A little while ago I decided to stop using shampoo, partly because I just read a random website swearing that it’s unnecessary, but mostly because I’m too broke to keep buying these expensive products if I don’t really need them. I thought I’d test it out and see whether my hair grossed itself up after a few days or if this no-wash business really works.

Here, therefore, is a small diary of my progress.

Day One

Sunday, November 12

Hair gets washed as normal. This will be the last day for some time that I use shampoo. I’m going to miss this chemical orange smell, especially after a few days when my hair starts to smell like old garbage.

Day Two

Monday, November 13

This is the first day of non-washing. I do use a little Herbal Essences conditioner, mostly on the ends, but fortuitously I use the last of it. After this I plan to get a lighter conditioner, ideally one not tested on animals this time. I can’t really tell what condition my hair was in today, because I braided it right out of the shower and left it in braids until I went to bed.

Day Three

Tuesday, November 14

Morning

No product at all today because I haven’t gotten around to buying my new conditioner. I do get it wet in the shower and then just finger-scrunch it. It feels drier than usual, probably because of the lack of conditioner. My scalp also feels dry, but normal-dry, and that’s encouraging because I was worried it would be oily by now. My hair smells clean and is keeping its curl instead of hanging limply like it usually does. Observe:

Afternoon

My hair is both oily and dry now, if that’s possible, and is doing the thing it always does when I leave it down, which is to gradually lose the nice shape of its curls and disintegrate into semi-frizz. Into a braid it goes. Who invented the braid? I need to send that lady a thank you pie.

Tomorrow I’m having lunch with my fashion friend, Tracy, who will surely notice if I show up looking slightly homeless. Should I give in and shampoo tomorrow or risk the conditioner treatment? I know you’re just on the edge of your seat about this.

Day Four

Wednesday, November 15

I do a “conditioner rinse,” which basically means washing with conditioner instead of shampoo, and leave the house with wet hair in order to meet Tracy in time. By the time I reach her office, it’s clear that this plan was a disaster.

Me: I really have to apologize for my hair.

Her: You really did not just say that to me.

My hair at this point is oily, dry, limp and miserable, as am I.

Day Five

Thursday, November 16

I give in and wash my goddamn hair.

Clearly this no-shampoo idea is completely retarded. What’s sadder is that this is not the first time that a random website has tricked me into making a bad life decision. Other internet punkings have included:

– Vegetarian lasagna recipes

– Clothes which look weird when you actually put them on

– My mail-order bride who ran off with my wallet and VCR a month after our marriage

– Urban legends in email forwards

Internet, never again do I trust you to provide me with untainted facts, goods or spouses!

Here endeth the lesson.

“She herself was a victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful acquisition of books. This passion is more common, and more powerful, than most people suppose. Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines — not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master’s call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality.”

– Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost

“Hoarding books is unfair to everybody. In fairness to all Book Sale participants:

-No blankets, sheets or any other coverings are allowed.

-You cannot have more than one hundred books or five boxes of books under your control at any given time without purchasing them.

-Anyone caught stashing or hiding books will be expelled.”

-SF Library Book Sale Instructions

“Books are trophies.”

-Ellie

I’ve rearranged my books again. Reference books have their own shelf now, separate from the other non-fiction. In having a whole shelf and a half dedicated to non-novels, I’ve become a more serious, better-educated person in a way I wasn’t when I had merely read these books.

In High Fidelity, the main character organizes his record collection autobiographically. (“If I want to find the song “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the fall of 1983 pile but I didn’t give it to them for personal reasons.”) One day, when I’m old and cantankerous and my library takes up more space than my furniture or grandchildren, I will organize things this way, beginning with Little House on the Prairie and ending with my back copies of Octogenarian Today. When I die and my library is dismantled, probably no one will care why a spurt of Jonathan Carroll novels is followed by a Vienna guidebook, but at least as my life dissolves out onto other bookshelves it will disappear linearly — childhood, adolescence, adulthood — like the better sorts of plots.

I turn 27 this week. (On Tuesday.)

It’s big: it’s my bimodal peak. (On Tuesday.)

Your Dido’s all grown

This rhyme makes me groan

And now it is your turn to speak. (Today or Tuesday.)

Got a villanelle? A limerick? Haiku, couplet, free verse, two words that rhyme? I turn 27 tomorrow, and for my birthday I’d like some poetry. Don’t feel you must, but if you are inspired to write me a sonnet or a chant, I would be so delighted. I welcome all subjects.