Insecurity

I am having an attack of insecurity. There are (currently) four things I can blame, I think: 1. My husband is on call, and when he is on call we spend less time together and I feel ignored and needy. 2. My primary client, for the first time ever, returned a project to me and asked me to redo it. Not minor edits, but a complete redo because I had so completely missed the mark. 3. I have been ordering cute bikinis from amazon because the summery weather (which has since retreated) has me dreaming of time by the pool, and NOT A ONE has looked remotely reasonable on me and only emphasizes the weird shape of my hips and thighs. 4. My poor kid is homesick for our old house and cannot fall asleep (it is currently 1:11 in the morning egads) and I cannot help her feel better (which I know isn’t always the goal! she should feel her feelings!) or help her fall asleep.

To sum up: I am unlovable, my work performance sucks, I look terrible in a bathing suit and probably in all clothing, and I am a terrible mother.

Should I perhaps be focusing on the fact that my husband is lovely and warm and attentive 6/7 of the time, and that he is not ignoring me but is instead focusing all his energy on the very difficult work of keeping dangerously sick people alive? Should I perhaps be remembering that this client mostly asks for very small edits, if any, and also it seems statistically improbable that I would write exactly what they want every single time and also one miss does not negate all the hits, nor does it preclude me from writing well in the future? Should I perhaps stop pressing my finger into the tender bruise of body imperfection when I have a perfectly good, rear-end covering skirted suit already? Should I perhaps recall the many, many nights when I was a child that I cried myself to sleep over something or other and the many, many nights as a child and an adult when I couldn’t sleep and how none of those nights had anything to do with my parents or their parenting ability?

Should does not equal AM DOING, let me tell you that.  

Insecurity can REALLY spiral if I let it get going, so I have been reading articles titled “Top Ten Things Therapists Recommend You Do When You’re Feeling Insecure!” and “How to Conquer Feelings of Insecurity.” The thing is that I know how to stop feeling insecure. I mean, I am aware of the techniques. But most of them are long-term kinds of things (replace negative self-talk with positive self-talk; focus on your strengths; talk to a therapist) and I am working on those things, but I want a quick fix. Is there a quick fix for feeling insecure?

What I really want is to say something negative about myself and have someone refute it with convincing evidence backed by reliable sources. My husband is not good at providing reassurance of this type; he is impatient with insecurity and seems to operate under the belief that there is no need to tell a person something that they should already know about themselves. (I also worry that, if I am too insecure around him, he will stop wanting to be married to me how’s THAT for insecurity catastrophizing, hmmm?????)

Reassurance is best sought from friends, I find. But it’s too late to call or text any of my analog-world friends, so I am writing to you. This makes it sound like I am demanding compliments, which I am not because that would be embarrassing and stupid. (Also, you aren’t married to me, you don’t know my work writing and you don’t know what I look like in a bikini, so, lovely and brilliant as you are, you cannot possibly make an honest evaluation of any of those things.) What I’m hoping for, I guess, is commiseration and solidarity. I would also accept The Key to Real Confidence, if you have it.

Do you ever feel insecure? If so, what do you do when you feel that way? My negative self-talk is so loud right now, even my strategies for combatting it (talking out loud to myself; pretending my concerns belong to my best friend and saying to myself what I would say to her; referring to myself as honey and acknowledging that my feelings are valid) are inaudible over the din. 

Gah. Being a person is so stupid and exhausting sometimes.

Well, I suppose the next best thing to writing a blog post about it is going to sleep. Sleep helps most things. 

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Blustery Tuesday Blah Blah

I am sitting in a dark house, staring out at a brooding sky and wind-tossed trees. It is deliciously quiet right now. Thanks to your powerful not-Covid thoughts, Carla is Covid negative and back at school. Hooray!

We were very productive yesterday: in addition to going to the doctor, I did four loads of laundry – INCLUDING folding – and have a last load waiting for me to put it in the washer (I have been trying to see a load through from hamper to folding before I start a new load; reduces the pile up). We also cleaned out Carla’s desk, which had an entire trash bag’s worth of junk in it, and we listened to Project Hail Mary (which I listened to based on Jaida’s excellent recommendation and loved so much that I explained it to Carla, and my enthusiasm made her want to listen to it also), and we watched a very long video of someone who gives makeovers to OMG dolls. Carla subsequently added “liquid latex” and “heat gun” to her list of must-have crafting items. It was nice to have a little extra time with my kid, but she has another day off coming up and I am very glad she is back at school.

After I dropped Carla off, I went to the grocery store and spent all our savings on food. I have not been noticing a huge number of shortages… things seem to have leveled off, a bit. (Although at Costco this weekend, there was no Kirkland-brand toilet paper, and both toilet paper and paper towels were one-per-customer.) Plenty of staples – beans, pasta, flour, sugar, pepperoni. Even Lunchables are available again. A thing that I do find concerning is that Target now has “only X left” on pretty much anything I try to order online. This is true whether I choose “pick-up” or “shipping” as my delivery option. It could simply be marketers playing to the scarcity strategy, but whatever it is, it definitely cues my panic response.

You know a thing that I find unnecessarily anxiety-provoking? When someone can’t hear what you’re saying. The checker at the grocery store had a hard time hearing me, and was really frustrated-acting about it. Which I get! It must be frustrating, to not hear someone! And I am sure that she has to deal with this same situation multiple times per day, what with people wearing masks, and her being stuck behind a plexiglass shield and all. But she did that thing where she shook her head and closed her eyes in an “I am counting to ten” kind of way, and, her tone said “this is entirely YOUR fault” and I felt helpless and defensive and equally frustrated that I couldn’t make myself heard and ugh. I just hate that. Makes me feel shaky and tearful when it should be a simple exchange of, “Oh, sorry! I will speak up!” and “Thank you! That’s better!” instead of disgusted dismissive shrugging like I am purposefully being a jerk.

She also seemed mad at me that I asked her to re-scan my apples. I bought Jonagold apples because a) I can’t remember the last time I ate a Jonagold apple, and cannot remember how they taste and b) because they looked so beautiful and shiny and red. I purposely avoided the Honeycrisp apples because a) they were $0.50 per pound more expensive and b) also looked pale and bloated. So I pointed out that they had rung up as the wrong apple – which she had me repeat twice – and then she said in an angry way, “Well, they come up as Honeycrisp when I type in the number on the tag.” Which. Okay. Either some Honeycrisp apples migrated into the Jonagold section or the tag was incorrect or the computer was reading them incorrectly or she typed the number into the computer incorrectly or I blacked out in the apple section and got Honeycrisp instead of Jonagold… I don’t know, but it didn’t seem to me that I had been BLAMING her for doing something WRONG when that is clearly how it came across. She is never as friendly as some of the checkers, but she sure drank some curdled milk this morning or something.

A package of M&Ms classic mix (M&Ms, peanut M&Ms, and peanut butter M&Ms all in a single bag) caught my eye at the checkout, but I neglected to act on my impulse and buy it. I wavered because I don’t really like plain M&Ms. But I am regretting my inaction now.

We got the bill for the exterminator, and it was MUCH higher than indicated in our previous infuriating and elliptical conversation. And I can’t decide whether I need to simply pay it and find a new exterminator service or if I should email him back and request an explanation. And I KNOW that prices are rising and costs are increasing, so there could be a reasonable explanation for the discrepancy. But I want to KNOW. I don’t want to just pay whatever he says the price is, willy nilly. We got a nice letter from our snowplow service saying – in advance – that they had a lot of increased costs and so our bill would go up, and I really appreciate that kind of up-front transparency. We will gladly pay the increase. Part of me wants to email the exterminator, just to see what he says. Although I am afraid he will then call me.

My root canal takes place next week. My husband took the day off from work and will drive me to and from the appointment and presumably ensure I don’t die afterward. I am not looking forward to it. But it will be nice to no longer have severe pain in my jaw. (Although I have heard plenty of stories about root canals not “taking” and needing to be repeated. Arrrrggghhhhh.)

This past Sunday, because Carla wasn’t going to school the following day, the three of us watched Cruella, with Emmas Stone and Thompson. There were some men in it, too, but the Emmas were the real stars. It was a decent movie, although it made Cruella a little too sympathetic, and I still am not quite sure I can make the narrative jump to her wanting to skin and wear a bunch of a Dalmatians as a coat. Also, the whole nature-vs-nurture theme of the movie could have done with a little more thinking through, but I suppose what do you want from a children’s storybook villain origin story. Carla was quite taken with her and has resumed speaking with a semi-British accent.

This is a bit of a delicate topic, maybe. But… do you shave your face? I had not done any sort of facial hair removal until a couple of months ago, aside from an occasional plucking of a stray eyebrow hair, or pulling out the hair that insists on sprouting witchily from the mole on my chin. But now I am completely obsessed with these Tinkle razors. I think I have used these enough times now to be able to recommend them with confidence. A little back story: an acquaintance mentioned these to me over the summer, and said she’d gotten a couple extra and she would give them to me. Note that she did not ask if I wanted them. Then the next couple of times we ran into each other, she’d slap her thigh and say, “Oh darn, I forgot to bring them for you!” As you might imagine, after each of these exchanges, I would spend long minutes with my face pressed up against the mirror, trying to determine whether my peach fuzz had graduated into full on facial shrubbery. Surely, my furry outer layer was so evident that this person felt COMPELLED to get me to take action. So when she finally pressed a couple into my hands, I was ready to give them a try. I had never tried any sort of facial hair removal options before because my mother had always given me stern and strenuous warnings about how the hair would grow back thicker and darker than before. A mother’s admonitions are a hard thing to get past, even when one is in her fifth decade of life. So far, I have not noticed this to be the case with the Tinkle razors. There is a period during which the face feels a teeny bit rougher than normal, but then the hair goes back to its normal downy state, and I haven’t noticed any change in color whatsoever. Anyway, these are very easy to use and I LOVE THEM and I am not going back and if you are looking for a facial hair solution I recommend you give these a go.

What are we supposed to be watching on TV these days? My husband and I watched Midnight Mass (interesting and thoughtful concept; Hamish Linklater; too many long-winded monologues) and Squid Game (VERY stressful but impossible to stop once we started) and are of course watching the latest season of Great British Baking Show. But we need something new. I want to watch that murder comedy with Selena Gomez (Only Murders in the Building) and my husband wants to watch Succession and neither of us is particularly excited about the other’s choice. What have you watched recently and loved?

I looked up the person who does the OMG doll makeovers and she apparently makes somewhere around $14,000 a month.

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Rules That Are Ridiculous

You may have surmised from my last post that I am a little on edge lately. Which means that it is very easy for me to go from pleasant to full-on CRAB in about six seconds. And nothing pushes me right over the edge into crab-infested waters than rules that are absolutely stupid.

Listen, I LOVE rules! I am a Rule Follower! Rules are presumably there for a reason, and exist because someone took a careful, thoughtful look at a given situation and decided there needed to be some sort of boundary or regulation. Hopefully to PROTECT people or property or freedom or whatever it is the rules are serving. Rules are generally good, and I like to do what I’m told and I get panicky when I accidentally break a rule and I get very indignant indeed if someone else breaks a rule. Go, rules! That is my motto.

AND YET.

Some rules are stupid.

We took out a loan a few years ago. The lending bank required us to set up a special account they would use as collateral against the loan. We cannot access this account – it is our money, sitting there, waiting for us to pay off the loan. (Or, I guess, default on the loan, in which case it would belong to the bank.) (We have no intention of defaulting on the loan.) We have no checks for this account. We have no debit or credit card associated with this account. We can check on the balance of the account online, but we can neither add to nor subtract from the account. It’s just money, in limbo, for the life of the loan. Other relevant information: The bank itself is in a part of town neither my husband nor I ever visit. We do not have other accounts through this bank. And its other branches are in cities at least a thirty minute drive away from our home.

Each year, around this time, we get a statement from the bank that says we are being charged an inactive fee.

Of course the account is inactive. It is, by its very nature, supposed to be inactive. And yet we get charged for it.

This is an example of a stupid rule.

This year, as I have the previous two years, I called the bank. This year, as I have the previous two years, I explained the situation and asked if there was anything they could do about it. Could they rename/reframe the account, so that the inactive fee would no longer come up? Could they put a note on our account, saying we are exempt from the inactive fee, and have someone manually remove it? Could they have a bank manager put a standing item on her calendar to remove the inactive fee next time it pops up?

No, is the blanket answer. The ONLY WAY to avoid the inactive fee is to go into the bank, in person, and deposit something. Even $5 or $10 would do it, they say, as though this helps.

That is ridiculous, say I. I do not want to ADD money to this money that we cannot access. Why would I do that? If I put $5 into the account, I will not see it for several years, until the end of the loan. Yes, it is only $5, but for tightwad’s sake, it is still $5!

There is nothing we can do, the bank says.

You can at least refund the inactive fees that have already been charged against my account, I say.

Okay, they agree, we will do that.

I know this is not YOUR fault, I tell the person I am speaking to. I try a laugh. But you must understand how frustrating this is. WHY is this a rule?

Well, maybe there is a federal regulation that requires it? they say. They don’t KNOW, they are just guessing. (Which means that maybe if they dig a little, they could find a solution.) Or maybe it is because we want to maintain a relationship with our customers, you know, just make sure everything is okay?

WHAT ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP WHERE WE PAY BACK THE LOAN EVERY MONTH?

Do you know where our nearest branch is? they ask.

Yes, I say. But it is nowhere near where we work, live, or shop. It is completely out of the way. It would be very inconvenient to have to reroute our lives to go to this bank for this incredibly ridiculous reason.

Perhaps you don’t know about our other branches? They are in [location 30 minutes away] and [location 45 minutes away].

Infinite screaming.

Listen. LISTEN. I get that this is a very silly problem. Very. Silly. So what if the bank is not conveniently located. I should be able to get myself over there once a year and deposit $5 into this stupid account.

But the rule is STUPID. The blood pressure propelling kind of stupid. The kind of rule that probably fits 99.9% of all cases… but needs an exception for that teeny percentage of cases where it makes absolutely no sense.

Speaking of exceptions.

Another thing that really herbs my seafood is when there are rules… but they are followed arbitrarily! (Arbitrarily, as opposed to for a reasonable reason.)

This weekend, a checker at Target double charged me for toilet paper. (Side gripe: The reason I did not notice that I was overcharged while I was at the STORE is that my Target has made it nearly impossible to watch the computer as your items are scanned. The computer faces the checker, not the customer. So you have to stand way back away from the credit card machine, by the conveyor belt, and watch the computer to make sure you’re getting the correct prices. This is not always easy to do, Internet! Especially when Carla thinks she is “helping” by putting items on the belt that may have already been scanned. Plus, it means that I am blocking the way for the next customer to put their items on the conveyor belt. And if I forget to stand there and watch the computer from my belt-blocking vantage point, and go up to the credit card machine, I am out of luck! Who knows what I bought at what prices. (And you KNOW there are mistakes. There’s almost always an instance of something having a for-sale sticker on the floor and then ringing up at $0.25 more. If my eyes aren’t glued to the screen, I will miss out on that whole quarter!) (WORSE YET: the credit card machine does not even display the amount you are being asked to pay!!!!!! The checker has to say it to you, in a loud and clear enough voice for you to hear over your bored and gum-requesting and dangling-precariously-off-the-handle-of-the-shopping-cart six-year-old. THIS IS MADNESS!!!!!!)

Usually, if I get home and see that I’ve been overcharged, I am annoyed but feel like, okay, whatever, it probably all evens out at some point. But this was a $12.99 mistake in Target’s favor, and Target seems to be getting on just fine, and $12.99 is NOT insignificant.

So I called Target and told them about the error and asked if there was anything they could do. The person on the phone said yes, I had to come back to the store and someone would review my purchase. (I assume that means someone would look at my receipt against video of my actual transaction, which makes me feel really squicked out, but whatever, we are all being tracked at all times anyway.) It was worth it to me to drive back to Target for $12.99 (plus, of course, we had forgotten three things at Target so I needed to buy those anyway), so I drove to Target, stood in the Customer Service line, and told the checker my problem and what the phone person had said.

And the checker said, in a very this-is-your-own-damn-fault kind of tone, “Well, usually we would just refund you. But since you called and they said you needed to have it reviewed, I’ll have to find my manager and get someone to review it.” The checker’s tone and body language and facial expression were all conveying that a) it was hugely inconvenient to have to get his manager and b) I was being really dumb for going through some whole big rigamarole instead of just getting the refund, as though I knew I had a choice.

But… what? Either you review a mistake like the one on my receipt or you don’t, right? It shouldn’t be at the WHIM of the person I spoke to about the mistake.

I had come in prepared to have someone review my purchase, so that’s what I did. I stood there near the carts and waited patiently as the checker found a manager and the manager asked me what was going on and then took my receipt to the security office and then came back and asked me which item was double charged and then left again. I waited for twenty or so minutes, and as the time ticked down, I ticked off because it SOUNDED LIKE I could have simply brought my receipt in, gotten an immediate refund of the double charge, and then gone home (well, after procuring my three forgotten items, of course) instead of standing around in a busy Target trying to look pleasant and not sketchy or increasingly irritated by the long and seemingly unnecessary wait.

My husband very reasonably said that it’s in Target’s best interests to make it at least a little bit difficult to claim an error on a receipt. I agree; of course I do. If you could just go in and say, “I bought one giant television set but was charged for two” and get your $300 refund right away with no double checking that you actually did buy only one giant TV… well, I can see how that could put Target in a tricky position. So perhaps the rule makes sense. Especially for large claims.

But… WHY is there a rule if you are only going to follow it sometimes? Yes, yes, yes, I understand that there are always going to be exceptions! But those should be, you know, the exception, and not a regular bending of a rule. If a rule can be bent that often, IT SHOULD NOT BE A RULE.

Maybe the checker who was so cavalier about refunds is unaware of a price threshold for correcting mistakes. That would make sense. Maybe anything under $10 is just an immediate refund, but anything over $10 has to be backed up by video proof. I don’t know. I recognize that I may be annoyed for NO REASON, or annoyed simply because of the APPEARANCE of arbitrary rule following, and yet I. Am. Still. Annoyed.

I am feeling riled up enough that I may need to take it out via Strongly Worded Letter.

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Live from the Middle of the Night!

It is bad enough that I am a very light sleeper. So light that the sound of my niece turning on the lightswitch in the bathroom down the hall jolts me into heart-pounding alertness.

What’s worse is that I cannot fall back to sleep. I am now awake, even though it is not yet four in the morning and even though I only went to bed three hours ago and even though the house is completely dark and no one else – not even my niece – is awake.

Instead, my brain is bouncing around from toe to toe like a boxer psyching herself up for a fight, except that the boxer has just downed an entire crate of 5-hour energy and her opponent is my desire to sleep.

Let’s worry, for awhile, about our security system. Early yesterday, we got a call from our security company to let us know that the power was out in our area. Great, thanks, security company. Allow my blood pressure to drop from Our House Is Being Invaded levels for a moment here. But then, of course, came the worry that our power was out, and we are… not there. My husband looked up the outage and discovered it should be resolved in a couple of hours; sure enough, it was. But then today, we got ANOTHER call from the security company to let us know that the outage had NOT been resolved and our backup battery was running low and we needed to DO SOMETHING. We could not do anything because we aren’t close with our neighbors and our local friends are all also on spring break. So I told them this, fervently hoped that a burglar would not choose this exact moment to break into our house, and said goodbye. But now, at not-quite-four-a.m., I am worrying and worrying and worrying. Maybe the person who said they were from our security company was not, in fact, from our security company… but was trying to scam me? And, yes, their plan was quite elaborate, mirroring the security company’s phone number and all and having two separate people call me, but STILL. It could be a very elaborate burglar. And, even if there is no scammer, what about our poor house, standing empty and unprotected (you know, except by locks and good, observant neighbors)? And what if the power company is WRONG, and our house doesn’t currently have power and our pipes are freezing and our food is all rotting? Of course there is absolutely NOTHING I can do about it, but let’s go over all the nothing options one by one since there is no one awake to entertain me, shall we?

After I finally decide to call the police station tomorrow and ask if they will increase patrols around our neighborhood for the next few days, my mind turns to the much more productive topic of Embarrassing Things I Did and Said During High School.

I turn on my phone and scroll through my news feed.

I turn off my phone and recite poems in my head.

I push my husband because he is snoring.

I go to the bathroom.

I listen very carefully to see if the noise Carla made (she is sleeping on a mat at the foot of our bed) is going to turn into crying; it does not.

I pick up my phone and start scrolling through a favorite blogger’s archives, because they are lovely and soothing, but it turns out I have overused this particular comfort technique because I can’t find any posts I haven’t recently read.

I find a nice long article about the mysterious disappearance of the world’s most famous actress.

Ah, finally. I am starting to drift off to sleep. I close my eyes and… UPPERCUT. My brain pinches me, hard. OMG, I almost fell asleep! Not on my brain’s watch! No way, no how!

Now I am nice and alert to focus on the important work of worrying about an upcoming trip and how hard/awful it will be to leave Carla behind.

Why didn’t I work harder on memorizing more poems???

Oh good. Here are partial lyrics from the Descendants 2 soundtrack to loop through my head instead.

I know! I can fret about the upcoming dinner party! Maybe I should scrap the Tex-Mex theme entirely and go for chicken and salad.

Go to the bathroom.

My husband is doing that thing where he is lying on his back and he has his head resting on his forehead with his elbow up in the air, but it keeps falling over and he keeps jerking it back into position. I push him onto his side.

Is Carla having a nightmare? Is she whimpering?

Are there burglars tiptoeing through my defenseless home right at this very moment?

Dumb Buzzfeed quiz.

Slow slide into sleep… PUNCH TO THE SOLAR PLEXUS. Almost made it there, but my brain swooped in to intervene just in the nick of time!

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

This goes on until seven thirty when my niece wakes up and starts talking with her mom, at which point Carla wakes up, delighted to get to play with her cousin, and I whine to my husband about my sleepless night. Kind man that he is, he takes Carla out into the kitchen and closes the door behind him. But… two minutes later, Carla crashes through the door to get a stuffed animal, and then two minutes after that my husband comes in to get some medicine and I snarl at him to just let me have HALF AN HOUR OF SLEEP FTLOG and lie there fuming at the rapidly-lightening ceiling. And then thirty minutes of no sleep later I angrily get up and start the day.

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1,470 Words Is Too Many Words About Shampoo

I am really worked up about shampoo right now.

You might call me a Shampoo Loyalist. I used Pantene for pretty much my entire life (I mean, except for the portion during which my mother, presumably, washed my hair. I have no memory of this.) but then in the early aughts my hair stylist went on some rant about how Pantene was the WORST thing you could put on your hair and said some things about animal testing and I did zero research or fact checking but immediately stopped using it. (I loved him. Loved. Him. I miss him to this day.)

But then I went through a Dark Time during which no shampoo seemed to really cut it for me. I don’t have too many requirements of a shampoo: I want it to clean my hair, smell pleasant, and make me look like Kate Middleton, which doesn’t seem like I’m asking too much. The Herbal Essences and Garnier Fructises of the world all ticked the “pleasant smell” box, but I think over time I’d get bored with them, or my hair would seem flat, or whatever, I sense you inching closer to the edge of your seat, in anticipation of what juicy detail I might share next, certainly not to leave the room. But I was sick of dating around. What I wanted was shampoo marriage material.

At some point, my mother-in-law left some of her fancy shampoo in the guest bathroom, and around the same time, my new hair stylist started trying to upsell me (in a non-annoying way, I swear) to a keratin treatment, which sounds MAGICAL and yet is way too expensive for my taste. And I discovered that lo! my mother-in-law’s hand-me-down shampoo leavings had the word “keratin” on the bottle. So I tried it out.

It was OGX Brazilian Keratin Therapy. And it had a pleasant suntan-lotiony smell and it did seem to make my hair less frizzy. And while it was more expensive than my previous dalliances, Target seemed to have good Buy-One-Get-One deals that made it less so.

Photo from ogxbeauty.com

And THEN one magical day Target was out of the keratin therapy flavor? scent? type? of OGX, so I started looking at the other OGX offerings for an understudy. I read each bottle carefully, to determine whether I needed something for color-treated hair or dry hair or whatever and then – do you do this? – I sort of unobtrusively started unscrewing the caps and then sniffing each different color? blend? mixture? and trying not to get any wayward shampoo on my nose.

The one I fell in love with was Bamboo Fiber-Full (huh, I have been using this for possibly years and only just now realized it was FULL and not FILL). I love the way it smells. It leaves my hair feeling clean and light and fresh. Less Kate Middletonny than I would like, but no shampoo is perfect.

Photo from ogxbeauty.com

We had a happy relationship for a long time, Internet. And then Target stopped carrying it. Why, Target? WHY? Instead, my Target is all about this orchid varietal. Bah.

I started the shampoo search anew. The one shampoo I liked best was Garnier Fructis Full & Plush. But literally every time I used it – or even if I wasn’t washing my hair, and I just saw it, or glimpsed it from the corner of my eye – I would get so annoyed by the word “plush” that I would mutter and stew for… at least minutes. I mean, PLUSH? I feel like plush is a word that should apply only to velvet. Or maybe lips. Or, and I feel like this is a stretch, but I’m trying to be generous, a nice thick lawn. NOT HAIR. I don’t want to be reminded of a tufted velvet davenport every time I lather up. I just don’t.

Photo from garnierusa.com

At one point, I figured that the fixation I had on the word plush was probably a waste of time and energy and brain cells (why didn’t you figure this out a paragraph ago, you ask), so I cut it off at the source and went back to the Brazilian Keratin Therapy. Which I like. It’s fine. I could see us moving in together, buying a car, maybe getting a dog. But I’m not passionate about it, you know? Like, when I picture us together in our old age, I feel sort of resigned, rather than excited about all the trips we’ll take to Europe.

What I really want is the Bamboo Fiber-Full. Why are you keeping us apart, Target? WHY?

This story is not over!

I got the big, “value size” bottles of the Keratin shampoo some months ago. And at a certain point, the conditioner was really giving me trouble. The bottles are shaped in such a way that you can really only squeeze them from the middle, and the squeezed area was staying squeezed and I could not un-squeeze it. It was forming a tight little girdle in the middle of the bottle, which improved its Marilyn Monroe curves, but prevented me from getting all the conditioner from the bottom of the bottle into the top and out of the bottle. AND, because the OGX packaging people have never used shampoo in their lives, the tops of the bottles are ROUND, so you can’t stand them on their heads to use gravity as your buddy. (And you can’t remove the tops anyway; at least, I can’t. They are affixed to the bottles with superglue and manic rage.)

I can’t tell you what an ORDEAL it became, to shampoo my hair. I tried to force the bottle to stand on its head by surrounding it with other things – a bottle of body wash, the shampoo bottle, my husband’s shampoo – but that was only occasionally successful, and more often than not resulted in all of the aforementioned toiletries collapsing onto the floor and all over my stunned toesies.

So I would bang the bottle on my hand and bang it on the shower bench, then bend the entire bottle in half, trying to lever the conditioner to the exit point (I was surprised it didn’t split in half, but that would have made the conditioner too easily accessible). At the end, I had to do all of the above and then ALSO use both my hands to squeeze out a meager amount of conditioner onto my thigh, and then transfer the conditioner to my hair.

One should not have to endure such humiliations!

The shampoo held up much better, but as I reached the “value” section of the bottle, it too transformed into a torture device.

So, fine, when I had finally extracted as much shampoo and conditioner as was humanly possible from the bottles, I vowed never again to fall prey to the siren song of “value size” and I replenished my shower with regular-size bottles of Keratin shampoo.

Alas! I am halfway through those bottles and the conditioner is already doing the waist-cinch thing!

My husband, bless him, forcibly un-cinched the conditioner by using his body weight to press the bottle short-side against the granite counter (he tried the wall first and the bottle dented the wall).

But!

I was at the supermarket the other day – one I don’t normally shop – and I happened across the shampoo aisle, and lo and behold! My beloved Bamboo Fiber-Full was there on the shelf! I scooped it right up, for $6.29 a bottle (Target, you are costing me money and losing yourself money!) and brought it home and made a Discovery.

Both bottles contain 385 ml of shampoo/conditioner. But the Bamboo bottle is slightly thinner, but deeper while the Keratin bottle is slightly wider but shallower. Does that make ANY sense? The Keratin takes up less space back-to-front and more space side-to-side; the Bamboo takes up less space side-to-side and more space back-to-front.

Because the Keratin bottle is less deep (from front to back, not top to bottom, I am doing such a terrific job of explaining this, good thing you bailed back up at “this is about shampoo”), it’s harder to squeeze. And the cinching thing happens more easily. And showering becomes an episode of MacGuyver.

Worst of all? It looks like OGX is moving toward this style of bottle. Because alllllll the other bottles seem to be the impossible to use terrible flatter/shallower version.

In my shampoo cynicism, I am certain that OGX is going to transition to this type of bottle and then start putting less of the product inside. As in, it may be 385 ml now, but next thing you know it will be 300 ml.

I think I need to start scooping up all the Bamboo Fiber-Full I can find in the old bottle shape.

Or – whimper – I need to begin a new search for my next great shampoo.

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