Baby’s butt. That’s how soft my hands usually are. Especially since I took a break from making furniture. No callouses. Nothing.

Gloves. I don’t wear work gloves. Never have. Except when raking or it’s cold.

So when tiling last week and handling and cutting tiles, working with mortar and grout I pretty much destroyed my hands. The sharp tile nicked the crap out of them and the mortar and grout sanded them raw.

This wasn’t really an issue until I cut up some hot chili peppers. Even that wasn’t a problem until I decided to scrape the seeds out of the peppers with my fingers. Did I mention that I don’t wear gloves?

Ouch! Now that’s a pain that lingered. No amount of after the fact counter-measures could reverse that genius decision.

Multiple opportunities have offered themselves up in this tale that would afford me the chance to learn a lesson.

But will I? I think probably not. You have to want to learn a lesson. I don’t want to learn to wear gloves. So there.

I did learn something though. I learned just leave the fucking seeds in the peppers. The best lessons are the ones you don’t expect to learn.

Maybe I’m just being stubborn about the gloves. Obviously I’d rather be idiosyncratic than intelligent. Crap! That sounds like the definition of a hipster: following a pattern of behavior that sounds cool but when analyzed doesn’t make any sense but following it anyway.

Though to be fair to myself I think everyone follows this pattern of behavior in some fashion. It’s that seemingly infinite human capacity to rationalize. Maybe it’s a self-preservation mechanism. It allows us to live without being in a constant state of contradiction between our rational thought processing and our emotional needs and desires. And in fact not only do we not feel contradiction we feel unique.

Maybe this is part of maintaining positive self-worth. Or maybe this is just more rationalizing. If I don’t try the glove on though, I can at least claim ignorance to whether it fits or not.