You can kind of see it in the picture that I used for this most recent Wordless Wednesday, but I have what is called brachydactyly — an inherited condition that causes unusually shortened fingers (and in my case, it appears to be just my fingers that are affected, as my feet and toes seem fine). My form of it is not as severe as some people’s, which is why I “got away” with people thinking that I simply had small hands as I grew up… and a lot of people, even now, simply think that I have small fingers and hands. And although that’s the case, my fingers and hands — mainly my fingers — are abnormally small, especially in proportion to what they should be. The type that I appear to have, or the one that appears to most line up with the structuring of my hand, is Sugarman’s. I don’t completely fall in line with any of the listed types of brachydactyly even though you can tell that I have it, but of the various types, Sugarman’s brachydactyly is the one that most resembles my hand size. And again, I don’t have it as severely as some people… but I do have “small hands”.

Some people have also gone a step further than that and have described my hands as “small, weird hands”.

I’ve actually found that you can get away with more being, or passably presenting as, female, and being short or small. I didn’t find out until I was an adult that there was actually an explanation for my hands being the way that they were (and I didn’t even find this out until I found out why I could not adequately follow nail polish tutorials… of all of the reasons to find something like that out, huh?), let alone that it was an anomaly.

I’m sure some of you can imagine the relief that I felt finding out that there was a scientific reason for this.

I don’t think we (as in humankind, as a collective whole) will be “getting back to normalcy” for awhile.

Apparently most people who have gotten infected by COVID-19 only hold immunity to it for three months on average. And since so many people as a whole, especially those who are in positions of power who are tasked to make decisions like these for those “underneath them”, are desperate “not to let the economy die” and to “get kids going back to school”, these things are being rushed to the point that people are continually being infected with the illness to the point that it still has new bodies to infect, and these lawmakers are left scratching their heads feigning ignorance as to why we are still in a pandemic, why it continues to actively infect people and why it has not just “gone away”. I still think that if we had committed to longer stay-at-home orders that we, especially the United States — who is the absolute worst at this, in my opinion as a citizen of this country — would not quite be in the position we’re in now. In spite of there having been pandemics in the past, and global ones at that, it honestly seems like no one knows how to be in a pandemic or quite manage one, although some countries are doing better than others, and some countries are doing much better than others. For the United States to do well at all, we’d have to start with another President.

And I don’t even have faith that we won’t elect this one right back into power for another four-year term.

Seriously though, why can’t people just sit at home and watch Netflix? Play video games? Wait this virus out until it no longer has live bodies to infect and then get on with our lives? That would be the more preferable alternative to what we’re doing, because what we are doing right now is clearly not making this go away…