Greenhorn Ranch | Quincy, CA 

Whenever you travel, you end up forgetting something. On last week’s trip to Greenhorn Ranch, in Northern California, that thing ended up being two things: my shampoo and conditioner, specifically. Which are unfortunate things to forget, especially when you find yourself essentially in the middle of nowhere and in the company of realllly a lot of dust and sun and other things that tend to dry out already super-dry hair like mine.

So what I decided to do for the week was go next-level with the haircare routine I wrote about a few weeks ago, and try to get even more volume and waves into my (already pretty voluminous and wavy) hair.

These past few weeks, I’ve been clocking a minimum of an hour a day in the pool, and usually it’s more like two – the first around late afternoon, helping my kids figure out this whole “move your arms and legs at the same time” thing, and the second after they’ve gone to bed, when I have nothing more pressing to do than swim a few laps all by myself in the silence.

I’m trying to remember to do this more lately: find opportunities to be quiet with myself. It doesn’t come naturally at all, but I read something Brené Brown wrote about letting go of the idea that exhaustion is a status symbol, and it’s something I’ve been trying to remind myself of as often as I can. Basically: that it is okay to rest, and to do something for no other reason than because you enjoy it.

Anyway, this is a new thing for me: wanting to spend more time than I have to in a pool (as opposed to “next to a pool”; I’m pretty much always happy to do that). The reason I’m finally enjoying it now is because I realized that my rationale for not swimming every day was a completely ridiculous one: I didn’t want to get my hair wet, because blowing it dry again is a pain.

Way back in 2003, I shot a commercial for Capital One in which I aged from a 1950s teenager to an eighty-year-old woman and then pushed my boyfriend into a lake, all set to the song (Now I've) Had the Time Of My Life. I can’t remember what, exactly, this had to do with credit cards, but I’m sure it was something.

The whole experience was very weird, half because it amounted to a little social experiment in how differently people treat you when you visually age 65 years overnight, and half because it involved making a plaster cast of my face. Trust me: if you're not claustrophobic before having twenty pounds of plaster poured onto your head to the point where you cannot see or move, and can breathe only through two tiny straws inserted into your nostrils, this experience would do the trick. (I for-real almost lost it, but the cute guy auditioning to play opposite me held my hand while I spent half an hour frozen in cement, so that was a plus.)

Even given the overall oddity of this experience, one of the things I recall most clearly from the shoot was the makeup artist breaking out a little machine that blew out a fine spray of makeup, and that she used to cover up my tattoo. At the time, what she was doing seemed super-fancy and complicated, but in the years since airbrushing has made the leap from something used only by pros to something that people like you and me can keep in our bags of tricks for whenever we feel like looking not just “good,” but spectacular.