Glamorama

crossing the street downtown asheville
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I'm going to dye my hair tonight, I think. This is always a fun and festive hour or two around my house whereby I walk around in my special short terry cloth hair dying robe while wearing a plastic grocery bag or two on my head smoking. I feel that if one is going to be all trashy and dye one's hair, it behooves one to dress appropriately: smoking cigarettes is also de rigueur during the process, as is drinking trashy drinks like beer from a can or something pink from a plastic iced tea glass with lipstick on the rim. Young M dies of shame as I promenade about with the bags on my head, even though there is no one to see me but the dogs, who do not care. Then I get dye all over the bathroom and then, finally, I wash my hair out and look anxiously to see what color it is this time and then remember that, hey, I can't tell what color it is when it's wet and then I go to bed miffed about it and wake up to purple stripes on my forehead where the dye migrated during the night. Nothing but fun around my house, let me tell you. But as of this moment I have every single intention of actually going home right after work tonight and staying there, alone except for young M and the dogs and the groundhogs and Fang and so on. We all know which road is paved with intentions like that one. Sigh.

Last night I went over to A's friend C's new house. Well, C & her brother B & her boyfriend M are sharing it and it's a fucking amazing humongous mansion tucked up on the side of a mountain in Woodfin and they're paying, basically, nothing to live there since their landlords essentially just don't want to be bothered. I'm so jealous I can hardly breathe. So I tried to rain on their parade by kind of trying to gently warn them that there was not going to be any way to heat that place. This is, alas, true, but who cares? It's months til fall and they're all in their twenties. The house is gorgeous arts and crafts with a huge stone porch and diamond window panes and beautiful wood and a fabulous big yard and, get this, round couches and a revolving coffee table that came with the house and even a dishwasher. "A dishwasher!" I exclaimed, "I didn't have a dishwasher until I was 40! This isn't fair!" And it isn't but ah well, good luck to them. I too lived in decaying mansions once and my mother came to visit and peered at the furnace and the holes in the siding and roof and said gently, "Felicity, a coat of paint can't fix everything."

However, in other news, I would like to report that last night young M and I installed a water filter on the faucet at home and it was incredibly easy and nothing went wrong. I still can't quite believe this. We had to get a new water filter because I got a wild hair and decided to, gasp, clean the ancient Brita pitcher thing that had been standing on one or another kitchen counters since probably the last Clinton administration if not the Stone Age. Well, that was an education. There were life forms in there - life forms in the shape of waving green strands of algae. Mmmmm. I'm not hippy enough to believe that stuff is good for me, even though it probably is, and I'm not self deceiving enough to believe that the pitcher would ever be really clean and algae free again so I pitched it and went off and got a Pur faucet filter thingy. For $20 more I could have gotten the one that adds artificial flavor crystals to your purified water, thus rather neatly circumventing the whole idea of purified water, but I opted, naturally, for the cheapest one. And I'm here to tell you that it was spookily simple to install.