The Case For Bliss

We get hundreds of catalogs in the mail and most of them are interesting only for the truly absurd Objects De Crap that they attempt to foist on an unsuspecting public, particularly during the holiday season when spending $200 on a reproduction Leg Lamp from the flick A Christmas Story seems almost reasonable. Then there's the Bliss catalog, which sells the most extravagant face, body and hair potions imaginable. I have neither a pot to piss in nor a window to throw it out of, so the idea of spending $125 on one ounce of moisturizer from La Mer is totally alien to me, never mind if it has sapphire extract or whatever in it. However, I was washing my hair yesterday when I noticed something interesting. I bought some shampoo and conditioner over the internet that was supposed to help with unexplained hair loss (Rudy's Emu Oil products). When it arrived, I was sharp enough to write the date on one of the bottles and yesterday marked the one year anniversary of the purchse. The shampoo, conditioner and treatment serum cost me $40 including shipping and handling. I have quite a bit left in all three bottles and I have also used it on my son's hair because both he and I are mildly allergic to sodium lauryl sulfate,an ingredient in almost every shampoo on the market except this stuff (apparently). $40 a year is not an extravagant sum to spend on hair care products that address a specific problem and WORK, by the way. When I was still buying shampoo form the grocery store, I would frequently use it as bubble bath and/or body wash/and or dish soap, so we'd go through a couple of bottles a month at $2 a pop. I do not do that with my fancy-pants shampoo. Six months ago I bought some expensive facial care products from Origins ($60). I still have 3/4 of the jar of gommage, and about 1/4 jar of moisturizer left and I use those products according to the labels, gommage twice a week (for sun damage) and moisturizer twice a day. When I bought the stuff, the saleslady gave me free samples of facial wash containing mushroom extract, which makes me feel as though I'm washing my face with something I should be using to flavor the gravy. I still have a tube and a half left out of three even though I have used it five times a week for six months! So that $125 ounce would probably last for at least six months. If I bought a kit of products from that particular purveyor, it would cost about $300 and last for a year. If one were to spend that kind of dosh on a "system" it is unlikely that any further impulse facial care purchases would be made until the "system" ran dry. For a regular woman over 35, $300 a year isn't so very much to spend on facial care, is it? Especially if the stuff is megasuperluxurious and also works wonders. I'd bet that the average woman blows $300 a year on impulse-buy grooming supplies that make no claims whatsoever except "on sale". Since my purchases from Rudy's and Origins, I have spent zero dollars on shampoo, conditioner, facial wash, exfoliant or facial moisturizer and I still have enough of the stuff to see me through a number of future months. So, if you just HAVE to have that kit from La Mer, go ahead and get it and don't buy anything else until you've used it all up. And if your hair is falling out, just go see Rudy.

New Year's Revolutions

Why do people even try to keep New Year's resolutions? The act is doomed from the outset. Most New Year's resolutions are made a) while drunk, b) in front of loads of family members and c) in a loud tone of voice. Drunk people make bad decisions and everybody knows it, therefore it's much easier to shuck the guilt on January 1st when you can say "I was drunk, so it doesn't count." Many of the family members present at New Year's resolution declarations are teenagers who are most likely not drunk and therefore will remember and repeat ad nauseam everything you said until your resolve collapses in a fit of pique and you light up/chow down/lunge for the remote/consume enough Jagermeister to quell your urge to strangle any teenage wiseass that dares to quip in your general direction. Anything declared in a loud tone of voice, even when alone, is null and void as soon as the echo is gone--that's just a fact. If one says loudly that one is never going to do a particular thing, like as not one will find oneself doing exactly that on the City Hall steps at high noon. An insidious aspect of this fact is that sometimes it can take years to swing back around to kick you in the ass, sometimes decades, and by the time you find yourself enmeshed in whatever you said you'd never do, you will have forgotten all about it and there will be some former teenage wiseass right there to remind you. Some people really do try to keep their resolutons, usually with hilarious results. My sister-in-law quit smoking at midnight on January 1st. By 10:00am she had washed and folded every item of clothing in the house and she had a nice tic going in her face. By 1:00pm she was soaking already-clean dishes in the bathtub in boiling water and bleach and looking very sweaty about the temples. By 4:00pm she was frantically vacumming out and Febreeze-ing her SUV in a superhuman effort to keep herself from leaping into it and heading pell-mell for the convenience store, and her eyes were twirling like pinwheels. My husband quit smoking about eight months ago, and he did it without any fanfare whatsoever by choosing to extend a period of abstinence brought on by a sinus infection indefinetely. He never said "I quit" or "I'm going to quit" because he never ever EVER says things like that, he just goes ahead and does things and waits for us slowfolks to catch on. It is interesting to note that while I admire the hell out of his ability to just get on with it, it kind of ticks me off that he is so successful at affecting change. I despise change, even when it is inevitable/obviously necessary/the only thing between me and death, so there is always a lot of screaming involved with me making even the smallest change to the status quo. Kids love routine, and so when their routines are based on my flawed ones, it becomes doubly difficult to change them. My kids are used to being able to graze their way to fullness, sometimes eating every fifteen minutes until bedtime, so it is now a great shock to my five-year-old when I deny him a bowl of yogurt twenty minutes after he ate a hot dog sheerly because I want him to be hungry three hours from now when I present him with a plate of meatloaf. "Do you want me to STARVE to DEATH?" he wails in protest. The two-year-old is in the middle of a Picky-Pants Phase, wherein she will beg for chow and then refuse it once she's eaten about a third of an ounce of it. This morning I refused to grant her loud request that the bowl of Cheerios that she had eaten four individual O's from be removed from her sight posthaste. Instead of wailing like her brother, her method of protest was simple, elegant and effective--she poured the bowl into her own lap while staring me down like Spartacus. It is clear that the girl takes after her father and the boy takes after me. She got the job done, and he's still waiting for meatloaf.