I don’t know if anyone has ever assigned directors to seasons and I refuse to Google it. There may already exist something called David Fincher Is Like Permanent Overcast or Ari Aster Is an Autumn but I’d prefer to preserve the illusion that I’m discovering penicillin as I do it here and now.

We all have our sea…

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I wouldn’t understand myself at all. One of my best and worst habits is overindulging (“processing”) my feelings into a journal every morning. People have carbs or night caps or online shopping. I have raging into a screen, then snapping my laptop shut, relieved and smiling as if I didn’t just annihilate whatever minor…

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I’ve spent April and the first week of May back in Los Angeles. I live here only part time now, depending on what I’m working on. The other part of the time is in Colorado, where I grew up, where my family lives, and where I use the quiet to work on writing (also to take very long hikes to avoid writing).

Since the labor strikes, the TV & Film industry has been, let’s say, a bit touch and go. You spend three hours getting ready for a meeting that begins with, “We’re really excited about your work,” before then hearing there’s no money, no timeline, and maybe no network. So a full move back to drift between generals and burn through my savings hasn’t felt like the wisest financial decision and despite my inability to give up $10 lattes, sometimes I make those. Wise financial decisions.

My friends, who travel a lot for work (he’s a Music Supervisor, she’s an actress) sublease their home to me, a sweet little house in Glassell Park with a lovely backyard. There’s a sauna, a hot tub and a cold plunge: famously, the trifecta for releasing what no longer serves you.

They’ve also lit it beautifully. As someone who has to talk about lighting a lot, I’m impressed when people figure out a great lighting scheme on accident. It’s like, ok, how did you map this key, fill and practicals using Home Depot Edison bulbs and the lights inside your hot tub? How is the fire pit and backyard motion sensors creating a photo situation where my face has cheekbones, emotional depth and history?

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Despite a resounding public craving for the rom-com to be resuscitated, Hollywood has yet to get its shit together. The airy delights of the 80s, 90s, and early aughts had everything: clever premises, career-making performances, and lines so unforgettable they have permanently replaced key survival information in my brain. I could not, at this time, cha…

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I.

There is a particular strip of Los Angeles that I think about when I think about Los Angeles.

It devastates me, in a good way. Like thinking about your parents when they were your age.

It only works at a certain time of day. Maybe that’s not true. But in my mind it’s always sunset there. The sunset is non-negotiable.

It is not Postcard Los Angeles. It’s not palm trees against opaque blue looking down from Mulholland. It’s not the Hollywood Sign. It’s not the pier, or the Chateau, or a John Lautner case study with windows pretending to be walls. It’s not even a neighborhood I lived in, or a stretch I would’ve thought to assign meaning to at all. If you’d asked me three years ago, when I briefly moved out of LA, to pick an image that represented my time here, this would not have been it.

And yet.

Somehow this banal piece of road contains my most complete understanding of Los Angeles, and more broadly, the editorial logic of memory, the way it promotes random snapshots into personal mythology while leaving others behind.

The stretch begins at Barham going downhill, just before it hits Forest Lawn Drive. It ends around Olive, where Universal City turns into Burbank. The 101 dips over the hill behind you, perpendicular.

Barham.

Toward Burbank.

For those unfamiliar with LA, this is a weird piece of the city to feel sentimental about, because it is deeply unspectacular. It is the opposite of a destination: a busy, transitive road with bumper-to-bumper traffic off the freeway, getting into the Valley.

Billboards and actor dorms.

For Rent signs on apartments whose front doors open into traffic.

Satellite office buildings and community centers.

A corner flower shop I am convinced is a money laundering scheme. I’ve never seen anyone buy flowers there.

You would only be here because you were trying to get somewhere else.

Maybe it’s unfair to generalize it this way. Or at least incomplete. Let me be more precise and describe the way I see it.

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As I write this, it is 2:55pm and I just pressed a fresh coffee. I didn’t sleep well last night. I woke up around 2:30am and lay there blinking until about 5. In that window, naturally, I scrolled. I scrolled in the hope that if I filled my corneas with enough blue light and low-grade psychic poison, my brain might finally accept defeat and let me drift off. At least three of my medical professionals would love that choice.

Still, when my 8am alarm went off for Sculpt, I rose to meet the day like a Civil War widow in a sports bra. I put on a matching set. I drank cold brew. I went, any semblance of hope held together by electrolytes and what I can only assume was a minor dissociative episode.

None of this is, on its face, particularly interesting. It is roughly as compelling as being cornered at a dinner party by someone narrating their health insurance journey. And yet I offer it because I need you to understand: I remain stunned—stunned!—that there are people among us who are simply…getting good sleep.

This information is staggering to me.

You mean to tell me there are citizens of this planet Earth who get into bed at, say, 10pm—10pm!—and simply fall asleep?

You mean your nervous system does not wait until the exact moment your head hits the pillow to unfurl a Keynote titled Are You Sure You Should’ve Left That Frame in the Final Edit?

You mean your existential dread doesn’t choose that precise moment—after you’ve dutifully swallowed your magnesium gummy and read at least thirty hopeful pages of a charming, spiritually responsible book (I’m currently reading How to Be Perfect by Mike Schur, which is wonderful)—to burst through the wall Kool-Aid Man style?

You mean you awaken to sunlight slicing through the curtains and birds singing as if you’ve been softly animated by hand, and then you stretch, pet your dog, and simply…continue being alive?

Without later convening an internal tribunal on whether you require:

• another coffee,

• protein,

• peptides (I don’t know what these are???)

• a nap,

• or a discreet lobotomy?

Daily?

What do you mean?

I truly envision my anxiety lying dormant in another part of my body and then spilling into my brain as soon as my body goes horizontal. This is how anatomy works.

There are women online charging five thousand dollars to teach “Feminine Energy” and “High-Ticket Sales” and other phrases that sound either fraudulent or faintly erotic. (I still do not know what a high-ticket sale is, and I pray to remain both ignorant and pure.) There are courses for becoming magnetic, aligned, abundant, optimized, six-figured, womb-led, and algorithmically irresistible.

And yet—not one class. Not one! For the one skill I would actually finance with the enthusiasm of an actor who wants to get into “investing”:

Sleep Through the Night.

Where is the woman in a beige Intimissimi set and a center part whispering from a marble kitchen, “For just three easy payments, I too can teach you how not to wake at 2:30am possessed by ancestral cortisol”?

Because my Capital One Venture X is on the table.

My card is in my hand.

I know the expiration date.

I know the little code on the back.

I am prepared to enter it manually.

Name your price, sleep witch.

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It took me a long time to commit to working out regularly. The problem, rather annoyingly, wasn’t discipline. And despite the nature of production schedules, it wasn’t time either. It wasn’t always accessibility, though memberships and eating well certainly add up. For me, it was a PR issue.

In Los Angeles, one is surrounded by every imaginable permutation of exercise. One is marinated in waitlists and branded water bottles, steeped in forms of movement you did not know required a waiver. If you can dream it and it burns calories at $40 per class, it exists in LA.

You want to do yoga? Beautiful. Which kind? There’s vinyasa, ashtanga, kundalini, bikram, hip-hop, sculpt, yin, aero, wine, puppy, goat. There is yoga that makes you sweat, yoga that makes you cry, yoga that introduces you to the concept of your hips as a storage unit for ancestral grief. There is yoga with animals. There is yoga with alcohol. There is yoga that feels like spiritual laundering (which is a polite way of saying: cult audit).

Pilates? Of course. Walk with me.

We have the earthy East Side mother coven, where the women arrive in heirloom linen and Elizabeth Warren merch. They pulse with civic responsibility. You suspect they compost.

There is the invite-only, all-white-reformer WeHo Pilates where the application process feels like joining the Illuminati. The lobby feels like a Scandi design lab. The receptionist appears to have been 3D-printed.

And then there is the essential Pilates Princess franchise: an army of matching sets under a neon decree, Good Vibes and Tight Thighs, performing wheelbarrows to Sabrina Carpenter.

You want a class where you dance violently, chant and expel your demons? It’s called The Class. Emma Stone goes.

Perhaps you prefer something more outwardly punishing, the kind of place that compensates for emotional damage with eucalyptus towels. Allow me to introduce you to Barry’s or Equinox.

There is spin, barre, boxing. Dance, rowing, indoor surfing. Outdoor surfing, paddleboarding, running clubs. Red light soundbath, ketamine microdose meditation, a silent disco.

And yet, despite this endless buffet of abdominal awakening, for my first fifteen years in LA, I hovered at a B-minus baseline of fitness but never identified as Woman Who Works Out. I had a CorePower membership, sure, but who doesn’t? I hiked Runyon with my dog, but that was more for her than for me. If she does not walk two hours each day, she threatens to reorganize furniture with her mouth1.

For one thing, I felt an enormous, humbling shame in those LA classes. Everybody was so good. They were so effortless and composed. I could not assemble a respectable Crow to save my life. I existed firmly in the world of modifications. If there was an easier version, I had already requested it in writing.

It also didn’t help to live in a city where half the population’s livelihood depends on their physicality. Often enduring a brutal uphill professional climb, these people made the front row of Yoga Sculpt their stage. There is nothing quite like being next to someone aggressively doing handstand pushups when the teacher has asked for a modest Cat-Cow, to free the mind from distraction.

But even more than the material reasons, I simply could not see myself as a “fitness person.” I prioritized creative work over exercise because, in my mind, the two were spiritually at odds. The latter would take valuable time and energy away from the one that mattered.

Being a “fitness person” belonged to a different species. People who referred to certain months as “wedding season.” People who had plans about where they were watching the Super Bowl. People with matcha recipes. Plural. Fitness people meal prepped and drank homemade broth. Fitness people owned air fryers. Fitness people considered a Medjool date the height of indulgence.

I fancied myself a rumpled insomniac, distracted by feeling, blissfully enjoying food groups like caffeine, crafty and Red 47. I had convinced myself that the alarm required to make a spin class was incompatible with the midnight flow required to finish a screenplay. I could not picture any of my heroes on a treadmill. I could picture them chain-smoking, yes. Arguing over a glass of wine, absolutely. Napping? As needed. But incline walking? Narratively incorrect.

It never occurred to me that discipline is discipline. That the same muscle that wakes you up to run might also sit you down to write. I had so thoroughly separated the two that it felt like doctrine.

Over the last three years, my life has changed so dramatically that I sometimes feel like everything before was a dress rehearsal. Friendships dissolved. Career reshaped. Family dynamics shifted. I briefly even moved overseas. The material changes (and losses) forced a complete recalibration. Recently, I attached this to its name: ego death.

It sounds dramatic but it’s less a lightning strike and more a humbling realization that the identity you defended so fiercely was perhaps just a costume you were afraid to take off.

One of my greatest joys in this new era has been (brace yourself) exercise.

I know. The woman who once treated a yoga membership like a trial in character-building now possessed actual enthusiasm. I joked last January about resolving to become “sporty” and by repeating this often, it materialized. The larger umbrella under which “sporty” came to life proved a quieter, longer metamorphosis that had nothing to do with obliques and everything to do with self-respect.

It began innocently, as most things that have staying power do: longer hikes with my dog that gave me time to think. I would wander for miles sifting through a yard sale of former selves until movement became a form of metabolizing. I resurrected my home workouts, ones that started during lockdown, and treated them less like a long-procrastinated siege and more like release. They were onto something in the ancestral grief storage cabinet class. Somewhere in the middle of mountain climbers, an epiphany would appear. Apparently, enlightenment just needed better circulation.

And then, almost imperceptibly, something shifted.

Suddenly, I became unafraid to book back-to-back Pilates classes in advance, something I didn’t fully trust myself to do before. Rain or shine, crack of dawn, I’d be there. The woman who once required FBI-level mental negotiations was now treating this like brushing my teeth. All of it began to feel like proof of that larger thesis: I can do hard things.

Despite this having been a years-long internal renovation, in the last few months the results started to show. Compliments rain down in a way that is both flattering and a little disorienting. Acquaintances resurface to ask what I “did.” “More Pilates and less booze?” I respond to a friend (a filmmaker, mind you) because it sounds concise, attainable. It isn’t untrue. But it also isn’t the whole story. It wasn’t one hack. It was everything.

Last year I worked on a show with dancers, people who tell a story while executing something just shy of impossible with their bodies. This was perhaps an extreme, more on-the-nose version of my own experience but I found myself thinking about how much time I’d wasted litigating a false binary: body versus mind. Athlete versus artist. Executor versus creator. Dancers create and they move. There is no separation. The body is not a distraction from expression; it’s the instrument.

It also occurred to me that being in the body fully, as a practice, is often the fastest way out of the mental labyrinth. The one that tells you you’re not a fitness person, or even the one creating a gratuitous symposium to untie a knot in your creative work. We spend years talking around problems we already know how to solve. We ruminate, intellectualize and workshop the obvious. The answer lounges patiently in the gut, like a woman who arrived early and already ordered. It’s the mind that drafts counterarguments. There’s a particular kind of busy work that flatters the mind while postponing the decision the body has already made.

I think I always wanted to be “a fitness person,” even if it wasn’t the prerequisite I thought it was to do fitness. Not for the optics but for the feeling: I wanted the schedule and the structure, but also to feel clear and alive. I wanted a sense of accomplishment to catalyze the day’s momentum. My intuition told me this was possible, that discipline wasn’t the enemy of creativity but a precondition.

Most Eastern European children are enrolled in either piano or ballet. I did both because apparently my parents believed in range. They say that everything you do should be for your younger self. I think about that child, hair scraped back into a tight bun, attempting a low cambré to impress my Russian teacher, who seemed carved from the same material as winter. Or the version of me running through woods upstate, lungs aching from the brittle New York air. Or even the skeptic in those early LA days, rolling out her mat but showing up time and time again, claiming she hated Sculpt but secretly hoping the teacher would scream “let’s gooooooo” during cardio like a drill sergeant.

I had wanted to move all along. I like moving. As humans, I think we all do. But there is so much branding and identity attached to our view of modern exercise. It’s wild that to feel comfortable in most workout classes, you have to already be in shape. In my case, there needed to be an entire lifestyle attached. It begs the question: what else do you stop yourself from doing because you don’t think you’re the type? There are many forces that would prefer we have a personal brand, a niche, to be legible on paper. That makes us convenient, easier to sell to. Social media has taken marketing from something businesses do to something everyone does, as a form of supposed connection, every person flattened into a lifestyle brand. This is why it is crucial that we embrace our perceived contradictions. So that we cannot be bamboozled. So that we have a rich, textured life that’s not easily explained. So that we possess conviction, charisma.

Today, I own a Stanley and many stupid grip socks. I did not realize the Stanley was a polarizing cultural artifact; I was under the impression it was a water bottle. I am slowly training myself to wake up at 5am because I would like the extra time and extra peace before the day begins. I’m currently at 7, which, if you know anything about me, makes me Alysa Liu.

I have dabbled in the idea of cold plunging, despite its recent PR. I choose to picture my sweet Swedish friends in a winter lake, not the cursed image of RFK and Kid Rock in damp denim. I drink electrolytes. I eat chia seed pudding. I will not learn about seed oils. I refuse zoodles on linguistic grounds alone; I also distrust foods imitating other foods. It’s dishonest. I have boundaries.

The other day, I sat next to a college-aged girl while grabbing coffee. She complimented my bag and then said, “I wish I could get something like that, but my friends would make fun of me. Because, you know…brown leather.” Then she left. Excuse me, what? No, I don’t know. I hope she dabbles in brown leather someday.

Max1, a soft-spoken Canadian filmmaker, had already accrued a large number of accolades for a relatively small body of work. It was clear he was good. His style was original. His execution, unassailable. With actors, he was precise and gentle; he would lean in and murmur a note…

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I am a Millennial white woman and yet, I say this bravely, I do not want chickens.

I want many things. A calm nervous system. An abundant bank account. Taylor Russell’s coats. But chickens? No.

Many of my friends want them. Many Millennial white women want them. Women I know personally. Women I know spiritually. Kristin Cavallari has chickens. Hilary Duff has chickens. Amanda Seyfried? Chickens. Women with blowouts and impeccable contouring are waking up at dawn to collect eggs before their Pilates classes, like they’re in a Perry-free version of Big Little Lies, executive produced by Goop.

Why? What are the chickens saying? Why are the chickens here? Is this about eggs, or something else? A lifestyle thesis disguised as poultry? Because no one actually wants to care for an animal that screams, attacks you with its beak, and can be taken out by a stiff breeze.

Perhaps chickens feel less like a pet and more like an announcement: I HAVE SPACE NOW. Physical space. Emotional space. Acreage. A mudroom.

Chickens imply land. You don’t get chickens unless you’ve graduated from “apartment person” to “someone who casually says ‘the property.’” You don’t get chickens unless someone in your home knows their way around a hammer, a latch and a ramp (for the dramatic chickens). You don’t get chickens unless you are committing to a life of many omelettes.

The aesthetic argument, of course, is airtight. Chickens pair beautifully with a DÔEN dress. You can imagine yourself drifting through your yard at golden hour, hem grazing calf, hair in a loose, morally superior braid, whispering affirmations to a Rhode Island Red. The fantasy is powerful: no screens. Just you and your flock, living off the land. You’re baking sourdough while your chicken friend looks on approvingly: ah yes, good, she thinks, this will go nicely with a breakfast sandwich. You’ve taken a guitar. Not because you play, but because it makes sense. There’s shelving with a lot of bobbins and even more homemade jams. The bobbins and jams are as abundant as the domestic fowl. Does this sound like something you’d be interested in? Need I bring up shiplap?

Never mind that chicken caretaking is, by all accounts bureaucratic labor involving mites, fencing disputes, and the devastation of discovering that something called a “hawk” exists. The fantasy does not include any of that. The fantasy includes speckled eggs in a ceramic bowl. Overalls.

So I decided to investigate.

Again, not because I want chickens but because the chickens want me. They’re circling. They’re symbolic. A feathered milestone. And I thought it was my duty, as a woman still emotionally renting and more interested in a lymphatic drainage massage than livestock, to look this thing in the eye and ask the only question that matters: what is this all about?

Let us open this Dutch door and uncover the truth.

The Trad Wife

We should probably address this first, if only to clear it as a suspect.

The trad wife is the obvious explanation, the cultural figure pacing outside the crime scene with butter molds.

It makes sense that the tranquilizing tones of Nara Smith have a hypnotic, almost religious effect. Who among us would not like to be gently baptized into a life of English muffin-making and a husband who appears intermittently, chewing a toothpick like a character in a Western? It sounds like a warm, splendid bath. A bath where nothing is urgent and everything smells faintly of Dutch pancakes.

I did my due diligence and combed through Ballerina Farm. The manual labor does not speak to me (respectfully, I am not built for it) but the hygge elements absolutely do. Candles at the table, even during daylight. A glossy green oven that’s like if an appliance were stomp-clap music. Everything wrapped in pie pastry. Still, this is not about me. This is about the chickens.

The strongest argument for the trad wife’s influence on my brethren is that chickens may simply be the gateway drug. First come the hens. Then the raw milk in mason jars. Then you’re cooking things at home that do not need to be cooked at home. One day you’re collecting eggs, the next you’re making your own cereal while insisting cutting grain into tiny fruit is actually very easy, once you get the hang of it.

But the timelines don’t line up, according to my cork board. The trad wife phenomenon appeared only after chicken fever. I remember my friends bringing up chickens during the indie sleaze era, a stern confession exiting Teddy’s, meaning there was no Instagram. Meaning there were no trad wives of which to speak, since this is where they live (also, on farms).

Let us dive deeper.

Martha Stewart

Martha Stewart: the first influencer. Queen of all things impeccable, casual but elegant. Mother to many.

Martha is like a demigod to white women. Martha isn’t so much discovered as inherited as a rite of passage, like an heirloom that knows how to make delicious punch and holiday ornaments. We all have a collective agreement and that agreement is: not guilty.

I once watched Martha make a bed and I have not stopped thinking about it. There were so many steps! It looked so comfortable! It was soothing in a way that felt like a guided meditation! Cinema. Calm App. Breathwork. Sometimes I return to it when my cortisol spikes.

Martha, naturally, owns chickens. This is not surprising. But she also owns horses, cats, dogs, donkeys, geese, and peacocks. An entire menagerie. I love this about her. In a strange way, it feels more aspirational than the chickens alone; more responsibility, yes, but also more honesty. If you’re going to do this, really do it. Go full Ark.

And yet, Martha is not the idol of the women I personally know with the chicken fetish. Her New England WASPiness does not quite blend with the California girls in kick-flare trousers and hair kerchiefs who refuse to wear mascara. They’re more likely to idolize Joni Mitchell or Stevie Nicks. Martha is too controlled. She doesn’t cosplay domesticity. She administers it.

There is still work to do.

A Bakery in Maine

Do you remember the sketch “Bakery in Maine”?

It is a documentary and a parable. It is a warning. It perfectly captures how all women of a certain age want to disappear from their own lives (kids, husbands, camel coats) and open a bakery in Maine. The joke escalates through an increasingly absurd list of loose strings the women would like to tie before leaving forever, but the underlying premise is this: every woman thinks this is her idea.

They don’t want success. They don’t want money. They don’t want anything save for a humble life of making lemon poppy scones against a salty breeze.

There are new iterations of this. I’ve frequently heard “just me and five dogs” or “moving to Tulum to become a yoga instructor.” Or if you’re a man who at some point made skate videos and owns a Leica, relocating to Tokyo.

To me, this is the most compelling case for the chicken phenomenon. Chickens are not about eggs; they are about ascension to a modest yet more elevated plane of existence. Nirvana. The soft life. A pastoral dreamscape: a counterspell to city life with its Manolos and Cosmos and whatever it is you city girls are doing that no longer feels spiritually aligned for the humble chicken proprietor. Chickens are surrender. You leave your ambition, your dysregulated dopamine reserves, and your materialism at the door. Bare hands against soft feathers! Liberation! Viva la Chicken!

Maybe you’ve considered chickens as a lifestyle choice. Perhaps even goats to take it a step further. I don’t know your life. But allow me to ask you this: what will the chickens solve, Jessica?

Come here. Sit down next to me. Have a Cosmo.

Will they deliver meaning, or just eggs? Will you be a changed woman? Will you stop scrolling because of the chickens or will you simply post content of them? The chickens will give you breakfast. Everything else is up to you.

Most people associate martinis with New York.

Martinis hold the same kind of shorthand to the city’s mythology as a MetroCard, a slice of pizza or Fran Lebowitz. The first time you visit New York, your brain obligingly assembles an expected cinematic overlay. Sinatra is playing. Someone is wearing a fur coat. Someone else is smoking a cigarette. A yellow…

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A case for New Year’s

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a New Year’s Eve evangelist and apologist.

It’s my favorite holiday, second only to Halloween. Anyone who works in film or television loves Halloween in a way they believe is deeply personal and revealing, but is in fact wildly predictable: Costumes! Makeup! An o…

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The woman’s voice is shrill and metallic, a serrated knife cutting into a bell.

There’s vibrato, which suggests she technically knows what she’s doing, but there is no artistic flourish. Whatever song this is, it has been reduced to a sterile exhibition of scales and decibels. She is a singer in the way that an air…

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I’ve always loved a great talker: the rare creature who can volley a topic with a feather’s touch, toss in a well-timed joke or anecdote, and then, miraculously, shut up and listen.

They rephrase your story in a way that suggests full comprehension. You feel seen!

They ask good questions. You feel important!

They add cheeky footnotes…

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I’ve never been a summer person.

Well, maybe, like most of us, when I was a child and the pinnacle of human experience was no school and a public swimming pool. I used to think summer was about pleasure: bare feet, dripping fruit, the vague possibility of making out with someone in a band.

In high school, the movies told us it was Je…

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At 5 a.m., I swung open the door in a panic, the kind where your body reacts before your brain can name the emergency.

A tow truck was outside, metal slamming against pavement in a rhythm that sounded less like reverse gear and more like a punishment for the neighborhood’s collective sins. I had parked the night before with maybe a tenth of my car nudgi…

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In the days of CD binders, mine was a collection of underbaked taste and wholesome delusion.

It held scratched discs from Second Spin and Angelo’s, gifted Sharpie-scrawled mixes whose function was either getting ready or getting over him, and mysterious blanks filled with LimeWire downloads: bootlegs skipping crucial s…

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