how i wash my hair
Become forlorn.
Seek change.
Mope a little. Watch one episode of Top Chef clinging to my girlfriend like a mollusk.
Say, “I have to wash my hair.” Sigh. Think about a time in the distant past when I was cruel. Relitigate the circumstances of the offense swiftly within my head while gargling ice water and decide with characteristic selfishness that I could probably not have been expected to do any better and that anyway these trespasses perpetrated and weathered in our youth are essential to learning how to be a person. Also Matt, while approaching handsome, was a bully with too sweet smelling sweat. I used Herbal Essences then. It was already 90s retro in 2014.
Beg for kisses, groan, writhe and tumble limb over next out of the room while saying something about when I fell in the YMCA locker room and hit my head at age eight and how my grandmother picked me up in her red car and I slept all day or otherwise about my fantasy basketball team.
Place my socks in a knot on the floor. That’s gender play. I remove my shirt.
Between seven and twenty two minutes will pass now during which I am examining my body in the bathroom mirror. This is done alternately with a scientist’s extreme focus or in a Narcissusian daze, eyes locked unseeing. I am fevered as I catalog every spot and bend in my flesh or else I am not really aware of any of them, any of myself, but for a general pink blurring. Regardless, the water in the shower has been running.
Teenagers online have taught me that I have low-porosity hair. Without fully understanding what this means, I accept it as a spiritual truth. Most products make my hair look worse instead of better and it takes a long time to get it really wet, the strands fighting off the water with a tenacity I admire and worry was mistakenly all put onto my head rather than in it. I stand under the hottest water I can bear, which is very hot. This, I have learned, is not good for your hair but is a nonnegotiable part of my life so in a gesture of compromise I tilt my head back and take the water direct in the face. I once imagined I had outgrown the hunger for oblivion urgent in my younger years. In the shower I am less sure. I get red.
Turn down the water temperature and wash with something mild. By now I am wishing I had put on some music. Without music I will soon give my mind over to intense and lifelike daydreaming, cycling through the latest crop of stock alternate realities where I am, for example, a famously queer pro soccer player with a popular column in The Cut, or a prodigious private detective in tortured love with my rakish mentor, or a stay-at-home mom with three children who have complex food needs. With music I will do all that but there is a cute little soundtrack. This tends to temper the proceedings. I have been known to get out of the shower sopping and to slide across the tile to my fogged iPhone and then I’ll put on, probably, some wincing 90s girl rock song which, when I have made it back into the shower, will be unintelligible over the din of the water.
Anyway shampoo. I had a sample of some good stuff which was nice I guess but got moldy in between uses. This is not a reflection on the brand so I won’t name them here. I know it was my fault somehow. This morning I dropped three eggs on the kitchen floor. There wasn’t time to shower.
There are all kinds of chemicals you’re not supposed to put on your hair which is great because all of those kinds of chemicals are used to manufacture hair products. I read the ingredients lists like a toddler thumbing the pages of a storybook, the letters meaning nothing as they placidly ape their mother. I look and see nothing and choose based on the color or name. When the soap is on my head, I give over to the roaming buffalo herd of personal quandaries which constitute my number one hobby i.e. thinking about myself. Which haircut will make me suddenly well-adjusted and able to coolly weather any struggle? If I had gone to a fancier college would I have an Oscar nomination by now? Can I call myself a lesbian if I hope one day James Gandolfini will be my boyfriend in heaven?
I stand slightly apart from the water and view a slideshow of every shower I’ve ever been in. The shower in the apartment where we lived after I was born and the house I remember from elementary school and the duplex I adored in fifth grade and the house my dad built after and Ashley’s house and my grandmother’s perennially under-construction ensuite with pink wallpaper and Emily’s dank basement watering hole and the high school locker room totally open like in Carrie and multiple Connecticut casino hotels and the third floor apartment in Amherst where my head was slammed into the mirror and the All Star Music at Disney World. The cavernous shower in my first girlfriend’s loft apartment which echoed and was dangerously slippery to traverse. My LA sublet, sharing a bathroom with men for the first time in my adult life. The apartment in Silver Lake where I took three hour baths during those bleary first COVID months. Some dirtier showers in between which I can see but not place. The walk-in steam shower we thought we broke while wine drunk and dogsitting but it was okay. And ours.
My fingers begin to prune.
I panic over the next step.
Something needs to happen. I’m drying up.
The softening. Begin with a palmful of runny whiteish conditioner, a slithering pearlescent lifeform which luridly recalls entirely different sprays flung there in the past. Just kidding. One of my conditioners is blue. I’ve had stray grays since seventh grade. Billy Sullivan pointed one out to me on the bus and I flipped him off but cried walking home. I use drugstore box dyes to a blurring effect. Now it looks neither good nor bad, I think, but like me. The blue conditioner is to banish the dreaded reddening of the dyed hair. I have no ill will for the ginger community–except for a few to whom I am related and they know who they are–but that is not a lifestyle I am willing to partake of.
I have a hair mask from a brand which has got something to do with Jennifer Garner. I try to remember what that college sophomore with ten thousand followers said to do with it. I worry my hair is not wet enough. This anxiety has replaced for me many other seemingly more pressing worries. I ward off thoughts of death and failure with the fear that I am not getting the most out of my naturally thick and waving head of hair. The battle for wetter locks begins to feel existential and I am about to give it up and get a wig.
Squeezing and soaking and squeezing and soaking.
The water begins to pool around my feet because fallen hair has knotted to clog the drain despite Megan having bought a device to prevent this. I either notice this clogging and think to clear it or do not and when I do not that is a major failing, but I suppose we do all have them and all that can be done is to try to improve anyway sorry, baby.
Seconds after turning off the tap I am scrunching foam into the hair and the bathmat is swimming. Lately it is this one. For most of my life I used zero hair products. The detangling spray in the green bottle with the orange cap from back in that old, gone life of childhood was as close as I came to styling. Then I was up to three or four, searching. Now I am trying to do more with less which I have never done but think sounds good. I don’t know what I want exactly except to be perfect and stunning in a way that is so clearly effortless it makes people feel puzzled and a little sick. Additionally, defined curls with no frizz.
Let us never speak of how I struggle to plop my hair. How I can only tie the turbie twister microfiber towel onto my head three times out of ten. If that. Here is where I should put on lotion all over to make up for the ritual scalding, and many times I start to do so, only I am too excited to get back to bothering Megan with the details of my hero’s journey (see above) and roll myself wetly back to bed, dripping a manmade lake onto the sheets and exhausted in advance at the thought that one day I will have to do this again.
consider: romantic new Waxahatchee. ** Not prepared to give my formal statement at this juncture, but an incredible development this week is that I am starting to think maybe Kyle Richards really is getting eaten out by that Morgan person. Further, I feel that perhaps The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills is really back, baby! If you dipped out at any point (we skipped last year entirely; Lisa Rinna became genuinely unwatchable.) it could be worth returning to try season 13. These women fucking hate each other but in an incredibly low stakes and weirdly mostly cordial fashion. Also Dorit is so depressed about her ugly husband and the ever-looming fact of death that she dyed her hair brown and is wearing glasses and sweatshirts, which, for those in the know, is like seeing a dog walk on its hind legs. (To be clear she looks great and remains my little angel.) ** Speaking of my girls and their needs….. I stand here awed by the glow of pure delight which emanated from Lisa Barlow (who, I would be remiss not to mention, washes her hair EVERY DAY!!!!) in this week’s RHOSLC reunion part 2 as she proudly (hair twirlingly, feet kickingly, giddily!!!) as she explained that her son’s visa for his missionary trip to Colombia was delayed because the photo he included in his application was a shirtless selfie taken on a boat. She loves it! Feral in a way approaching holy. ** I saw my first Jason Statham movie (THE BEEKEEPER) on Saturday and was mesmerized entirely but now can only remember vague flashes, which seems right. Amazing stuff. He was the protagonist and had like nine lines. ** It’s the busiest time of the year at work so I scarcely thought about anything but emails and seating charts and program copy and, as mentioned, Kyle Richards maybe getting divorced. Obviously as a pathological booster of The Empathy Exams I did find time to read this Leslie Jamison piece about her divorce which is kind of obvious and repetitive and just not at all as gobsmacking as her work typically is but I did still enjoy it lol. ** Here is a winter poem that makes me cry!! “She thinks she’ll never be so happy for who else will find her graceful find her perfect skate with her in circles outside the emptied rink forever” !