Continuing on with this month’s Self-Portrait Challenge theme of “bits,” I thought I’d give my Gumby fingers a little exercise for this one.

Most of the time the fact that my fingers do this doesn’t bother me at all but it makes writing very tiresome and sometimes painful. They’d frequently just go numb. Back in the days before computers were commonplace, when you wrote all your homework and term papers by hand, I’d often have to tape the joints to prevent them from bending like this.

It also added a little extra challenge to playing the various instruments I was learning at the time. These fingers sort of act like trick knees, one minute they’re fine and then woops, they snap. My piano teacher was always so frustrated with my tremendously poor hand position. I would try to explain to her that I couldn’t keep my fingers in the proper form but I guess she was one of those smacked asses who don’t listen to a word children have to say.

We all knew I was no Vladimir Horowitz anyway, so when I eventually gave up out of frustration, nobody tried to stop me. I played three other instruments so my parents were probably happy to save a couple bucks on the piano lessons.

Thanks to bluberd for loaning me the 50mm, you can’t beat that f/1.8.

You can see more bits here.