Humidity - Fountain of Youth or Just Another Bad Hair Day?

I'm sitting in a waiting area in a hospital in Miami, trying to read a book. But really I'm listening to one side of a cell phone conversation. A young man, probably in his late twenties, is telling a friend all about his recent trip West with his parents. They'd been in Las Vegas and to the Grand Canyon.

"Dude, if you ever get the chance to go to Vegas, do it. Dude, it's amazing."

He talks about the glassbottomed skywalk that goes out over a tiny part of the Grand Canyon.

"Dude, I was freaking walking on glass right above the Grand Canyon."

And he also mentioned the dry air.

"And Dude, there's no humidity in the air."

I've been thinking a lot about humidity since I've been here in Florida. I've been feeling a lot of humidity since I've been here in Florida. I grew up in a humid climate and I've been having flashbacks to my childhood: towels that never dry completely between showers or trips to the beach, sheets that are slightly damp when you slip between them at night. I don't think I really knew what dry was until I moved to the desert.

But I'll say one thing for humidity - it's great for my skin. Within two hours of getting off the plane, the alligator skin on my shins was gone. Gone! Here in Florida, I always feel like I've been recently dipped in a really good brand of lotion. I'm convinced that I look five years younger here than I do at home. No wonder Ponce de Leon searched for the Fountain of Youth in Florida.

But my hair looks terrible. Ugh. And it takes me longer to dry it here because of the humidity. I straighten the curly part with a gigantic round brush and then add volume to the straight part using the same gigantic round brush. And within five minutes of finally completing this task, the straightened parts are going curly and the voluminized parts are flat against my scalp. In Utah, after completing this process, my hair can still look pretty good four or five days later! I know, that's gross. But try camping in the mountains with no hot water and no place to plug in a hair dryer.

"Dude," the young man tells his friend (and he sounds like Bill Murray in "What About Bob?" when Anna invites him to go sailing on her friend George's boat and he says "It makes my lips numb to think about it."), "My lips feel like they're, like, burned up."

Yeah, I think, but I bet your hair looked great.