Blown Away by Roget

Here are a couple of things I think are, uh, fruitful! My new thesaurus! It’s really, um, husky as well as commanding! Verily, it is chock full of idiom-related items, and I expect to be a lot more—wait a sec—silver-tongued from now on.

It’s Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus in Dictionary Form, in paperback. Easy to hoist and also easy to use. I looked at a big hardcover version and could not make heads or tails of it, between you and me. I’m sure I could have learned to use it, but it was also too big to pick up and brandish menacingly.

I also like very much my long-distance telephone service, OneSuite, which saves me a fortune relative to anything I used before. You go to their website, buy some minutes, and then use them up talking to your mom.

However, I know someone who signed up and then didn’t use the service for a long time, and when she went back, OneSuite had cleaned out the rest of her minutes, which turned out to be what will happen if you don’t use the service for six months, plus their customer service is also terrible, but I virtually never have to call them about anything.

I have finally solved the hair products problem, which has taken me nearly ten years, the problem being that nearly every product meant for the hair, including ones billed as hypoallergenic, makes me itch.

Here are the answers: Wash hair with J. R. Liggett’s Old-Fashioned Bar Shampoo. Comb hair while still in shower. Upon departing shower, dry hair very slightly, and work in a generous amount of Stonybrook Botanicals Fragrance Free Unscented Organic Herbal Oil-free Extra Body (hold on, I’m getting there) Conditioner. Finally, apply a dollop of Real Purity Natural Styling Gel. And voila! Frizz-free hair with no, or very little, itching.

Two or three weeks ago, I had a massage at a place toward the southeast quadrant of the city. When I made the appointment, based on rave reviews on the Internet, I asked if there would be a safe place to lock my bike. The receptionist said I could lock it outside and that it would be perfectly fine there, that many people arrive on bicycles.

On my mental map, it seemed to me that that intersection would be a dismal, desolate, semi-industrial spot, but perhaps I was a couple of blocks off. I pictured a thriving shopping districtlet, sprung up since the last time I was there.

I went there after work one day, via a lonely ride south on Third St., followed by a lonely ride west on Cesar Chavez. The place I was visiting turned out to be a dismal, desolate and semi-industrial spot, precisely as pictured—the only soul in sight was a street person. Fortunately, there was one (and only one) thing inside the electric gate I could affix my bicycle to.

My masseuse was nice, her music was horrible—that is, her taste was extremely sophisticated and drew on diverse cultural influences—and the massage itself hurt quite a bit. From now on I will avoid anything described as “deep tissue.”

The next week, to rid my body of the memory of that massage and rid my bike of any memory it may have of being chained in such an inhospitable place, I went to Spa Solé at Fillmore and Clay, which is a busy neighborhood where one feels entirely comfortable locking a bicycle outside and where I had quite a nice massage.

I used to have two pairs of the same Pearl Izumi cycling gloves, which I liked a lot and which lasted forever—years—but eventually I had to shop for new gloves, and by then, gel-filled gloves were no longer in vogue. The idea now is that you wear gloves with little padding, and use squishy handlebar tape.

After buying a few pairs, I finally found some Avenir gloves that were comfortable, but they turned out to be pretty shoddy in construction, sprouting actual holes after some months. Freewheel carries hardly any Pearl Izumi gloves, so I ordered some online that seem to be working out well.

I have discovered one teensy downside to the iMac, which is that the top of the screen is much higher than the top of my old PC’s screen, so a stiff neck can ensue after a while, from squinting at menu items. Unlike on a PC, you can’t just drag the menu bar to the bottom or side, but what will probably help is learning more key shortcuts.

Tonight Tom and I saw Daniel Day Lewis’s amazing performance as Christy Brown in My Left Foot, and then I watched Ryan Gosling play a Jewish white supremacist in The Believer. Tom picked up his chair and went home soon after the latter started, saying it didn’t look like much fun. It wasn’t a highly satisfying movie—there were too many elements of the story that were murky or improbable—but I think Ryan Gosling is a really great actor, so it was worth it to see him.