A Round Up of Really Good Things, October Edition 2023
A leave-in conditioner I love, great sweatsuits, how to cover a bald spot in 10 seconds, and a rosti potato pancake recipe.
Hey everyone, it’s Helen! Thanks for opening this up! Become a paid sponsor if you can, I truly appreciate you. It’s the one year anniversary of this column, I hope you’ve been enjoying it!
❤️ Roots Sweats. Is the brand Roots a thing in the United States? Like, is it on everyone’s radar? Here in Canada is definitely on our radar but seems, on the whole, not to be doing as great as its 80s heyday. Here in Toronto as a kid in the mid-80s, if you didn’t wear Roots you weren’t a Prep, which means basically you were a scum. No one called you a scum but you just felt like a scum, know what I mean?
I think Roots is a brand in decline, which is a shame, because its famous hoodies and tracksuit bottoms are really long-wearing. The logo is a beaver, so you’d have to feel ok with wearing that. In Canada we wear this unironically and no one makes beaver jokes. I’m serious.
My kid has a number of sweatsuits from Roots and they just wash so well it’s incredible, right up there with Lululemon’s lasting qualities. He beats them up with splashes of hot sauce, meat gravy, french fry oil stains and somehow they keep going.
Side note: Did you know Gap and Old Navy and 90% of kids retailers use a lesser quality textile for kids clothes? That’s why knees, shirts and socks blow out so easily. And don’t even get me started on H&M for kids, it shreds apart if you merely look at it the wrong way.
This is purposeful, to cut down on costs and to get you in the habit of thinking kids clothes fall apart so readily. However, Roots uses the same sweatsuit material for kids and adults as far as I can tell after about 8 years of buying this brand for my son.
💁🏻♀️ Toppik. Toppik is hair fibers that you can sprinkle all over your head like pepper and cover up your bald spots. Seriously! It takes about 10 seconds to get some good coverage going. Someone invented this and it’s a really smart product that I have no problem vouching for. I used it almost daily back when I had a big ole bald spot. It’s made out of keratin and a bottle of it lasts a long time.
The way the Toppik fibers stay in place is using the principle of static cling, it will sit there until you wash it out. If you sprinkle some on a paper, they look like dust or powder, basically. Some people find it a bit itchy but I have never had this issue. Here’s a link to it from Ulta.
🥔 Recipe: Rosti potato pancake. Once again, walk down nostalgia lane with me in Toronto Of The Past where we used to have a restaurant called Movenpick that was, theoretically, Swiss.
Canadians of the 90s liked to think of themselves sophisticated enough to patronize the classy European culinary scene, so of course Movenpick was a hit despite the fact that it was basically a cafeteria where you’d walk to different stands holding your own tray and collecting food like a complete high school freshman. We are the same people, as mentioned above, who have no problem wearing giant beaver logos on our clothes, so make of that what you will.
Oh and if you wanted Rosti, the swiss potato pancake from the dedicated Rosti stall at Movenpick, Good luck, I hope you enjoyed standing there like an idiot holding your tray while your arms fell asleep cause the Rosti took at least 15 minutes to make. They didn’t think that one out, did they? What a gong show. Anyway, you can make this potato latke-style pancake at home, I vouch heartily for this recipe from Recipe Tin Eats it’s SO GOOD!
😁 Glo At Home Teeth Whitening Device. Do I own a single LED device that doesn’t make me look like a murderous psychopath? I don’t! They are all singularly terrifying, including the mouth guard LED device in this kit that lights up neon blue while peroxide bleaches your teeth. Works great though, I was a skeptic but my teeth are less yellow! Here’s a link to it from Sephora.
💇🏻♀️ Ouai leave-in conditioner spray. Did I mention this before? If I did, forgive me. I now have three jobs and I can’t keep everything straight. I have always liked Ouai products (except the one perfume they make, pee-yew) and this leave-in conditioner is no exception. Mostly I like it because it smells great. I can’t use conditioner on my roots cause it looks greasy, but if I don’t use anything I have frizz and flyaways. So I spritz this on my roots when I’m finished in the shower, here’s a link to it from Sephora.
📕 Books Eventually I flamed out of the spicy romance novel kick I’ve been on over the summer and I’m back reading lots of non fiction again. That said, I did enjoy Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfield, which is set in a thinly veiled Saturday Night Live workplace. There was a lot of nice pacing and romantic tension, and it’s more of a novel of manners than a straight romance, which I liked.
Nonfiction wise, I wanted to love the highly lauded You Could Make This Place Beautiful by the poet (not the Downton Abbey dame) Maggie Smith, but I just couldn’t vibe with this memoir that’s a diary of the writer’s now-famous divorce. She married a man who became a lawyer after they married and she was stuck with all the housework and child rearing. I’ve felt that way before, I get it. My husband works lawyer hours as a reporter, minus the lawyer paycheck.
I’ve also spent a portion of my writing career interviewing lawyers. Key takeaway DO NOT MARRY A LAWYER IF YOU NEED YOUR SPOUSE AROUND because they are married to their work, it’s a total grindset culture. The thing that lawyer after lawyer impressed upon me is 1. their spouses are “long-suffering” and 2. you need to pay for domestic help if you’re a lawyer. Period.
Smith’s former spouse was also definitely a dick, but it comes out later in the book that she’s a bit of a twerp too.
Her mom admits that she used to be irritated by the writer and her family coming over for weekly Sunday dinner, and she would cozy up on the couch whispering with her husband and kid and not get up and help her mom out at mealtime? What?? Ugh. I found this memoir self-indulgent but worst of all, deadly dull. The poems were good though.
B A C K T O B A S I C S
Look, it’s all great to shovel your money like dirty coal into the steam train of capitalism as per above, but I want to say that you gotta look after YOU and that’s the best REALLY GOOD THING I can commend to you right now…
🏃🏻♀️Exercise. Today. Did you read my semi-recent screed about how the modern exercise juggernaut’s got you all twisted, thinking you need to kill yourself for an hour every day at the gym? You don’t!
Go back and read that article for an in-depth look at how I got fit in my 40s. It only took me 7 YEARS ahahahaha. No really though, stop making it so hard. Just do 20 minutes of something every day. You start today. Go forth, my friend.
📘 Read something. If you used to love to read but then social media got in the way, fix yourself. There is no better high quality leisure activity out there, maybe other than going for a walk, than reading.
Use reading to calm down. Use reading instead of meditating if the thought of meditating makes you want to pluck out your arm hairs one-by-one. If you don’t pray but you beat yourself up over it, you could read. Get yourself what’s called a “devotional” where you read one page a day, by design. Devotionals come in secular versions too which is a great way to commit to reading one page a day.
📞 Call someone. Pick up that stupid overpriced cell phone of yours and make a call. My paid subscribers know that I recently changed jobs, or rather, added one to the mix. I’m now a life insurance broker and freelance writer and content creator because apparently, I love stress.
You know what insurance brokers have to do? TALK ON THE PHONE. All the time. I thought I’d hate it. I don’t! I enjoy it! Texting is a shitty approximation of actual conversation. So call someone you know and love, it will give you a dopamine hit, I promise.
🧥 Fix something. I don’t know your life, but I bet some button is hanging forlornly off a coat, some knob or handle needs tightening with a Phillips head screwdriver you will not be able to find, some linen closet is bursting with your thinning towels and bad shampoo decisions and needs a reorganization. Do it! Stop putting it off. Next week this time, I expect you to have done one thing and I WILL BE CHECKING YOUR HOMEWORK.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
Warmly,
Helen
Here are some past reads, in case you missed them!
And a YouTube video, in case you’re really bored. Someone actually left a comment on this that my hair looks like crap compared to my video’s from a year ago, which I deleted. How dare she! I’m perfect.