Skype Well, darn.
I was going to Skype for the first time ever this morning, with a dear old friend who relies on Skype--I even washed my hair last night so I would look presentable--but due to time confusion, the call's not happening today.
I've always dreaded Skype––it mixes two things I'm nervous about: the phone + being presentable at home––and I'd geared myself up to do it, so I feel let down and am sorry to miss catching up with my friend.
But since I dreaded it, I'm also a little relieved.
Bluing
Speaking of hair, if you've got yellows in your grays, as I do, here's an old trick:
rinse with bluing.
After spending $20 on shampoo + conditioner that didn't do much (except clean my hair), I bought a $2.99 bottle of Mrs. Stewart's Bluing in the laundry section of the grocery store
--it's for whitening whites (made from a very fine blue iron powder, bluing is gentler on fabrics than bleach)--
added a few drops to a clean milk carton of water, and after 4 rinses, the blue had color-righted most of the yellow.
It darkens the remaining dark hair too, but if you use too much, it also turns it blue.
Pencils
Speaking of old fashioned things, here's a funny mention of pencils in Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life, which I finished last night. He's talking about going to high school (in the early '60s):
"I brought home good grades at first. They were a fraud––I copied other kids' homework on the bus down from Chinook and studied for tests in the hallways as I walked from class to class. After the first marking period I didn't bother to do that much. I stopped studying altogether. Then I was given C's instead of A's, yet no one at home ever knew that my grades had fallen. The report cards were made out, incredibly enough, in pencil, and I owned some pencils myself.All I had to do was go to class, and sometimes even that seemed too much."
I see there's a movie of the book, but I'm not particularly interested. It's not the story that makes this book good, it's the words.
And now me and my clean hair are off the the Farmers Market.
There are more reasons than technology that video phones never caught on.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to hear well, but it is nice sometimes.
If I promise to leave my hair a mess, shall we try one day?
Wonderful book, love his short stories. The movie, despite DeNiro's presence, is not very good.
ReplyDelete"It's not the story that makes this book good, it's the words." Isn't this true for so many stories? Can you think of one movie that was better than the book? I can think of some movies that were equally as good as the book, but in a different way. You?
ReplyDeleteZHOEN: Video phones. :)
ReplyDeleteCLOWNCAR: I am going to try TW's short stories next. You confirmed what I suspected about the movie (great cast aside, it just smelled off.)
POODLE: Hey, hey--good question! I blogged about it today.
What I meant about This Boy's Life in particular is that the story isn't particularly interesting in itself: a dime-a-dozen bad childhood. (Not to dismiss the importance of telling that story, but it really was HOW he told it that made it exceptional, and you're almost certainly bound to lose that in a movie, unless you've got some amazing director.