I Feel Bad About My Neck Read Online Free PDF Page A

chance—if I ever did—that I would recognize either of them. On top of which they live in other cities. But the point is that I still think about them every time I’m tempted to leave the house without eyeliner.
    There are two types of maintenance, of course. There’s Status Quo Maintenance—the things you have to do daily, or weekly, or monthly, just to stay more or less even. And then there’s the maintenance you have to do monthly, or yearly, or every couple of years or so—maintenance I think of as Pathetic Attempts to Turn Back the Clock. Into this category fall such things as face-lifts, liposuction, Botox, major dental work, and Removal of Unsightly Things—of varicose veins, for instance, and skin tags, and those irritating little red spots that crop up on your torso after a certain age for no real reason. I’m not going to discuss such issues here. For now, I’m concentrating only on the routine, everyday things required just to keep you from looking like someone who no longer cares.
    Hair
    We begin, I’m sorry to say, with hair. I’m sorry to say it because the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.
    Tell the truth. Aren’t you sick of your hair? Aren’t you tired of washing and drying it? I know people who wash their hair every day, and I don’t get it. Your hair doesn’t need to be washed every day, any more than your black pants have to be dry-cleaned every time you wear them. But no one listens to me. It takes some of my friends an hour a day, seven days a week, just to wash and blow-dry their hair. How they manage to have any sort of life at all is a mystery. I mean, we’re talking about 365 hours a year! Nine workweeks! Maybe this made sense when we were young, when the amount of time we spent making ourselves look good bore some correlation to the number of hours we spent having sex (which was, after all, one of the reasons for our spending so much time on grooming). But now that we’re older, whom are we kidding?
    On top of which, have you tried buying shampoo lately? I mean, good luck to you. Good luck finding anything that says on the label, simply, shampoo. There are shampoos for dry but oily hair and shampoos for coarse but fine hair, and then there are the conditioners and the straighteners and the volumizers. How damaged does your hair have to be to qualify as “damaged”? Why are some shampoos for blondes? Do the blondes get better shampoos than the rest of us? It’s totally dizzying, shelf after shelf of products, not one of them capable of doing the job alone.
    I deal with all this confusion by taking draconian measures to reduce the amount of time I spend on my hair. I never do my own hair if I can help it, and I try my best to avoid situations that would require me to. Every so often a rich friend asks me if I’d like to go on a trip involving a boat, and all I can think about is the misery of five days in a small cabin struggling with a blow-dryer. And I am never going back to Africa; the last time I was there, in 1972, there were no hairdressers out in the bush, and as far as I was concerned, that was the end of that place.
    I’m in awe of the women I know who have magical haircuts that require next to no maintenance. I envy all Asian women—I mean, have you ever seen an Asian woman whose hair looks bad? (No, you haven’t. Why is this?) I once read an interview with a well-known actress who said that the thing she was proudest of was that she could blow-dry her own hair, and I was depressed for days afterward. I’m completely inept at blow-drying my own hair. I have the equipment and the products, I assure you. I own blow-dryers with special attachments, and hot rollers and Velcro rollers, and gel and mousse and spray, but my hair looks absolutely awful if I do it myself.
    So, twice a week, I go to a beauty salon and have my hair blown dry. It’s