How Not to Wash Your Hair

Executive dysfunction, Instagram grandmas, Salvador Dalí, and the world’s worst date.

I set a timer.

In ten minutes I will wash my hair.

I need outside motivators to do pretty much anything because my dopamine sitch is all effed up. If I do the thing before the alarm goes off, I win and get a treat.

The options are getting slim. I can’t keep shopping on Amazon, and too many shots of espresso turn my stomach into a permanent acid bath. So the reward is usually doomscrolling.

But I have curated my Instagram to mostly deliver poetry, art, cats doing weird shit like karate fighting, and elderly overweight German influencers trying on outfits or recording personalized greetings.

“Hallo, hier ist Carla Lagerfeld. Heute grüße ich Olli in Travemünde.”

I hope you enjoy my big tits and my tight ponytail facelift.

They’re probably my age, but many look like they’ve spent forty years marinating in tanning beds and smoking Virginia Slims. I don’t look so hot these days either, but definitely not like I survived a hard-knock life at Ballerman Beach.

Meanwhile, the timer has gone off.

It keeps beeping.

No reward.

The time isn’t auspicious anymore. I need to reset it for something neat and clean, like 4:20 p.m.

In the meantime, I take a power nap.

I once read that Salvador Dalí used to nap holding a set of keys. When he drifted off, the keys would fall to the floor, wake him with a clang, and his nap was over. I have never verified this story and I’ve never tried it. I just like the idea of it.

So I nap.

I dream that I’m being chased by zombies. Or former French bosses armed with paper clips. Or that I’m some small woodland creature being torn apart by alligators in a mud pit.

The alarm goes off.

I’m disoriented for a few minutes.

Long enough to miss my window to wash my hair again.

I think about the last time I had sex.

I can’t remember.

The last date?

Nothing.

Well...there was Mosen.

He wore too much cologne and had a thick accent.

Five minutes into lunch he pulled out his phone to show me the three pairs of Gucci sneakers he’d just bought.

“Gucci has changed a lot recently,” I said. “Did you see Billie Eilish at the Emmys?”

“Yes,” he said. “Models don’t look like models anymore. They have big ears now.”

He pulled out his phone again.

“Let me show you.”

He searched for runway photos and handed me the screen.

The girl did, in fact, have very large ears.

“Well...” I said.

He just shook his head.

The whole thing was a waste of time.

I drank a Paloma and got a little dizzy in the heat on the restaurant patio.

I’d actually made an effort for once.

Fresh mani and pedi in an almost-noir oxblood.

I had just discovered a shimmery dark green eye shadow that somehow makes my blue-green eyes look properly green. Like I’d been issued a whole new eye color. More exotic. Less Northern European.

My blonde roots were also growing in so dark—and increasingly gray—that, together with the green eyes, I felt like an entirely different creature.

I had even bought one of those tingly lip plumpers at Sephora.

And when I vacuumed my car the week before, trying to make it pass my boss’s inspection as the vehicle of an upper-management professional fashionista, I found a lost nude lip pencil under the passenger seat.

Between the eyes and the lips, I figured I could probably go a whole week without complete self-loathing over my aging face.

Mosen seemed to like it.

He walked me to my car.

He kissed me without asking.

Then he took my left hand and put it on his hard cock.

I froze.

Something like that hadn’t happened to me since I was a teenager.

I drove home feeling violated and filled with loathing.

Time to wash my hair.

Fuck the timer.

I do the ADHD trick of walking into the bathroom and just turning on the shower without putting any pressure on myself to get into it.

But I’m distracted.

I set another alarm.