“Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else”

When I was in high school, I met this amazingly cool girl at volleyball camp who wore a ring just above the second knuckle on her pinky finger. The ring was a simple, thin gold band that had been in her family for years, and looked subtly natural, despite its unorthodox positioning. She had started wearing the ring years before, and her skin had grown so accustomed to the ring that her finger actually bore a somewhat permanent indention where the ring sat on her finger.

For some reason, I always thought that was one of the hippest things I'd ever seen, and I was determined to recreate the effect on myself. As a teen, I tried to start wearing ring above the second knuckle on a few of my fingers, but I've just never been a very big ring person. It never took. I decided that I just wasn't cool enough, and would let that desire to have a finger-ridge fade.

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Also in high school, I uncovered a small silver band adorned with a turquoise apple from amongst my masses of souvenir jewelry. I really liked that ring, but since my fingers had grown larger since I'd acquired it as a youth, I decided that I would slide the ring on the second largest toe of my left foot.

I left the ring there for a while, and my foot grew accustomed to it. It got to the point where it felt more peculiar to not be wearing it than to be wearing it. By my junior year, the ring had become a permanent fixture on my foot, and I hardly noticed any longer. A few times, classmates even pointed it out and called me weird, as toe rings were not quite the rage eleven or twelve years ago as they are these days. I shrugged off the comments and continued to wear my ring.

After a few years, the silver band on my apple ring fell apart. I quickly replaced it with an actual toe-ring from a sterling silver outlet, simply because I couldn't tolerate the nakedness of my toe... it felt odd. I still wear that $5 ring on my toe, and I can't recall ever having taken it off.

To get to my point, I was getting my toes done today, and most uncommonly, the pedicurist actually removed my toe ring. As she did so, I noticed something. The second toe on my left foot had a dent. I bent over and felt it, and it was definitely there... a somewhat permanent indention, similar to the one I had seen years before, the one I had longed to mimic. I shrugged and smiled to myself, thinking back to girl I had once known.

It seems that the things we admire in others don't always work for ourselves, but its weird how when you do accomplish that something, it really doesn't mean what you thought it would.

I guess Judy Garland said it best...