This morning I was completely unprepared for the mental stress I was about to undergo. True, watching hours of classes on modern poetry and literature is pretty stressful, but I wasn’t planning to do that till I was good and ready.

After rising I headed for the hall closet and grabbed the toiletry bucket with my name markered on it (we have so many kids that we take a modular approach to things), collected my clothes and went to the boys bathroom downstairs and tried to enter. Turns out it was full of girls. Well, I thought, if they're going to use our bathroom, I'll just use theirs.

Now, this was all fine and dandy - I had my bucket of things, right? I soon discovered it wasn't so easy. After shaving and getting in the shower, I found myself faced with a formidable lineup of hair care products to choose from. Normally I use a shampoo I've never heard of called Tenzen Panthenol (it was the first thing I grabbed from the shampoo stash) and Suave sleek conditioner, which is an off-brand clone of Matrix sleek.look. But that was all in the downstairs bathroom, not in my trusty bucket.

Unfazed, I grabbed a bottle labeled shampoo with a strawberry on the front and opened it. A powerful odor of dessert filled the air, causing me to reconsider and look at the label again. It said it was Alberto V05 Moisture Milks Strawberry and Cream. It smelled downright edible. Not wanting my hair to smell edible, I put that bottle down and tried again. I decided to pass up the dandruff shampoo, baby shampoo so gentle I could put it in my eyes, another Moisture Milks and several small bottles of brightly-colored, unidentified goo for some Pantene Pro-V. I had a bit of past experience with this, and so I was relieved to find it sitting there.

I quickly applied it to my hair, deciding to ignore the fact that it smelled more like those huge bottles of salon-grade Biolage my aunt kept giving us than Pro-V. I decided it would be better to skip conditioner altogether and get on to more important things, like mentally composing this essay. So here I am. My hair isn't sleek, it smells funny, and I don't know what condition those girls left my bathroom in, but I'm here, almost relieved to be studying e. e. cummings!