Sunday, September 23, 2018

Hair Success, Video Game Fail, I Still Don’t Look Like Anna Faris


This was supposed to be a big week in this Typist’s life, a monumental, yuuuge, beautiful week, my friends, because this is the week that Shadow of the Tomb Raider was released! I leaped out of bed early on release day and, after some recognizance by Mr. Typist, decided to download the full, ultra-deluxe, uber version with all of the bells and whistles, and most importantly, extra outfits for Lara! I got the game download started and I busted out of work early to run home and play, and….no go. It wouldn’t play. It wouldn’t play after updating my video card, adjusting all of my settings, uninstalling and re-installing multiple times, and following the tech support suggestions to the letter. Needless to say, this was devastating. Devastating. I went through the five stages of grief in under 24 hours, before finally accepting my Tomb Raider-less lot in life. But, being an addict, I was unable to control myself. To stop the shakes, I purchased an old version of Tomb Raider: Anniversary, confident that this would load up just fine…but NOOOO. It crashed repeatedly and was totally unplayable. This is when I hit rock bottom and re-installed Salt, the world’s dullest game that takes literally no bandwidth. Sure enough, it crashed within five minutes of playing. I finally stomped off to the living room and declared to Mr. Typist that the Universe didn’t want me to play video games this week and that I would have to resort to reading an actual book on my Kindle. Oh, the humanity! I am now halfway through the Augusten Burroughs memoir “Lust and Wonder,” which is delightful and sad and uplifting all at once.

But on the plus side, in “I’m Going to a Major Conference in Chicago this Week and I Can’t Stand My Scraggly Hair Anymore” mode, I went and saw this brilliant hairstylist today and showed her a picture of Anna Faris with an adorable bob and said can you make me look like Anna Faris, and without missing a beat, she was all like, “You got it, girlfriend!” and after much snipping and gossiping and blow-drying and the sweeping away of alarming amounts of hair, gosh darn, she actually did it! Okay, well maybe I don’t look exactly like Anna Faris, but I do have her haircut from that one picture:




I am hardly one to walk around trolling for compliments, and I cringe at any positive attention, but I must say I was quite uplifted to get exactly four compliments from the point of leaving the salon to walking to my local drugstore to home. I’m almost fifty, and most of the time I feel like I can barely pull myself together for public presentation, so this influx of admiration was pretty intoxicating. As I was paying, the cashier at the counter said that my haircut really brought out my “striking, soft blue eyes.” Well, he works there, so I can’t put much stock in that, but then a lady who was just standing around looking at lipsticks said I looked beautiful. I immediately deflected this by stating that Tara, my stylist, was a genius and got all the credit. Then, and this is the kicker…some dude on the sidewalk gave me the Joey from "Friends" treatment! He looked at me up and down very deliberately and said something along the lines of, “Heeeey. How’re you doin’?” I handled it coolly, (“Fine, thank you”) but inside I was all like, “Oh my God, an actual man just flirted with me! I still got it! Yes!”  Then the lady checker at Bartell’s asked if I got a haircut and said it looked cute.

I came home floating on a cloud of fresh-haircut elation and immediately told Mr. Typist that a random man flirted with me. He congratulated me, as is our tradition now whenever we have a tale of opposite-sex flirtation to share, as we are coming up on seventeen years of marriage and we need to keep each other’s spirits up about these things: “Aww, good for you, sweetie. Congratulations!”

So, I am bereft without Tomb Raider. But I do have a cute new Anna Faris bob haircut that may actually be magical. Maybe the bob will somehow mystically influence Tomb Raider to fire up on my computer. It’s a big unknown at this point, but I am determined to get Tomb Raider, any Tomb Raider, going soon, or I am going to go into full-on withdrawals. I’ll keep you updated. In the meantime, here is a taste of the glory I am missing: 


 


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