Welcome to another week of Home Alone. I hope you have enjoyed an invigorating yet restful weekend. I personally do not love weekends. I don't actively dislike them either, but they veer outside of my established routine enough to make me eye them warily and approach them with care.
Ah sweet relief, it is Monday again, though. Back to the routine, the solitude, the absence of distractions. I sincerely love my distractions; but I also love it when they are happily engaged elsewhere, like at work or at school. Now I can really zero in and apply my lazer-focus to things. I can turn over the questions of the ages and seek a voice in the Great Conversation. I can concentrate and intellectually wrestle with deep issues.
Like my hair.
After pouring over the latest issue of Real Simple magazine (in which very little is actually real simple, but I am an easy mark for it every month with its clean, cheerful covers and engaging articles -- who doesn't want to know how to "make grilling more thrilling" or "beautiful organizing solutions for every room?"), I determined that life would cease if I did not invest in their recommended brand of summer time styling foam. The article stated that after working this foam through my damp hair, I would get "shiny, bouncy, mermaidy waves." Um, yes please. Do I even need to say that mermaidy waves would not only change my hair, but also my life, and my relationship to both?!
Procuring a product of this importance required a 40-mile roundtrip visit to our local mecca of beauty products - Ulta. I love browsing in this store, especially the fragrance row. I usually leave smelling like a riot of dusky smoldering love and eternal flowery passion all twirled together with 14 spritzes of White Linen just for good measure. What I do not love about this store is their approach to helping.
When I am shopping, I much prefer to be left alone to ponder and make decisions. I do not want to talk to a complete stranger about what I am looking for today, or any questions I have today (people like me do any necessary research from the safety of home), or if they can help me find anything today. I am extremely polite about this (I am always extremely polite to complete strangers) giving my standard, "No thanks, I'm just browsing." But at Ulta, oh Ulta, it is never enough.
Wave upon wave of employees roam through the store, lurking near the nail polish, waiting to pop out and ambush you near the hair dryers. Not only do five different people trot by and ask you if you need anything, often the same person asks you repeated times, just in different areas of the store. Like you're having some sort of freakish nightmare in which you don't really exist, someone keeps up the act that they haven't yet seen you that day (or 2 minutes previously, over by the loofahs). At best, this is unsettling, but more often tends to be downright frustrating.
However, in spite of having to be uncomfortably vigilant and repeatedly polite while in the store, I did manage to score the last bottle of the magical styling foam that is going to alter my life forever. If I don't blog tomorrow, you'll know it's because I now have both mermaidy waves and the resulting life of blissful, shiny underwater love that everything about the word "mermaidy" promises.
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