Two Confessions In One

I dye my hair. Actually, I pay someone else to do it for me, so maybe this is more like three confessions in one. Once, when I was young, my hair was the color I now pay someone to dye it. But in high school I started noticing a gray hair here and there, in college I started noticing several more, and by the time I was 22 I had what I considered to be an unreasonable amount of gray hair for a 22-year-old. My friends assured me you couldn't even tell I had gray hair. They were lying.

I know this because one day, as I was doing some grocery shopping, I realized that the guy stocking the produce section kept looking at me. Not looking at me like checking me out, but looking at me like he was confused. I caught his eye and he said, "I'm sorry I keep staring. Do you mind if I ask how old you are?," to which I replied, "22." "Yeah," he said as if that settled it, "you have such a young face but then you have all that gray hair." "You don't talk to women much, do you?" I huffed, and then I went straight home and made a hair appointment.

This hair-dyeing thing takes a while too. You have to sit there for about 30 minutes to let the dye sink in, or do whatever it does (I think it penetrates the hair shaft, but that was really just an excuse to use "shaft" and "penetrate" in the same sentence, because, really, why should cheesey romance novelists have all the fun?). Anyway, I used to take a book with me to the hairdresser so that I'd have something to do during the penetration portion of the procedure. Then I discovered Glamour magazine.

I subscribe to several publications: Rethinking Schools, The Believer, and occasionally Utne or Mother Jones. I'll often pick up a random copy of National Geographic, Time, or Newsweek. All of which is to say, I'm not really a Glamour kinda girl. No one I currently know would describe me as glamorous, nor could that term have been accurately applied to me at any point in my life. Cute, maybe, or crunchy, but definitely not glamorous.

Glamour bills itself as the magazine "for young women interested in fashion, beauty and a contemporary lifestyle." I'm not even remotely interested in any of that shit. If you looked at my Friendster profile, you know that I hate both electricity and modern conveniences. And although Glamour offers me to the opportunity to vote for things like my favorite naked actor, I'm not the kind of girl who even has a plain old favorite actor, let alone a favorite naked actor.

None of this, however, prevents me from enjoying the hell out of Glamour magazine while I'm getting my hair done. I once even bought my own copy (make that four confessions) after I skimmed through an article at the hairdresser entitled "This is the Year You'll Get a Great Body." Unfortunately, as it turns out, getting a great body requires that you actually do something (only 15 minutes of something, to be fair to Glamour), and I'm not nearly that displeased with the body I already have.

I had a hair appointment last week and I was looking forward to my Glamour fix. But, horror of horrors, Glamour wasn't in the magazine rack. My hairdresser noticed my distress, but mistook it. "Most of that's smut," she apologized, "let me get you something better" and handed me Gourmet. I sort of read the Gourmet, but mostly I glared at the other women when they weren't looking, just in case one of them had my Glamour. Gourmet wasn't bad, in fact, it had some pretty good recipes. It's just that none of them were for how to get the most out of your little black dress, 12 little things that make sex so much better, or how to eat like a man and still look like a woman. By which I mean that it sucked.