The Wayfaring Adventurer versus the Melon-sized Butterfly: Contemplating a Year Away

You can find Utica pretty much bang in the middle of New York, almost exactly at the shallowest point of the Mohawk river (or so wikipedia says, at least). The city holds a population of somewhere just over sixty-thousand people, as well as the 1993 Guinness World Record for the largest donut. Seriously. Utica has been mentioned several times in the Simpsons; several films I'd never heard of have been partially shot there. If you try and find if anyone important lives in Utica, a Google search will essentially respond with a ‘not anyone you’d know, silly Brit.’ 

Why the information? Well, because Utica also happens to be the place I’ll be spending my next year as an international student. In just over two days’ time, I’ll be blearily wandering out Newark airport with a bag filled with textbooks and ugly shirts, set to spending a while in the land where colour has one less U in it and where pants are the second thing you pull over your legs each morning.

My year away has, understandably, has been the main conversation I’ve been having of late. 

Are you all ready to go? Pretty much, I think so. 

So you've packed everything yet? No, but the David of tomorrow will be all on top of that job. 

Okay. And how are you feeling actually going away? 

That’s a good question. Say, have you watched that new Breaking Bad episode?

I’ve not figured out to reply to that ‘how are you feeling’ question yet, at least not succinctly. The truth is, when I sit back and think properly about the fact I’m shunting myself several thousand miles to the west, a whole boatload of feelings rear up in my stomach, sail the hydrochloric seas for a while before firing their cannons somewhere into my internal organs.  

There’s excitement, obviously. Taking the initiative of moving to a strange place makes me feel like some sort of wayfaring adventurer, going independent and choosing his own cereal in the morning. Though I’m actually legally becoming a child again by moving to the states, there’s a very real sense that my doing something this dramatic is the big step towards being a fully fledged man. A man who goes into sulks fairly easily and owns several water pistols, but a man regardless.

On top of that, there’s a feeling of potential that comes from the move - that anything-could-happen-ness of flying into a new place with new things. Granted, I’m more one for tea parties than keg parties, but still there’s a new backdrop to poke around in, and not just on a small scale. Utica is situated at the red star, below-

- and its position, I feel, gives an oppurtunity to head to a bunch of places during holidays or if there’s a dip in the workload that would be cost a bundle in flights otherwise. I could go to New York or DC, I can finally visit this Walmart place everyone is apparently so very keen on.

Third, last, there’s the fact I’m a bit scared. Am I allowed to say that? When I told one friend I was feeling the nerves they took my hand, but then when I told another he told me to stop being such a tool and man up. Naturally, I sulked for a bit and shot him with my water pistols. 

There’s quite a lot of fear, actually. What if I struggle with the way things are done? What if the learning jump is too big - or worse, too small, leaving me to play catch up in my final year of my degree? What if people don’t understand my accent? Most struggle in Scotland. It’s all a bit scary. I have to leave my dressing gown behind. I wasn’t lying about that excitement and sense of potential, but I have to recognise I got a lot of it from videogames and they get me to explore by sitting in the same place and wiggling my thumbs. I’m not easy-going, my DVDs are arranged alphabetically and I get close to breaking down if there are toast crumbs in the butter. Throwing myself into the unknown like this is new, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t as nerve-wracking as it is exciting. 

Still, that’s partly why the whole thing will be so good for me. The odds are the opening line of my next blog will be The first thing I did in America was get lost, and getting lost is a learning experience and therefore possibly a good thing. 

So, excitement, potential, nerves; all merging into a melon-sized butterfly that lives in my stomach and flaps about whenever somebody asks me how I’m feeling. At the same time, though, I couldn’t expect myself to be feeling anything else. I’m ready (as I’ll ever be) to get on that plane, and I know full well - if the worst that can happen is I spend a year in a room reading second-rate sci-fi - I’m going to have a good time, evil butterfly and all. Keep the irn-bru chilled, folks: I’m off for an adventure and I’ll see you in a bit. 

Oh, and nobody mess with my DVDs while I’m gone. 

Click here if you want to see my attempts to go cold turkey on my nail-biting habit,

Or, if that’s a bit too high octane for you, I review classic literature here.

Since my last post I’ve been:

Reading Dickens’ Women by Miriam Margoyles and Sonia Fraser

Reading ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King

Watching Firefly/Serenity (and wishing it hadn’t taken me this long to get around to it)

My Week as a Recovering Nail-Biter

Like many addicts, I can point to a single scene as the source of my nail-biting habit. I was somewhere near four years old at the time; my main investments were in orange peel and jumping on things. I wasn’t showing any signs of being a child prodigy, then, but I did get that there was something up when I wobbled into our kitchen one evening. Dad was eyeing the back of his hand, my mother standing beside him. He was looking disappointed in himself, annoyed, like he’d stepped on scales and found out he’d packed on a small cow. 

“WhasamatterMummyandDaddy?” I said, using my best growed-up voice. 

“Well,” said my mother, looking at me between the fingers of her husband’s left hand, “Daddy’s been biting his nails again.”

“Wieseedointhat?”

“It’s not always on purpose”, Dad told me, dropping his fingers. “Daddy sometimes doesn’t realise he’s biting them when he is, see?”

Here the images flicker and my walk down memory lane comes to a brick wall. Probably, my tiny self-absorbed self said something close to “Ayeonleewanted Abiscut Notchyoorlifestory Gosh” and wandered back out the kitchen, but I can't say for sure. Regardless of what else happened, anyway, that day became the first I thought it might be a fun idea to bite down on the keratin at the end of my digits - and that wild ride has only sped up since. Fifteen years on, I chew my nails when I read, and I chew them when I write. When gaming I chew between loading times, and it'd likely be slower to take a buzz-saw to my hands after each study session. As my days as a teenager begin to dwindle (and thank goodness for that), each finger looks on its way to a party dressed as a car crash.

I’m not very proud of being part of the Nail Biting Society. It’s not part of my twitter bio. I don’t join Nail Chewing Rallies and I usually give their Facebook invitations a decided Ignore. Eating the ends of my hands is something I just tend to do. So when - fifteen years after they accidentally set me on my habit - my parents sent me the message 

“Visa appointment fixed. They take fingerprints so better stop biting nails ASAP”

I wasn’t that worried. Hey, I thought. This’ll be easy. I’m a strong kind of guy, after all. Resolve of iron. I bought myself some of that anti-biting solution along with a few packs of gum. I was travelling with friends so I had people to provide counsel and, if needed, a chastising flick on the ear. Give it a week or two, I was sure, and I’d be hand modelling for cash in my spare time. 

Sure enough, I found days one and two on the wagon (a little less crowded and easier to stay on than the gambling or alcohol equivalents) a pretty comfortable ride, though mostly because there wasn’t much to try and chow down on. For those first forty-eight hours, I went about with a kind of happy determination that the world was on my side and nothing could possibly defeat me. When I woke on day three and saw - to my horror - my nails were growing to what seemed an absurdly long length, that optimism dissipated. I felt I'd become the Wolverine's gangly second cousin at some point during the night. A small voice at the back of my mind began to slither its way forward; telling me to repent of my wandering ways and get my nails back to what to their standard stubbiness pronto. 

Regardless, I held on and decided to persevere. I am strong, I told myself. I shall not let my mind fall prey to the desires of the cuticle. My nails will soon be of fair length and my brother won’t be able to point at my fingers as a way to break the ice at gatherings. 

It’s hard to explain the allure in biting nails. At bottom, thinking about it, it’s just a nagging sort of feeling that won’t go away until you cave in. Like having to finish a drink even if you’re not thirsty ,or a bad joke that your brain won’t let go until its told. Thank goodness for the solution I had purchased, then - I’d put my fingers in my mouth and get hit with a dose of anti-nail biting solution, a taste next door to running your tongue down Sauchiehall street on a Friday night. Worse, the gum I was chewing would soak up solution and make the flavour stick around until I could find a place to spit the whole mess out.

Day six was worse than the first five piled together - the morning and afternoon were made up of driving down one of Australia's more dull, rain-specked highways with that annoying voice tagging along for the fun. Then, once we’d stopped at our motel for the evening, we were forced, in the name of hygiene, to spend time in a hokey little laundromat and watch our clothes spin themselves clean. Bored, I had to spend most of that time pacing and trying very hard to forget I had hands.

“We’re all very proud of you, David,” one of my friends said, leaving those beside us to guess for themselves what class-A substance I was recovering from. “Real proud.” I glared at him, unwrapped a fresh stick of gum. Somehow I stumbled to the end of the day digitally intact.

I crumbled on day nine. We were boarding a lengthy night-flight to Singapore and my travel buddies had somehow managed to beat the seatbelt sign to switching themselves off. I couldn’t sleep myself but I wasn’t fussed about it. I had a book, after all. And an iPod. I had one of those head-rest televisions...but, I realised (with a little jump in my seat that startled a couple of air hostesses a little way off), what I'd forgotten to bring in my hand-luggage was my nail solution. Worse, since we were headed for Singapore and very much hoping not to be flayed on arrival, all gum had been binned hours ago. If I was ever going to give up, I was beginning to realise, it was going to be right about...

Several hours later I walked through the baggage stands with ten fresh stumps where my progress had been. I was back to car-crash hands, and all the battles I’d fought that week had been thrown out the window thirty-thousand feet up. . The little nagging voice had shoved to the front of my head, wreaked havoc and, job done, had abated. 

The injury I'd done to myself in heading back to my nail biting ways went deeper than my fingers, too - it had lowered my self-confidence the same level as the guy whose girlfriend introduces him with “this is my...friend...”. I had taken on my habit, with bravado, and had lost rather easily. So much for being resolute, I thought. So much for being strong. 

Now, If I stopped the words flowing at that last paragraph, this would turn out to be a fairly depressing post. I failed, after all, and failures as a rule tend not to do very well at things. Why not write up the sequel to that high school blog or another post another game review? People laughed at those. Sometimes even in the right places. 


Well, the reason I'm sharing my failures with you, fair readership, is that I’m going to try again. The second I hit that ‘post’ button marks my attempt to get back on the straight, nicely filed path of hand hygiene and drag myself back onto the wagon. I hope it’ll work. I’d like to be able to open canned drinks again without help. That's the dream, isn't it? So, you catch me a week from now with nails looking anything like this:

Be a pal and flick my ear for me, would you? Thanks.

[No nails were harmed in the composing of this blog]

To see me self-righteously dismissing well-loved literary classics, go here,

 here I tell a slightly distasteful yet unfortunately true tale of a recent car ride.

Since my last post I've been reading:

Prince of Thorns - Mark Lawrence

The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

God Collar - Marcus Brigstocke