a really important update

If you'll recall, I wrote a while back about embarking on something of a bathing experiment. I traded in my harsh bar soap, usually the 39 cent Walgreens brand, for the body wash and loofah routine.

It's been a little more than a month of me using the new products fairly regularly. Inspired by the process, I also brought fancy face wash into the shower and followed the washing with a post-shower full body lotioning (something I know we should all do, especially considering the windchill was -15 degrees today - just murder on your skin!). Here are my post-experiment observations:

- My skin was almost instantly softer and certainly smoother - at least to me - and less winter-triggered itchy.

- Because I used several new products, it is hard to say the product to which I can attribute the change. For example, the body wash and loofah might have done well on exfoliating, but perhaps the lotion was the softening kicker. Hard to say.

- The length of the shower has at least doubled to roughly 8 minutes, and days when I don't have that kind of time, or I am just needing a post-gym rinse, the bar soap wins.

- One downfall was that after I used the body wash, I felt as if it never fully rinsed off, like there was a film of soap left behind - a far cry from the clinically squeaky-clean Ivory soap feeling. Sometimes I prefer that feeling, although my skin tells me otherwise.

In all, I will likely continue the regimen, perhaps trying new brands of shower gel (I've been told a clear gel rather than the creamy Dove variety might suit me better). I could live without the shave gel, but I think it will be 15 years before I finish off this massive can. But lotion has certainly been incorporated into my daily routine. I still fancy myself low maintenance, so only some of this elaborate regimen can become permanent.

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I went to eat Ethiopian food tonight for what I thought was the first time. It felt like a brand new experience, tastes and textures and techniques I have never tried before. Then I got home, and my BF reminded me we ate Ethiopian when we first lived in DC. Maybe he's pulling my leg, or maybe I have serious memory retention issues.

But if you haven't tried it, I highly recommend it. You use this spongy, stretchy, kind of bitter tasting bread - which strangely feels like you could sew the pieces together for a sweatshirt - to pick up the food. Lentils, spicy chicken falling off the bone, creamy spinach, are plopped in dollops on another thin layer of said bread. Eating with your hands feels natural and liberating. Service was painfully slow, company was delightful, and food delicious.

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In other news, you will all be pleased to know I did not blow my brains out at Sears while holiday shopping this weekend, as I feared. (I came close at Marshall Fields, but resorted to a mini-comeapart, interrupted by a kind woman asking me and my friend if we thought a 13-year-old girl would like the hideous hoodie with two black cats she had picked out. Her question allowed me to focus for a minute, thus staving off a complete meltdown.) In fact, being downtown was quite festive, and perhaps the highlight was seeing a few dozen pigeons huddled around the eternal flame at Daley Plaza. Not sure why I liked that scene so much, but perhaps because it made total sense. They were cold too. They found fire and huddled up near it. Of course.