Day New, Ma.

I've always enjoyed picking at scabs. The grosser looking the better. There were the kids who glued their hands together just to peel it off (maybe in one miraculously unbroken hand shaped piece of something that looks like dead skin) or the ones who pushed safety pins through their fingertips or ran their tongues through lighters to show it doesn't hurt--and any observing person of maturity would tell us to stop it; some of them later overplucked their body hair or tried suspension (not me...not suspension) BUT I still can't leave a wound alone completely. I once asked a nurse why I couldn't just pick my knee scab open instead of her taking blood with a needle. She assured me I wasn't the first to wonder that and explained that the blood from my scab wasn't fresh anymore, that it was important to get it from the veins where it's circulating--and besides, reopening the wound would actually hurt more than that needle and make it take longer to heal, leave an...