If you haven’t become weirdly and suddenly allergic to sulfates, you should try Lush’s shampoo bars. I love Jumping Juniper the best, but I’ve also liked Seanick and Godiva. If you can’t deal with the shampoo bar (what is wrong with you?), I Love Juicy is also fantastic. (NB, I have oily, flat hair, so all my suggestions are going to lean that way. You curly girls have messy, fantastic updos, so I have little sympathy for you.)

(If you are weirdly and suddenly allergic to sulfates, the Trader Joe’s Tea Tree shampoo works well and won’t make you want to peel all your skin off.)

But sometimes you are too lazy to wash your hair, or maybe that’s just me. For you/me, there is dry shampoo. This hatefully named stuff is brilliant. It makes your hair all va-voomy and huge and sassy. I’ve been working my way through various dry-shampoo sprays and they’re all pretty much the same–decent but not fantastic. Key is using a natural-bristle brush to brush out the spray. Do that. 

I just cut all my hair off, but I’ll include some long-hair suggestions. First, buy the giant roller pins rather than the teensy bobby pins. They do a much better job holding a big ol’ bun in place. Also, get a hair donut. You’ll be so cute! Or you could just cut all your hair off, which is also an excellent idea. 

Here’s what you do:

1. Go buy some paper lunch bags. Those smallish ones that are allegedly for taking your lunch to school but seriously who does that. They’re cheap–like a buck fifty for 200, so you’ll be set for a while.

2. Buy some popcorn kernels. You don’t have to go with the expensive stuff (though that is a useful container to refill later); the $2 bag is fine. Just make sure you get the yellow kernels. The white kernels taste like absolutely nothing, with a sprinkle of nothing.

3. Open bag, pour in kernels, add some salt and a glug of olive oil if you like. If you use the oil, put the bag on a paper towel. Fold the top over until the bag is just tall enough to fit in your microwave. Put in microwave. Press the Popcorn button.

4. While your popcorn is popping away, melt two or three tablespoons of butter. It’s good for you! Makes your hair and eyes shiny!

5. If your microwave is like mine, it’ll give you a beep about 30 seconds before the popcorn timer is up. Add 30 seconds. Unless the popping has slowed, in which case get the bag out of there.

6. Throw the popcorn in a bowl, salt & pepper, pour on butter, gently mix with a chopstick.

7. Use that chopstick and its companion to eat your delicious popcorn dinner.

If you’d like to get fancy, you can add parmesan or nutritional yeast (you should totally add nutritional yeast) or whatever spices you like. But this is my lazy food, so I stick to lazy preparation. And it’s good for you! It even says so on the bag of kernels that popcorn is a whole-grain food!

Which is to say, if you think you can’t wear shirtdresses, cool. But if you think you can’t wear shirtdresses but you want to wear shirtdresses, go find the one that calls to you and make it work. You’re pretty enough to do what you want.

Ok, then, shift dresses. I feel like they fall into two camps–sleek and classic vs. kooky and retro. I love them both. They also both work well under cardigans, which can turn just about any “I can’t wear that” outfit into something functional and cute.

Camp Classic

(modcloth.com)

This is beautifully utilitarian-looking, and then it has a fantastic microdot pattern. We’ll all be wearing these while enjoying our dinner in the form of space-pills in the future.

(modcloth.com)

Dots and a belt and a belted hemline. That’s cute, right? And good if you’re straight up-and-down and want to make us pillow-piles feel envious.

(Banana Republic)

Of course, Banana has your basic shift dress covered. You can’t go wrong, but it can be a little boring. This color’s nice, though, right? And SLEEVES.

Camp Kooky

(teastreetvintage)

Green! Blue! Gold! Shimmer! Seriously, somebody go buy this right now and send me a picture of you wearing it and drinking something very girly.

(AllengroveVintage)

I might be hyperventilating a bit over this. And please note, this is not a tiny, tiny dress like so many excellent vintage pieces are–this is a solid 10/12. I may, in fact, buy this and hang it on  my closet door so it and my Fitbit can work together to make me go for a walk.

(CustardHeartVintage)

I don’t know why this woman looks so unhappy wearing this adorable dress.

Here are some dresses that you can wear:

Shirt dresses

(Foundling Vintage)

Silver belt, red cardigan, go.

(PicassosStudio)

How ridiculously cute is this? So ridiculously cute. Wear it with Converse and bobby socks.

(folieAdeuxVintage)

Yes, this is crazytown, but bear with me: It is so crazytown that nothing else you are wearing will matter. It will blind everyone with its awesome.

These are all vintage not because that’s the only place to find them, but because it’s hard to find new dresses that are cute and HAVE SLEEVES. I feel very strongly about sleeves, you guys. You may feel differently about sleeves, in which case you’ll have better luck with new retail. I wish you well.

But wait! you say. I do not love the shirtdress because I have various complaints about them! Aha! I say. In just a moment I will show you some stinking cute shift dresses and all will be well.

Anyway, the point I’m making is that you need to go look at two delightful personages on Twitter. 1) @streetcrow. It is a crow who posts tweets. That is all. And it is fantastic. 2) Chaucer Doth Tweet. It is Geoffrey Chaucer, tweeting in a kind of pidgin Middle English that makes me laugh. There are lots of this kind of fake account on Twitter, but these are the two I love best.

And you don’t even have to be on the Twitters to read them, you can just pop in whenever and catch up. Though if you want, I can also give you my long-form rationale for using Twitter and building up your network (buzzwords! synergy! leveraging! optimize!).

(P.S. It’s snowing. Just so you know.)

Having your fancy hot water bottle will make you more pretty because you will have a smooth, untroubled brow, unclouded by thoughts of how cold your feet are or how mean your cat is. And, during the summer, you can fill it with cold water, put it in the freezer, and lay it across your kidneys for pleasantly chilled blood. So multi-purpose!

I keep thinking that I’ll use one of my old cozy sweaters to make a hot-water-bottle cozy and then I don’t. So you should probably do that too.

There are a couple of writers I’ve done this with, though, and wound up wanting MORE ALL THE MORE BOOKS at the end of my binge. Kate Atkinson is one of those. She started out writing weird little novels that did strange things with typefaces (Emotionally Weird) and time (Human Croquet) and, eventually, bigger novels that did heartbreaking things with memory and storytelling (Behind the Scenes at the Museum). There was also a diverting collection of short stories (Not the End of the World) that I didn’t super love but I saw how it fit into the literary world she was building.

Then she started writing detective novels. Now, I’m not a big detective novel fan. I don’t like true crime, I find “classic” detective fiction often too twee for me. (Like any right-thinking person, of course, I do like Chandler.) Ok, fine, I read Gone Girl and found it, by turns, ok, pretty good, and really good at the end. But Atkinson does all that GG did but better even when she’s not writing a mystery (seriously, Museum does all that and more).

But Atkinson’s detective novels are a natural outgrowth of this literary world and her interest in how family memory works. They’re pretty amazing both as detective stories and as literary fiction. When Will There Be Good News? is my favorite of the series, though I recommend them all.

I tell you all this because 1) you should go read all these books right now, and 2) she has a new one coming out next month and you should be ready to read that one, too.

Here’s what you do: Go search Yelp for a shoe repair place. Pick the one that’s in the most old-money part of your town. Doesn’t have to be the fanciest part of town, but it should be the place where old ladies who wear giant furs and carry tiny purse dogs live and go to brunch. Gather all your sad shoes–the ones with scuffed toes and worn heels and that eyelet that’s coming loose. Put them in a giant bag and travel to that shoe repair place. Amuse yourself by thinking about how you’re carrying a giant bag of shoes down the street. Ask the guy at the shoe repair place to make your shoes pretty. This will probably require heel caps and maybe half-soles, and will cost $8-15 per pair. It’s worth it, even for those cheap plastic things you paid $20 for and wore the hell out of all last summer. Do your boots, too, since they’ve served you well this winter. Leave and live your life for a few days.

When you return to pick up your shoes, they will be shiny and new. All the scuffs polished out, all the nicks in the leather smoothed, heels that have never known the pain of a cracked sidewalk. Take them home and put your boots back on because it’s still goddamned snowing. Look longingly at your spring and summer shoes, all shiny and new.

(N.B., this will obviously not work if you wear mainly sneakers or molded-sole shoes. If these are most of your shoe wardrobe, you should buy new shoes. Please contact me as soon as possible for guidance in this matter.)

Here’s how you wear them: grey or black skirt, sweater in a slightly different shade of the tights’ color, tall boots, maybe with a grey or black sock peeking out. Or with a plaid skirt that incorporates the tights’ color and a black or grey sweater. Or all that but with brown, if you’re a person who has multiple items of clothing that are brown.

I’d show you a picture but I don’t want to gank other people’s images. So go look at this Pinterest page, find the prettiest ones, and do that. Never mind that all those photos are of 22-year-old women. If you surrender colored tights to the young’uns, we will never have any joy in our lives again.