8.28.2010

Dear Rachel Dratch,

A friend of mine revealed that if he were to win the lottery he would need to buy a mansion to house all of the scented candles, lotions, and soaps that he would buy because he loves them. He loves them! I think I kind of completely understand.

When my sister and I were younger, I swear she spent a period of her life hold up in the bathroom playing with different products. She'd have out the hard soap, the liquid soap, the shampoo, the conditioner, the detangler, the mousse, the gel, the hairspray, the mouthwash, the toothpaste, the Triaminic. She would be mixing and messing with all of these things, putting the final mix into some sort of spray bottle and call it her concoction.

This wasn't something she did in private, either. She'd be up in the bathroom, door wide open, wasting all kinds of money just to get something that smelled pretty and minty. I think she'd sometimes attack the Windex and the 409 just to make sure that if she were to ever put this thing on her body that it would also degrease and shine.

I wasn't jealous of her work when she would do this. But it does kind of make me think about my own love of face and hair products.

I don't know if I would buy tons of candles and soaps, but if I were to win the lottery a la Bow Wow, you better believe I would have the most expensive hair and face on earth. I love a good conditioner and some creamy gel to smear into my mane when I get out of the shower. I love to get a good scrub on in the shower with some kind of face wash that also contains teeny-tiny rocks that exfoliate and ultimately rip my old face off leaving me with the fresh skin of a teeny-tiny baby.

There was a phase recently when I was plat-num blond. My hair is naturally quite dark so it took some work to get up to the level where I wanted it to be. It wasn't just the dying part that was high maintenance, but the upkeep was also something that was high maintenance but also fed into my love and desire for doing my hair right. I would ask people that came into the store where I work what they did to maintain their platinum glow, or what they did to get it looking so good and natural. Nothing I did seemed to work to get it nice and soft.

My hair is already kind of crunchy and coarse and the bleach I covered it in did nothing to help it. I would go three or four days without washing it to see if some of my natural head oils might get it just a bit softer or more natural looking, like maybe some of the wave I get when my hair gets longer might return from the nuclear winter I set in motion the day I went blond. But I never had such luck.

So not washing my hair didn't work in getting my hair any softer. I would get all my hair products together and just mix them up in my hand when I got out of the shower. In the same vein as my sister, I was attempting to make a cure-all for my head that would make my hair amazing looking and take away its brittleness. Well, kind of like my sister's concoction, all I got was a head full of greasy yet hard feeling hair that only looked like a mess. It did not work and did not smell minty.

Also during this time, I tried all kinds of different shampoos for color treated hair. I had special purple shampoo that fake blonds are supposed to use to make your color last. You needed to leave it on for at least five minutes before you could rinse it out. I take quick showers and this was just too much! I had read on my T-Gel bottle that the color of the T-Gel could cause bleached hair to change colors, and I spent too much money on my hair to be fucking it up. So I went a few months with no T-Gel. This meant that my psoriasis sort of came back in a bad way. I bet you didn't think I was going to drop that bomb--I have psoriasis!

It eventually dawned on me that maybe this bleached out beauty just wasn't a good look for me. My hair was such a giant dry and flaky mess--Head and Shoulders couldn't even work me out. Right before my sister graduated from college this past May I decided it just might be a good idea to just buzz all the blond and start over. No products, no special shampoos (save my T-Gel!) this time around. Just regular old sort of that weird gray/brown dude colored hair that only seems to affect men. It's turned out pretty good, my hair.

Sometimes I like to think about my sister and her crazy mixing up things to get your hair, body and mouth right. And then I think about how Gillette just ripped her off with their new thing for guys that does everything but buy you a razor. I guess sometimes we're onto something and we don't even know it when we're kids.

Or you're a grown ass man and you just need to do something about your dandruff!

Jon

8.8.2010

Dear Rachel Dratch,

I've worked in retail sales for what seems like forever. What started out as a summer job during my first year of grad school has quickly become my job forreals. That first summer I made all kinds of no money, but I had some pretty sweet clothes. Then I lost some weight. I'm not sure how much but enough to go down two or three sizes. So then I had all of this shit that didn't fit me or anyone else I knew because no one else was shaped like a baby dumpling.

What I learned that first summer and, let's be honest, the next summer when I moved back to North Carolina and found myself only working a shift here or there, was that I did not need everything. I didn't need fourteen pairs of chinos that only vary by their shade of brown. I did not need more shirts with small to medium sized checks or stripes of blue. And I did not, ever, need anymore straight or bootcut jeans. Those are for people taller than me, and I once tripped on the seam of my bootcut jeans when chasing my dog in the street. That ended with me busted up for a little while because the jeans were too big and had too much fabric going on, causing me to eat the pavement.

Over the past year or so I've become really good at what I do. I don't sell you clothes because, "Oh my god you look so cute right now!" I sell clothes because I like helping people look good. That sounds real cheeseball, I know. But it's true. There are all kinds of people out there who are lost and blind and they need my amazing grace to help them get their clothing game up. And I do it, and they feel good.

Through all of this, as I play therapist and frat brother (i.e., the friend you pay to hang out with...which reminds me--there have been too many times where people just want to be my friend. I am on the job, and you need to buy these pants to help make me feel better about spending the last hour listening to you. This probably contradicts what I just said in the last part, but on the real, there are sometimes people who waste my time by trying on all kinds of stuff, letting me put together outfits for them, and then they decide they just want to hang out when I get off work. And ladies, cause it's only ever ladies, that ain't right! Anyway...), I have found myself sometimes saying whatever is the first thing that pops into my mind that seems to make sense and will hopefully help this person make a decision about buying some clothes.

This summer, I told this girl that she looked so sun-kissed. I have no idea why I chose that particular phrase, but all I could think about was about Jerseylicious-tan she was, and that she needed some good colors to help her tone that down. So I told her she looked sun-kissed. And she was totally into it. I have no idea if she bought anything, but it is one of the times where I remember thinking, "WTF did I just say!?"

So we get to today. I have been a little loopy the past few days. I'm working on the tail end of six or seven days straight. Sometimes toward the end I get a little silly and sometimes a little nonsensical.

I see this tall, Nordic man sitting next to this table about to rip into some Mrs. Fields' cookies. I love, love, love cookies and I've been on the Special-K diet so I was probably also thinking irrationally. I blurt out, in almost full Cookie Monster/Yoda voice, "It's COOKIE TIME!"

I said this to a man I didn't know and had never seen before.

It's cookie time. I said that in a weird character voice to a stranger.

I don't think he or the woman he was with bought anything. And then we kept making eye contact every time I would shuffle out of the fitting room, arms full of recently discarded "no's". That happened two or three times. I eventually just sat in the back and told my managers this insane story as a means of killing time to avoid the Nordic cookie god until he left.

This has to be the number one weirdest thing I have said anyone, even people I know. Oh, that is not really true. The other night I was over a house of some friend's. They just moved in together and they have a couple of awesome roommates. One of these roommates was bringing over this girl who I once met at a birthday party. Of my own. But she didn't remember me.

In trying to deal with that, I got all jumbled in my head. She went to shake my hand and introduce her self and I said, "How." Like the Indian stereotype. I meant to say, "How are you!?" But instead I just made myself look like a racist.

I'm not sure where all of this leaves me. Other than that maybe I need to take a long nap. And maybe also stop talking to strangers or strangers who don't remember me.

Stranger danger!

Jon