rid of "Obamacare"/"The Affordable Care Act", it could have conceivably ballooned from a free solve to a $500 problem. If not more, due to inflation. (Like, dude, some of those "cheap" medical tools are manufactured in other countries. The Trump Tariffs could go from them charging you $1.50 for a little paper cup they put pills in to $5 for a paper cup. The prices of things are not spread out to the business; they’re charged to the consumer. That’s you and me, fool.)

So like, without pausing, I solved a problem. I didn’t spend twenty minutes asking no one "What is that thing under my fingernail? How did this happen?!?" I didn’t get out a razor blade and start slashing under my fingernail.

I did a low-risk, high-return action that removed the sliver and stopped the pain.

I’m not suggesting that someone should knee-jerk order a "necessary for life" water reservoir to be dumped with little to no warning to the people effected. But if you’ve got a sliver in your finger, or an itch in your crotch, or whatever minor issue you’ve got that you can solve yourself… why wait until it becomes a big deal? Solve it yourself.

Pluck out that silver. Take a shower. Buy yourself some cream. Go no contact with your terrible relatives. Dance if you want to dance. Wear a mask. Wash your hands. Pet your dog. Hug your cat. Watch movies you enjoy, not movies you think you should enjoy. Be happy in the moment.

Because the moment doesn’t last.

~Harper Kingsley

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P.S. I once knew a woman that had to miss like a week of work after she had to get surgery because she popped a zit on her chest and it became inflamed and infected. So I’m standing there, trying to wear an expression of care and concern, and meanwhile my brain is like:

• why didn’t you wash your hands before you did that?
• why didn’t you realize shit was serious when the area started swelling up and turning colors?
• how hard did you squeeze that zit to cause yourself a medical emergency?
• it turned into a gross wound and you didn’t put any Neosporin and a bandaid on it?

Just all around, it was difficult for me to maintain an expression of empathy. Like, I could see something like that possibly happening to me, but listening to someone else describe how it happened to them… Gross, dude. Wash your hands more.

And context is a little key there, as her job involved working with one of the most disgusting, unhygienic substances on the planet–cash money–but at the same time it’s good advice for all walks of life.

You handle your dog. You touch your feet when you take your shoes off. You scratch your nose. You scratch your scalp. You’ve never sanitized your keyboard. You sit in a chair someone previously farted in. There’s so many ways living beings spread an invisible layer of filth around.

Wash your hands before you eat. Prewash the skin surface and wash your hands before you pop a zit (which, you shouldn’t do, but people do, so). Use antiseptic on your open wounds. You can even put antiseptic over your healing scab.

The idea of "a little dirt don’t hurt" is that you don’t have open wounds and the dirt hasn’t been contaminated. And that, you know, the person doing gross shit is up-to-date with their tetanus shots.