A Note From the Editor

Tomorrow at 10:57 am marks my 34th year on planet Earth. It happens to fall on a Friday, the my original birth day of the week—Friday’s child is loving and giving, as they say.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter any time since last September 4th, you probably know I’ve always loved my birthday. From childhood parties at McDonald’s, my venue of choice, where they would hide packages of cookies in the ball pit to the involved parties my older sister would throw for me at home, wherein we would make homemade body glitter and I would throw an inevitable fit about something, this time of year has always made me feel cherished. I want everyone I encounter tomorrow to know it is my birthday—I wish there were a way to let them know without literally having to say it myself. I want a hug, a happy birthday, an acknowledgment for having made it this far.

And yet, despite the general celebratory mood that marks one of my favorite days of the year and the start of my favorite season, I’ve felt a trace of heaviness following me around this past week. I didn’t want to acknowledge it, so instead, the feeling has been finding its way out in the form of early morning runs, extra sensitive romantic encounters, and being slower than usual to respond (forgive me). On two different occasions—one on foot, one on bike, both past dusk—I found myself heading home with eye sockets full of tears, a gentle sense of melancholy gripping me.

Had this been a year ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice about the crying, for I was always bursting into tears, still coming around to the reality that I was struggling with chronic depression that I hadn’t gotten proper help for. I’m happy to report that, right in time for my 34th birthday. I feel like a very different person nowadays. Emotionally, I’m ten tons lighter. Hope is more common than despair; I have the energy to support the people I love because I have the energy to hold myself up. I treat myself exceptionally well, and miraculously, I no longer feel like I’ve fallen behind in the Mario Kart race that is life in your thirties. I’ve accepted that my life is different, that I am different, that I chose this and am quite happy with how things have turned out so far.

Last night, after attending an inspiring book launch and talk for one of my talented friends, I decided to wade into the waters of the melancholy. At its bottom, I found this: a sense of loss for everything I will no longer have the chance to be in this lifetime. A young mother, a carefree recent grad who delays work a few years to volunteer on a farm, someone whose children will grow up down the street from their cousins. At 34, I must say bode farewell to everything that hasn’t come to pass. I don’t regret where I’ve landed, but it felt good—it felt honest—to acknowledge that somewhere out there, on some other timeline, versions of myself existed that I would never come to meet. And still, that there is so much life ahead of me.

Without further ado, I bring you my annual birthday tradition: doling out unsolicited advice acquired from the life I have led thus far. Enjoy!

1. Always salt your cucumbers and radishes.

2. If somebody is wearing a name tag—at an event, a grocery store, wherever—repeat their name back to them at some point in your conversation. Watch as a flicker of delight lights up their face.

3. A little table brush is much more useful than you might first think.

4. Remember: if a problem can be solved with money, it’s not really a problem.

5. Go volunteer on a farm for one week every year. Bring your lover, your children, your friends. Use the time to learn what manual labor feels like and give your body the chance to teach you what your mind has not yet learned.

6. When deciding whether or not to stay at a hotel, Google reviews are most helpful. You’ll get a sense of what a place is like in quick, plain language.

7. On that note, always sort Google reviews by “most recent,” and trust the 3’s more than the 1’s.

8. Attend the event, travel for the birthday, say yes to the dinner even when you’re tired. Showing up for the people you care about is always worth the effort.

9. Consider this truth: it’s hard to compete with people having more fun than you.

10. Let the people who love you in on your suffering.

11. If you have even the smallest inkling to do so, foster an animal and watch your heart grow ten sizes before your eyes.

12. Embrace the possibility of a foster fail.

13. Become a regular at your local hardware store. Whatever small problem you have at home, chances are you can fix it if you take a photo and inquire at said store. You’ll be amazed at your competence.

14. Add silken tofu to salads for extra moisture and protein. Best topped with sesame oil, green onions, and soy sauce.

15. When working on new projects, find a way to hire your talented friends. Even if it’s on a part-time basis, working with friends makes every project better, and the opportunities always come back around.

16. If you’re not excited to see someone again after three dates, a fourth date isn’t necessary.

17. An easy trick to learn passively: change your clock to military time, your phone’s temperature settings to Celsius, and your maps to kilometers (not all at once, but in that order, with the next change happening only once you’ve grown accustomed to the last).

18. Remember, all relationships require two-way effort. Do not assume time and continuity can do all the work of nurturing and deepening your relationships.

19. Jump in the pool. Go on the flower walk. Play the board game. Tell the story. Engage in all those activities that remind you of being a kid, and recall how it feels to be fully engaged in the world around you.

20. If you’re arriving at a destination late and you’re traveling solo, a hotel is probably a better bet than an Airbnb.

21. Take yourself on an enrichment vacation once a year. It can be a surf trip, a horseback riding camp, a self-guided writing retreat, a Vipassana, whatever. It doesn’t need to be expensive or long. This is an easy way to stay connected to yourself and your interests.

22. Always pop into a local stationery store when you pass one. Same goes for a local bookstore.

23. An easy way to bring a little bit of nature into your life: order this bird feeder.

24. An easy way to make your skin look better and to develop a meditation practice: order this red light mask, and use it in the morning while meditating.

25. If you’re traveling to Europe from the US, don’t shop for your trip before arriving. Hold off on the mass-market purchases and instead, seek out curated vintage stores in the cities you’re visiting and buy things there. Prices are better, quality is better, and your wardrobe will be better off for it.

26. Hand-written thank you notes are never a bad idea.

27. Stop buying store-bought granola. It’s easy, delicious, and much healthier when you make it yourself—here’s the recipe I like, minus the coconut sugar plus cloves, nutmeg, and pumpkin pie spice.

28. If you’ve experienced depression or anxiety for a prolonged period of time, book a consultation with a good psychiatrist.

29. If that psychiatrist suggests getting on medicine and you feel fearful based on what others have said, consider this advice my psychiatrist gave me: “I can’t tell you what a cherry tastes like to me. I can try to describe it, I can show you pictures of it, but you won’t know what it tastes like to you until you try it yourself.” Let your experience be your experience.

30. Rather than paying for pet care while traveling, find a sitter through this site (disclaimer: it’s my referral link). It’s also a good solve for travelers on a budget. I’ve had only positive experiences with sitters from the site so far.

31. Every time you go to the beach or to a public park, leave having picked up at least one piece of trash. Teach your children this rule. This is your troll toll for enjoying the fruits of Mother Nature.

32. Go to the movies more often.

33. Sharing treats with your neighbors is an easy way to bring joy and goodwill into the neighborhood.

34. Putting said treats in cute boxes makes the whole thing feel sweeter.

Share

Cheers my dears, and thanks for reading along! I plan to spend tomorrow how I always spend my birthday morning: getting a pumpkin spice latte for free (no shame), then reading all of my birthday cards in the park and ending the day with early drinks surrounded by a few good friends. My real birthday festivities are happening Saturday, where a few of my best friends are surprising me with an overnight trip somewhere. I can’t wait!

For past birthday lists, see 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, and 33. This list was inspired by creative genius, Kevin Kelly, whose wise list is worth reading.

A Birthday Request From Yours Truly…

I must be turning into my mother, because all I want this year is birthday cards. A physical card isn’t needed: an email will do just fine!

If you want to wish me a happy birthday, shoot me a note here. I won’t read it now; I’ll print it out tomorrow morning and bring it to the park to read when I read the rest of my cards. And I will be just as pleased with this note as I would be with a physical card in the mail :)

**Bonus Content** (All Virgo All The Time)

@jaconmilan1Nobody criticizes Virgo harder than the Virgo already living inside their own head. ♍️ Do yall agree !? 🤔 #virgo #astrology #fyp #virgo♍️ #viral

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

This, but also this, and LOL, very much so.

A Quote From A Book You Should Read:

“Running might take her forward, it could even take her home; but it couldn't take her back–not ten minutes, ten hours, not ten years or days.”

-The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

A Note From the Editor

It begins with my foster cat, Saul, whose original name when I got him was Southpaw. I return home from a long trip and am nervous about how he might react, whether he’ll still love me. The moment I enter the apartment and sit on the floor to greet him, he trots over. He has this stompy, fee-fi-foe-fum gait. It’s not cat-like or graceful.

He moves toward me with a determined intensity and bunts me in the face. He’s purring like a machine, trailing my hands, my cheeks, my bowed face with his gums. I stick my face into the soft tuft of fur between his shoulder blades and inhale. He’s so soft, I can’t help but wonder whether he’s a stuffed animal come to life.

My hairdresser said a cat’s purr does something to cortisol levels. It’s meditative, she claims, healing. I’ve been traveling for over 11 hours, a cocktail of stress hormones coursing through my blood, so I relish the soothing sound, the full-body relief that Saul still loves me. I never know how I’ll feel coming home from a trip—historically, it hasn’t always been sunny. Now, I have this stuffie waiting to greet me. Now, there are so many moments that light up my life with a little firefly flicker, so quick I could easily miss it if I’m moving too fast.

Like when I’m working at my desk, and he casually strolls over my keyboard, then back again, his tail sweeping my face. When I’m writing in my journal, or writing a letter, and he tries chewing the end of my in-motion pen because he wants me to stop paying attention to the pen and start paying attention to him. He flops his fluffy potato body right over onto my writing hand, the purring engine switched on. Or when I’m lying on the couch and he comes over and presses his tender little paw pad into my leg, my arm, my open palm. I imagine this is his version of holding my hand.

Or when he becomes obsessed with the most random items, like a fennel bulb I bought at the farmers market, which he carried around in his mouth like it was his pet. Or when I discover something new that he loves, like chasing crumpled pages torn from my ever-growing stack of New Yorker magazines, darting around the apartment like a maniac. I finally understand how having an animal transforms your life—in big ways but, cumulatively and where it matters, in the smallest, most precious ways.

I was always so worried about the mess a pet would make. It seems so silly, now.

———

Lately, I find it everywhere, in places expected and less expected. An ordinary Friday morning, scorching hot, and two of my best friends wake up early and drive over to my neighborhood just so we can start the day together. The matcha I order is watery and we’re all sweating, but it doesn’t matter. We each take a turn sharing updates. We’ve seen each other twice this week already, and yet somehow there are always updates to share. Mundanities, internal dialogues, wishes, secrets.

We giggle nervously as hordes of uniformed, sweaty adults jog past us, cops in training. The sight, at first, is off-putting; it feels very military state, but then we notice those in the pack who have already finished their route standing in a line, shouting words of encouragement to the stragglers. You’re so close, keep it up, you can do it! In that instant, the scene is transformed. Our wincing turns to smiles.

———

Then, back in Florida, visiting my siblings and my sweet nephews for a few days. Sitting side-by-side as my boy-genius nephew shares his latest fixation: flags. He rattles them off like a human encyclopedia—Tunisia, Macedonia, Gabon—except he’s only 8 years old. I am in awe. Later, we snuggle up on the couch to watch the live-action Lilo and Stitch. He settles his long, lanky body against mine and I play with his bouncy curls, glad that he isn’t too old to want to hang out with me. When I leave the next day, my sister says he cries big crocodile tears.

At my brother’s house, the twins greet me eagerly. I give them macarons from Laudree, three each because they love Paris, and they scarf them right in a row. They agree the salted caramel flavor is best; I concur.

We spend the Sunday before school starts in a frenzied flurry of action. First, we play family and I’m the bratty younger sister. Then, we play monster and I’m the monster. Then, I teach them a game wherein we each must exit the closet, act out a skit, and the others have to guess who we are. I get very specific—I am an adventurer with bad eyesight who mistook a spec of dirt on the telescope for a prized desert island, I am an elderly Spiderman, I am the French baker who accidentally invented macarons for a royal wedding. In turn, their characters get more and more specific, too. No matter that they’re only ever a hair off from my own.

We play board games, Clue and Uno. I give them a bath and, as they’ve been doing for as long as they could talk, they request I tell an elaborate scary story. “Adventurous, terrifying, surprising, with a huge twist! And a character from Paris!” I exercise my creativity in real time. This one’s a hit, a haunted waterpark, two sisters, one of whom doesn’t actually exist. A hopped timeline. We title the story “Imagination,” after the fact.

———
After a week so busy I hardly have time to feed myself, I decide on a much-needed night in. I make bone broth and granola and share a small jar of each with my upstairs neighbor who often feeds Saul when I spend the night away. She is charmed, and says so.

A family of ducks waits to cross the road, fluffy yellow babies all in a row behind their mother. My little sister texts me telling me she loves me.

I make a big batch of chocolate chip cookies and get to share them with my friends, with my cat sitter, with my brother. I eat as many as I want.

Before therapy, I bring a novel to the park. The air is finally clear of wildfire smoke. Even though it’s humid, I want to get outside. I find a shaded bench and crack open the book. It’s bleak, but also very beautiful, not unlike life. I lose track of time and almost miss my appointment.

At the laundromat, I lock eyes with a handsome neighbor. We smile at each other but never speak.

Later, my duvet cover is crisp and clean, my bedsheets are pressed. I slide into my freshly made bed like paper slipping into an envelope. Saul makes biscuits on my expensive linen duvet cover; I let him. That night, I sleep deeply.

Share

Three Pieces of Content Worth Consuming

1. Something Light to Read: Emma Straub’s Guide to Her ‘Tiny Village’ of Brooklyn. I’m snooty when it comes to New York guides, but I loved this one. I think the best (only?) way to approach a city guide is to be ultra-specific. It’s wild to try to characterize a place like New York in broad strokes. Hone in on a neighborhood you know well and let the guides rein.

2. Something To Watch: Wild Inside (Trailer). I lost my mind when I saw this trailer. It looks like something out of a Disney film, except it’s a documentary. So excited to see it tonight. Here’s where it’s currently playing around the US.

3. Something to Consider: The New Science of Inflammation. Back when I was on social media, every girl I knew who turned into a health coach would talk about inflammation, so much so that I subconsciously filed it away as just another meaningless health buzzword. This article is a good educator on the relevance of chronic inflammation—turns out, it may very well be the root contributor to many health issues that ail us.

One Good Question

As a travel writer and a ponderer, I spend a lot of time thinking about how so many places are becoming like each other. It makes me especially appreciate places that are singular. Which leads me to today’s question. Ask a lover, a friend, or even a coworker you especially like.

What’s one place you’ve been that’s unlike any other? And how so?

**Bonus Content** (The Season is Coming)

This Virgo season vibe is so real.

Also, a very attractive chair, if I weren’t committed to staying local this month, I’d be all over this or this, very into these chic coasters, such a fun idea for a late-summer party, making these cookies stat, planning a cute fall weekend here, and a pretty piece of art.

A Quote From A Book You Should Read:

“Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.”

-Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante

After three weeks spent traipsing around a sweltering Paris, putzing around the coastal French Basque region, and biking around the buzzy enclave that is Berlin in the summertime, I have one major takeaway: I am no longer shopping in America. At least insofar as I can help it.

This trip wasn’t necessarily intended as a shopping trip—I had a wedding and a surf retreat to attend, all packed for within the confines of a single carry-on bag—but I did have some vague plans to spend my free days treasure hunting around the endless stretch of vintage shops in Paris. I’d had a hazy vision of coming home with dainty, vintage silver ice cream cups to complete my current set, some various vintage French homewares that sell in Hudson for five times the price of what they charge straight from the source, in France.

To account for this, I crammed an empty, albeit bulky Osprey travel backpack into my carry-on, figuring once I’d shopped enough, I’d fill the backpack and check it home. It didn’t work that way. After five days in Paris and not a single homeware item purchased, I ditched the backpack in favor of traveling lighter.

Later, while pressing all my weight onto the top of my suitcase to compress it enough so that it could zip, I wistfully wished I had the foresight to hang on to the backpack. Clothes can be just as bulky as homewares, as it turns out.

First up, Paris.

Here, I had the highest hopes. A friend had sent me a detailed list of high-end consignment shops and cool vintage spots, many of which I browsed longingly, appreciating the quality of the fabrics, the impeccably tailored trench coats, the cornucopia of quilted Chanel bags. Price tags ranged from insane to reasonable, and even at the more chaotic of the stores, the curation was better than anything I’ve yet to experience in New York. None of the clothes smelled like musky old garage. For the first time in a very, very long time, I felt inspired by clothing.

What I Bought:

• A white Anne Fontaine Paris button down (similar here). My wardrobe consists of 75% white-button downs. I justified this addition because I liked the crop, the material was a bit thicker than my usual lightweight cotton, good for the coming fall, and the rounded, white buttons were a sweet touch.

• A textured, a-line yellow skirt. I’ve been on the hunt for a good floor-length skirt for a while now, but to no avail. I want a skirt to do a few very specific things—not to wrinkle too easily, to cut in at the waist, and to look more chic than frumpy. This vintage skirt checked all the boxes. The texture makes it a little more interesting, the pleats give it a put-together look, and the vintage tortoiseshell buttons in the back are very cool. A good find.

• ‘Silence is a Gift’ coffee table photography book. A friend suggested stopping by Yvon Lambert Gallery, and it was exactly my kind of art/book store. I knew I needed this gorgeous book the moment I saw the first photograph. The images are intimate and playful and human, all taken in the subject’s homes.

• French sunscreen. I wish I’d done a proper pharmacy haul, but I did manage to snag a few things on my way out; all of which are superior to my US sunscreens. For my face, I got this (so milky and soft), and for my body, this and this (which you can also use on your hair).

• Cute postcards. The postcard game in Paris is bar-none. I plan to frame a few of these and give them to my nieces and nephews as gifts.

  

Next, Biarritz (and beyond, in French Basque).

The greatest surprise of my trip was discovering the most perfect little boutique in Biarritz, which also happens to be one of my new favorite European towns. By all measures it is a surf town, seated smack dab in the heart of French Basque country just 45 minutes from American-favorite San Sebastian, but it’s unlike any other beach town I’ve visited. It’s a little fancy, a little laidback, cool without being pretentious or trying too hard. The shopping was constantly tempting.

What I Bought:

• A vintage white Prada cardigan. I stumbled into the aforementioned boutique for the first time post-surf, so I was sandy and gross and not planning to try anything on. Then I saw this cardigan—a soft pleat back, two delicate buttons along the top, the most lightweight fabric—and I knew I had to try it. It reminded me of Romeo and Juliet, so effortlessly romantic. The shop owners agreed that I had to have it.

• Vintage Alberto Biani printed silk shorts (similar style here). The Bermuda short length that seems trendy at first glance, yet these were made in Italy in the ‘90s. I’ve never had shorts this length that weren’t more tomboy style—these give such a posh, polished look. And they’re extremely comfortable. Bellisima.

  

• A vintage Celina Macadam tote (similar here). Despite what this edition may lead you to believe, I’m not a big shopper. I notoriously consider purchases for a very long time before making them, and I can go long stretches of time without buying anything new. If you’re like me, it’s important to have a person in your life who encourages you to just go for it when you stumble upon the right item. My older sister is that person, and it is because of her that I purchased this impeccable bag. The straps are just the right length, and the tote is both slim and large enough to fit a book and my giant water bottle. I’ve already gotten so much use out of it.

• A retro-looking souvenir tee-shirt. When I go someplace that feels special to me, I like to come home with either a commemorative baseball hat or a tee-shirt, so long as I can find a non-cheesy option. I loved the retro look of this shirt, and the quality of the cotton.

• Loads of tinned fish. Fancy tinned fish is a foolproof gift, for others or for yourself. I got truffle sardines, lemony trout, juniper albacore, etc. I intended to disperse these cans as gifts, but my very delayed grocery shop upon return made it so that I ate most of them myself. Whoops! I also bought a good chocolate bar for my mom, as I do everywhere I go.

Lastly, Berlin.

By the time I touched down in Berlin, there was zero space left in my suitcase. My dear friend, who I was there to visit, had told me there was “no good shopping in Berlin,” so I wasn’t concerned about lack of space. Turned out, she was wrong!

What I Bought:

• A bunch of natural olfactory products. What I thought would be just an incense shop turned out to be one of my favorite shops of the entire trip. I’m already dreaming of going back, and scheming about how we can get them a pop-up in New York. The owners, a French-speaking German man and a Japanese woman, were fascinating. They knew where every single ingredient was sourced from, they took so much time with us, the way a shopping experience should be. Everything is 100% natural and made right in Berlin. It was truly the holy grail for anyone who appreciates scent, beauty, skincare, and holistic wellness. I came away with a buttery-soft body balm, a room spray that makes my bedroom smell like a spa, a Himalayan crystal salt deodorant bar, and a few bundles of palo santo and beeswax candles. I wish I’d gotten this face oil, these bath salts. These products are so good, I think they might be worth paying tariffs on.

What I Didn’t Buy, But Would’ve Had I Kept The Backpack

• An aesthetically-pleasing lamp. The size, the light wood, the roundness. I’m into all of it.

• Chunky, block-heel vintage Prada pumps. It was hard to pass these up. Luckily, every store in Berlin keeps very limited hours, so it made going back for the shoes just annoying enough. I felt like I was being trolled by the vintage shopping gods, because everything I wanted fit me suspiciously well.

And finally, a few general tips on shopping abroad:

• Don’t buy anything you could easily get at home for the same price. I impulsively bought a jar of honey at a shoppy shop in Berlin. Was it a good price? Sure. Is Berlin known for its honey? Not that I know of. Can I get good, local honey anywhere, including at my Saturday farmer’s market in Brooklyn? Yes.

• Skip the souvenirs. Before you buy that little tchotchke, ask yourself, is the recipient of this gift going to hold on to this for the next five years? If the answer is no, skip it. Nobody needs an Eiffel Tower-shaped pen from Paris. If you absolutely purchase a souvenir, put some consideration into it. Food gifts are always a good idea, as is a beautiful mug from a local ceramics shop, a pretty tea towel, stuff with some utility and true local ties.

• Adopt the year-round gift mindset. I’ve long said the best way to buy good gifts is to keep an eye out year-round. Do you have a sister who loves skincare? A best friend with an affinity for art? Keeping an eye out for future birthday and holiday gifts while abroad is always a good idea, and it’ll make you a better gift giver. I wish I would’ve had the foresight to do this on this last trip.

• Finally, double-check those vintage price tags. I’m no expert vintage shopper (not yet, at least), but after this trip, I’m well on my way. It’s hard to have an idea what a fair price range is for certain vintage designer items, and it’s easy to get swept up in the moment. Before buying, you can do a quick check with Google, Claude, whatever. I uploaded a photo of the item, asked about the specific style details and collection, and then searched for comparable items on 1stDibs and The RealReal. Keep in mind, you’ll always pay a slight premium in-person, but it’s worth it to be able to see the item’s true condition.

__________

Cheers, my dears, and as always, thanks for reading along! I’m finally back in New York for a few weeks before I jet off on a cruise to celebrate my mom’s 70th birthday. Six out of seven of my siblings will be there, plus several spouses, friends, and one little one. Until then, I’m trying to lay low, get some work done, and catch up with friends. The end-of-summer whirlwind is real!

This weekend, I plan to eat ice cream outside at sunset, to meet my friend’s sweet new baby, and to finally see this movie. Have a wonderful weekend. Spend a few uninterrupted minutes in the morning listening to birdsong, take a long, aimless walk with a friend, make a fire.

Share

Three Pieces of Content Worth Consuming

1. Something to Listen To: Armchair Expert with Olivia Wilde. I must admit, I got caught up in the media drama surrounding Don’t Worry, Darling, and had been a touch nose-up on Wilde ever since. After listening to this episode, though, my mind is changed. She had a fascinating upbringing, she seems sincerely open-minded and curious, and I loved learning about what went into making her latest movie. Shooting on film, in chronological order, in one location is an insane filmmaking feat.

2. Something Shorter To Read: Mysteries, Yes (A Poem). I stumbled across this poem just this morning, while making my way through Devotions. Etch the final two stanzas onto my gravestone.

3. Something to Consider: How the Words We Teach English Language Learners Changed, and What That Says About Us. This is super interesting, even if you just click through the data visualization before the actual essay. The lists of words used to teach English as a second language were updated 70 years apart, built from real-world usage. As time went on, words that relate to the physical world were largely replaced with conceptual words. i.e., corn for justify, towel for perspective. I wonder what this list will look like in a few decades.

One Good Question

A cute, low-stakes question that’ll get your creative juices flowing—and hopefully make you appreciate all the little things that make a life. Ask a friend, a date, a child, a parent, or the stranger seated next to you at a dinner party.

What’s one silly, ordinary thing that brings you joy?

**Bonus Content** (How Do You Towel?)

Fascinating. I’m definitely doing this with my best friends from high-school at our September reunion.

Also, a summer lunch idea, a very good song, fighting the good fight, this is spooky, and the book list I always look forward to.

A Quote From A Book You Should Read:

"Things without meaning are the most beautiful ones.”

-The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

A midday swim and dancing with the Swedes

The first thought I have when I wake up today is that there are fewer days ahead of us than there are behind us. I’ve been quietly dreading the day this would be the case, for I want this retreat to stretch on indefinitely. I want each morning of my life to start earlier than it needs to, the only justification for prying open my tired eyes being the promise of sand and sea.

The water yesterday was so warm. Today, I test my endurance by wearing a typical surf bikini rather than a long-sleeved one. Extra sunscreen, then downstairs for our morning oats before surf. I take cue from the Swedes. They fill their bowls with a scoop of oatmeal, then with oat milk so that the oatmeal is an island surrounded by a milky moat.

Three bites in, I learn this is not the ideal way to eat oatmeal, at least not for me. Far too much milk. The Swedes say oatmeal is too dry without the milk moat.

Why not just use more water when you cook it? Or more milk? I ask. In return, I get shrugs. It’s too early for philosophical breakfast talk. And anyway, there are waves to catch.

___________

I have a great day in the water. We’re surfing a new spot in a little town called Bidart. I like the vibe straight away. It feels very local, no surf schools set up at the water’s edge, nothing much but an unfussy cafe. I give up the board I was clinging to for the last few days and try a new one, discovering that what was familiar was not necessarily best.

It’s our first day surfing with the lead instructor, a tan French man with a cool demeanor and kind eyes. He reminds me of someone who’d be cast as the heartthrob quarterback in an American teen film. He watches me take a few waves and paddles over to give me advice. I have to pop up sooner so I don’t travel straight down to the bottom of the wave; I should feel the drop. I recall watching my footage from last night, how my pop-up was two moves—hands, then feet—instead of one seamless hop up.

I let him push me into a couple of waves and pop up when he tells me to. Immediately, I feel the difference. He drills me on turning the board faster, shows me where to sit so I can maneuver onto the wave before anyone else in the lineup.

At some point, I am surrounded by a pack of tiny surfers, no older than 10, on boards the size of my pinky fingernail. They are so cute, so skilled, that I immediately begin dreaming about having a son of my own. A little surfer boy.

The leader of the mini pack is impossibly blonde. We go for the same wave—I’m closer to the peak, so it’s technically mine. Still, as I catch it, the little boy clucks at me, not unlike the whoops I’d get in the water in Costa Rica. These boys are cute, I soon learn, but not immune to a short boarder’s antics.

The legendary Swede calls aggressive short boarders wankers. As this tiny blonde tot shoots me a dirty look when I paddle back out, the word immediately comes to mind.

My little surfer boy won’t be a wanker. He’ll be sweet, graciously yielding waves to the adult women in the lineup, no matter how much better of a surfer he is than her.

And he’ll be a long boarder.

___________

Each afternoon, after surf and after brunch, we have a stretch of free hours to do what we please. Normally, I’m tired and need some alone time to write, or to lie by the pool. Today, I feel the scarcity of our days, so I join a few others on a quest to go into town.

The nearby town, Saint Jean De Luz, is petite and charming. Every building has a whitewashed timber facade and painted red shutters, which I’ve learned is not a unique feature of the château, but traditional Basque architecture. We are an international crew—a German girl, an Irish girl living in Copenhagen, a Swedish girl living not in Stockholm, a Swedish guy living in Stockholm, and me, the token American. We lay our towels out on a thin stretch of sand and decide to get into the water straight away. I haven’t yet been in the ocean purely for leisure on this trip, and it is delightfully cool.

We wade out to a rock and sit facing the bay, side-by-side. The sun warms our shoulders and I feel so content, so filled to the brim with gladness that I say so aloud. Quietly, I take a moment to sit in the wonder that this is my life. Anytime you feel a sense of wonder within 10 feet of you, I suggest heading straight towards it. Crash into it and stay there, dizzy and dazed, as long as you can.

After our swim, we stroll back into the town. A surprise to no one, I get a matcha. and my companions follow suit. Next door, we visit what has become my favorite local shop. The shopkeeper is a sweet man with a round face and a good head of hair. I buy another bag of the chips I’ve seen everywhere on this trip, some hand balm, and another tinned fish. Then I vow to stop buying things, for I’m certain nothing else will fit in my bag.

As I say goodbye to the shopkeeper, I wonder if this will be the last time I see him on this trip. It will be.

No matter, I think, I’ll be back next summer.

___________

After yoga, my cute Swedish friend and I embark on our daily ritual: practicing acro yoga together. He leads me in poses that feel haphazard, but are strangely achievable. As my arched back balances on the soles of his feet, I consider how fun it is to play. This friend, in particular, is full of whimsy. He’ll always accept a hug, swim out to the rock, take my hand and lead me in a few Lindy Hop dance moves. I remember how good it feels to have your bids for attention matched, to match someone’s bids.

___________

Several bottles of wine are drunk. Someone turns on a Bluetooth speaker. The sky is properly dark, which means it’s late. We form a circle, dancing toward each other. Someone adds a song to the queue, then another. My new friends are dancing freely, limbs loose, bopping along to songs I don’t know, easy smiles on their faces.

I locate the connected iPhone and add my song selection to the queue. When this finally comes on, everyone looks around like. The Swedes aren’t familiar with this one. Ever good sports, they begin to dance. I’m moving my hips, dropping down and back up, while they seem to bop along to some part of the beat I can’t hear. The song goes on and on, longer than I remember, and I instruct them to keep going. We’re all laughing.

At some point, the next song fades in. I have the bright idea to take a walk in the pitch dark in search of some horses I heard were roaming near the property earlier. My friend and I go walking. We find no horses, but I close my eyes and hear a symphony of sounds layered on top of one another. Crickets, birds, the buzz of insects, the rustle of the wind, something I can’t quite recognize. The evening’s song is its own kind of magic.

___________

Hiking at breakneck speed and scaring away the hiccups

We don’t surf today. That was always the plan, one day break to recover the muscles and go for a hike. Still, I’m sad about it. I already miss the water.

After many years of visiting mountains, I’ve come to realize I like hiking enough, but I can’t claim to love it. It isn’t just that my activity-induced asthma puts a strain on my lungs and my pride, but it’s that I can’t look up when I hike, for I’m certain that the moment I stop staring at my feet, I’ll miss a step and trip. Or worse, twist my ankle.

There’s also the matter of pace. I’m athletic. I’m competitive. If I’m hiking with a group of people, I must be keeping pace with someone towards the front of the group, which means I’m scrambling, swallowing my huffs, staring at my feet, wondering why people seem to love doing this.

Naturally, every man I’ve seriously dated has been enamored with mountains and climbing them.

___________

Today, we’re hiking the Pyrenees, just a 20-minute drive from the château. The trailhead sign says 2.5 hours and moderate difficulty, so I brace myself. The group shoots off; I get a vision of bats out of hell. I knew we were collectively fit, but I didn’t know I was among professional mountaineers. I get the sense they are skipping up the mountain easily, while I huff and puff, beads of sweat rolling down my back.

We come across some horses along the way with big bells around their necks. We hear them before we see them. They’re short, about my height, with arched backs and round, low-hanging bellies, ribs visible. There’s no way these horses could bear the weight of a human, so I guess they’re just for field-grazing.

___________

We reach the point in the hike where we stop chatting. Now, everyone’s a little out of breath. Every so often, I stop to turn around. The massive green valley reminds me of an even harder hike I did in South Africa. I remind myself of this as the ascent goes up and up.

At what we deem the top, we pause. Everyone’s sweaty. I close my eyes and try to be fully present, realizing I haven’t been alone with myself at all on this trip. Technically, I’m not alone now, but angling my body towards the woods, I feel like I am. The breeze cools my sweat. I consider what a special pocket of Europe this is—good surf in one direction, mountains and rivers in another. I could get used to this.

On the way down, we see a billy goat with two spiraling horns. I stare at him and he bleats back. I think of the old fairytale, the Three Billy Goats Gruff, meadows and trolls and tricks and green pastures.

___________

Back home, we take a minute to decompress. It’s been an active morning. Yoga is mercifully easy today, and my friend and I skip acro yoga, no energy to spare. Dinner is a beautiful paella with fresh octopus and squid from the fish market. I have three helpings, then I ask the chef how she made it. Around step four, my mind wanders. I vow to find a similar recipe when I get back home.

It’s hotter than usual tonight. I have a hard time sleeping for the first time all week. It doesn’t help that I have hiccups, loud and intrusive.

I ask my roommate to scare them out of me. I pull down my eye mask and attempt to relax. She creeps around to the corner of my bed and pops out, and I scream. It works in that I’m scared, but the hiccups are still there.

We laugh like banshees, so hard and for so long that I forget about the hiccups altogether. The Countess room is the most fun room, we declare.

___________

A happenstance bonus surf and saying goodbye

The final day approaches, as I knew it would. I try to embrace each step in what has become our regular routine. Even if I do this again next summer, there will never be another first time around, so I attempt to commit the rhythms to memory—the morning hush over oats, the bite of cold water on my ankles as I enter the ocean, the slow trailing out of the water for the last time.

It’s been an active week. When we break for the afternoon, I skip going into town with some of the others. Those who stayed behind are going to the pool. I saw I’ll join them in a bit. First, I hitch a ride with one of the makeshift instructors back to the surf school. He has to return some wetsuits and leashes, I have to answer what has become the obsessive call to get matcha.

We get the matcha to stay this time, sitting outside the café, chatting about our lives back home. The makeshift instructor tells me of his life in Sweden, how he spends every summer here at the château. Last winter, he went to Panama. He tells me what waves are worth surfing there, what the vibe is like, and I take notes on my iPhone, dreaming of a winter with warm weather and lots of surf.

It’s the barista’s birthday, I hear a man say, so I wish her a happy birthday on my way out.

___________

When we return home, the iconic Swede is playing the ukulele. I sit down at the table with my laptop, and after some time, I hear my name embedded into a sentence I otherwise don’t understand, in Swedish. I look up.

Wanna surf? asks the iconic Swede. Just a quick one.

I charge upstairs, throw on my suit, and we’re loaded into the big yellow van in no time—the iconic Swede, the makeshift instructor, me, and one other retreat goer, a friendly man from Copenhagen.

My blood sugar is low and the sun is hot, but I’ve surfed this wave before. It’s the same spot I came to on my very first day here, before joining the retreat. When we pull up in our van, surfboards strapped to the top, two tanned Swedes handing them down from the van’s roof, feet and chest bare, I notice a few people pull out their phones to take photos. The scene says: You are here.

I bask in the feeling of cool by association. The only girl of our little makeshift group. No matter that I hardly catch two waves.

___________

What to say about goodbyes? I’ve never liked them and I never will. Our final dinner together is celebratory, a champagne toast, fresh fish on the grill, a fruit crisp for dessert with several different ice cream flavors. There’s a vanilla sauce, the chef challenges us to guess the two secret ingredients. I get one, miso. The other is silken tofu.

I promise to visit Stockholm at some point soon and I mean it. We talk about the upcoming retreats—Encinitas in October, Morocco in the winter. I suggest we reunite here next summer. I have a feeling this won’t be the last I see of this place, these people.

-M

Bits and Bobs

• A taste of summer at the château.

• Watched this movie on the plane ride home, mostly because LOT Airlines has a very limited selection, and was blown away.

• Wish I’d have stocked up more on my new favorite face sunscreen in France.

Thanks for reading along this week from a surf retreat in the French Basque country. I’m feeling light and inspired after nearly a month in Europe, so more Euro-related dispatches are to come.

Cheers, stay cool out there!

The quest for cool, and six hours surfing

My eyes are heavy when I wake up this morning, and I am reminded of what a delicate flower I am when it comes to sleep. I briefly wonder how I will ever withstand those early days of motherhood, when two to three hour stretches are all that is possible. Last night, for example, I slept just over 6 hours—a reasonable amount—and yet, it feels as though I have been awoken mid brain-surgery. I’m foggy, groggy, on the cusp of grumpy.

No matter. The surf awaits us. I put on my swimsuit, slather on sunscreen. My room mate does my back, I do hers, and downstairs we go for our morning oats and boiled eggs.

___________

We’re in the exact same spot as yesterday, and I’m on the exact same board. In fact, I was a touch aggressive this morning, insisting I get the same board as yesterday, rushing out of the car, calling clear dibs with the instructors.

The ocean is much warmer than I expected. All of France is, and so I skip the wetsuit, the dorky surf school shirt and surf in a bikini instead. In my head, this makes me look cooler. I miss the first wave I paddle for. Then the second. I fall off the third. Around my fifth or sixth attempt to ride a wave more than a five feet, I realize I look about as cool as I feel, and that’s not very cool at all.

Around me, my fellow surf retreat-goers, my friends, at this point, are progressing at breakneck speed. It’s their second day out surfing and they catch waves without being pushed, riding them in. Two of them happen to be sponsored runners and I wonder whether there’s a correlation between running and surfing, or if the correlation is only general elite athleticism. When we got back to the chateau after yesterday’s session, they immediately went on a long, hilly run, something like 15 kilometers.

I’m pleased to find that the progress of my peers isn’t making me pissy. In Costa Rica, my attitude in the ocean was generally hostile. I blame this on being beat up by the waves daily, and being either hit on or yelled at too often, and often too early in the morning. I would fix my face in a perma-scowl and ignore anyone who tried to talk to me. I would get astoundingly annoyed at people just for talking to each other, for laughing when I wanted to surf in silence. In essence, I was not bringing good vibes.

I’m not quite there today, but I can feel my attitude is a sinking ship. I’m not performing well. One of the Swedes who works for the retreat paddles over over and asks me how I’m doing. I’m having a bad day, I say. We just got out, Meghan. We just got out here. Give it some time. Then he paddles away, a wise owl who dances on every wave he goes for.

He isn’t wrong, I know this. I consider how quickly I’ve arrived at the conclusion—bad, I’m doing bad, today is bad day—after less than 30 minutes out on the water. I wonder whether it’s not too late to change my stance.

___________

I feel spiky by the time we finally exit the ocean some hours later. We rinse off, someone asks me if I had fun and I say no, then immediately regret it, because I’m sinking my teeth into the poison apple of my own making. Just yesterday, I gave this very person a lecture about how some days in the water are good, others are bad, just let it roll off. I feel like a toddler on the verge of a fit.

There is one thing that is sure to cheer me up. I search Google Maps for a matcha place and voila. After a bit of eyelash batting and a bribe to buy our driver a matcha, we head to the nearby café. After a few days of stomaching coffee, the matcha is a godsend. A year after all but quitting coffee, it’s amazing that I don’t even want to drink it anymore. It feels like battery acid in my stomach. The matcha, on the other hand, feels like a warm embrace, exactly what I need today. I chug it down in five greedy sips, then wish I’d gotten two.

After matcha, we stop by a boulangerie for a dozen baguettes for brunch. I hold the paper bag like it’s my child, and it rides home on my laps. I stick my head in every so often and inhale. I will always identify this smell with France, warm and yeasty, a touch sweet.

___________

After another beautiful spread of well-deserved food—this time, I butter a quarter of a baguette, line each half with thinly sliced cucumbers and juicy, bright red tomatoes—we have a very short break before we’re off on a rare, afternoon group mission.

After a few hours of surf, the body wants to lounge, even as the mind is awake. Especially as hot as it is today, 42 degrees outside. By the time we all load up in the car to head to Biarritz, the town I stayed at for two days before arriving to the chateau, my head is spinning. Too much sun, too much bread, not enough water. I don’t feel like chatting so I strategically choose my spot in the car where I can angle my body toward the window and disassociate.

The heat is impossible. We all feel it. The world, it seems, will not sustain under the mounting pressure caused by this heatwave, probably the first of many this summer. Can it get even hotter than this? What will happen?

___________

The plan this afternoon in town is no plan. Choose your own adventure. The iconic Swede and his crew are, of course, going to surf. There’s a wave here called Cotes de Basque. I surfed it the first day I was here alone, and it’s fun, but crowded. You have to walk down about a million steps to get access it.

The rest of the group decides to go into town. There are shops to visit, macarons to nibble, coffees to sip. I’ve already explored the town, and I cannot possibly fit another item in my stuffed suitcase. Plus, who I am kidding, I’m going to get back into the water. I’m not sure this is the best idea, given the scalding heat and my general attitude today, but there’s an extra board and I don’t think too hard before grabbing it and descending the steps.

___________

As the legendary Swede will say many times this week, it’s always better to surf than to not surf. The water is cool, and upon entering it, I immediately feel the smog clear from my head. The lineup is full of first timers getting pushed into waves on foam boards. I hop on a wave, then another. There’s more power here so I don’t have to kick my legs so hard before popping up. I get hit by a foamie three different times, but I don’t mind.

A sense of calm washes over me. I am reminded that the ocean is my happiest place. Some people like the mountains, others prefer the buzz of a city. For me, there is nothing like the ocean.

I love its ever-changing rhythm, the unpredictability of it. One day, it might suck you out and humble you, the next, it might cradle you. I love the salt, how it dries out my skin and hair. I love the way it commands respect, the way it buoys you, so you can float on your back and gaze up at the sky. As a kid, I’d spend hours in the ocean every summer when we went to visit our family in Long Beach. I wouldn’t get out until my fingers were pruny, my face sunburnt. I never felt as alive, as happy as I did when splashing through the cold water, feeling the sand beneath my feet, jumping into the crash of oncoming waves, coming up for air laughing.

It’s the same this afternoon. Once again, I am one with the ocean. It’s an extension of me or I’m an extension of it. At some point, I feel the sun starting to burn my shoulders and I exit, a different person from the one who entered just a few hours ago. I rinse off and walk into town for an iced matcha, the perfect treat after a second session in the water.

Now, my body is officially spent.

___________

Back home, after an especially gentle yoga session on the lawn with an extra long savassanna, we share a beautiful dinner together. Each night, the bright-eyed chef comes out to announce what we’re having and what country our meal is vaguely based off of. Today, it’s Morocco. I spoon all sorts of dips and beautifully spiced dishes and salads onto my plate, and then I go back for seconds. We pour glasses of wine and recount our days, we learn more about each other.

Only now do I begin to realize what a beautifully golden, even complexion the Swedes have—at least these Swedes, after a few days in the sun. They look like the picture of good health, like they were reared on grass-fed meat and bread milled straight from the fields.

I’m becoming one of them—if not in skin tone, then in spirit. I can tell because, on more than one occasion today, someone has spoke to me in confident Swedish before registering the blank look on my face. Then, “Oh, sorry! I forgot you’re not Swedish.”

I am now, I reassure them. Some of the time, I even know what they’re trying to tell me.

___________

After dinner, we gather in the living room for surf analysis. Our videos from earlier are pulled up onto the screen, and the legendary Swede watches and gives us pointers.

It’s incredible, watching him watch these videos of our short, novice rides. He pauses the videos every other moment so that he can point out a tiny detail, so easy to miss—a slight change in stance, a tuck of the hips, a need to take a breath.

It feels like watching those ESPN commentators who breakdown every minor move of a football play in slow motion, except this time, I actually know what’s going on.

The commentary is as much about form and function as it is about style. Long boarding, when done right, can be graceful or cool or subtle or silly. Just because you’re a beginner, the Swede says, doesn’t mean you need to look like one. This style is different than whatever I was doing before—blacking out on the board, hoping not to die. He shows us how we might look cool in the ocean, how we might keep our cool.

Tuck the tail, push the bush is the philosophy borrowed from some legendary lady long boarder. It’s a stance I associate with girls with long, skinny legs, the ones the algorithm used to serve up to me, dancing on their boards. I don’t have long legs, but I want to surf like this. I’m determined to learn to keep my cool. And, to look cool.

___________

The video of me reveals I am not quite at the looking cool stage. I took a left that should have been a right, my pop up half a second too, spine a touch hunched over. My ego isn’t in the room; we all cheer for each other so I don’t feel embarrassed. I feel excited to get back out there tomorrow and try again.

At the end of the session, the legendary Swede plays us a surf video of one of his favorite long boarders. The point, I think, is to say surfing is a technical sport, sure, but it is also a creative expression. It can be whatever you want it to be. There are no hard and fast rules, there’s only style.

After spending more than 5 hours out on the water today, my mouth hangs open watching this video. What this surfer is doing is so difficult, so impossible, I am equal parts excited and sad. I wish I’d surfed as a kid, or at any point before 30. I wish I lived near a nice beach break. I wish I’d found these guys sooner.

___________

I’ve never found regret to be a useful emotion, nor self pity. So as I trudge up to bed, I consider the reality of my situation: I live in Brooklyn, I’m somehow still a beginner after all this time. I have a lot to learn.

Yet, there’s no denying it, I love this sport. I love this lifestyle, the way I feel after being in the water for hours on end.

And my life, at present, is still blessed with a rare degree of flexibility. I do some mental math. I can spend part of the year surfing, at least a few months, strategically timed with New York’s worst weather. I can go out to Long Island to catch some waves with my uncle on a Tuesday. I can practice my pop-ups at home, get more involved with this surf retreat. Take their trip to San Diego, Morocco. Spend next summer in Basque.

I consider my recent workout approach, my body, my abilities. I decide when I get home, I’ll trade weight training for yoga, at least for the time being. I’ll pick up running to build my stamina. And I’ll have another proper surf trip planned before the end of the year.

M

Bits and Bobs

• Excited to try this sun water from my French drugstore haul.

• Surf: it’s a cool, freakish art form.

• Already have my first baking project planned for when I get home.

And that’s all she wrote, folks! See you on day four.

What if there’s another way to do it?

I didn’t know it at the time, but the first morning here will be the only morning I wake before the group. I’ve had more time to adjust to the time change, more days between flying and landing in France. The sky is the same dusky shade it was as we began to retire last night when I creep down the stairs, past the velvet couches and massive paintings, out onto the back lawn. I meditate and journal, feeling like the kind of person who brings running shoes on vacation.

There is a quiet anticipation in the air as we shuffle into the dining room, scooping our oats into bowls, sprinkling on cardamon and almonds, spooning some sort of Swedish applesauce on top. We sip coffee and eat quickly, load into the vans, surfboards strapped on, and off we go.

____________________

There’s something you have to understand about surfing before we go on, and that is this: Surf culture is decidedly masculine. The easiest way to understand this is by taking more than one surf lesson from the same coach early on in your tenure as a surfer.

On your first lesson, the coach will stick you on a big, floaty foam board. A foam boat, if you will. Your board will be long, at least 8’0, and you’ll be pushed into a few waves. You’ll stand up, do a goofy hand position that’s meant to remind you to look where you want to go, and voila, the lesson’s over.

But you did well, you caught on fast, and so on lesson number two, the instructor will say, with a smug grin, You’re ready for a smaller board. Today, your board is 7’0, a whole foot shorter, still foam. Shorter boards go faster but make it more difficult to catch waves. Your coach will probably push you a little harder this time, and you’ll feel like, Wow, I’m that good already? Without knowing the mechanics, philosophy, or approach to surfing, you’ll inherently understand that getting a shorter board means you did something right, and that your instructor is proud of you. You got the proverbial gold star.

If you’re anything like me, you thrive under this kind of approval. And for the rest of your surf career, you’ll equate a smaller board with being a better surfer. You’ll see guys doing sharp, snappy tricks on the waves and even though it looks aggressive and sometimes a little ugly, you’ll tell yourself you aren’t a good surfer until you can shred on a potato chip. You’ll accept the boys yipping at you in the water, being screamed at for your careless mistakes, the days and days of not catching a single wave, of paddling back in with your jaw clenched, sinus cavity filled with seawater, mood in the gutter, as just part of the sport. Just the way it is.

No matter if you haven’t had fun in months, if you upended your life and moved to Costa Rica for this sport and yet, you’re catching no waves, making no progress, growing so reckless that you go out early in the morning, alone, not having had breakfast, on waves you have no business surfing solo. It’s all part of the sport, you tell yourself. The ocean is rough and the only way through is by brute force. That’s just the way it is.

But what if there was another way?

____________________

The iconic Swede tells us there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is he won’t be our instructor in the water. He’ll be catching his own waves. The good news is we have some of the best instructors in France, descendants of legendary surf blood, and he’ll still be in the water alongside us, giving us tips.

The ocean here is like no ocean I’ve known. We hardly have to paddle and there we are, in the little lineup. The waves are tiny but glassy, and I hop up on the board easily. I realize this might be the first time I don’t immediately black out on a wave. Suddenly, I’m conscious. I can feel everything I’m doing, every mistake, every victory. Not much stress.

I want to pop up quickly, to put my feet together, to stick my knees out and thrust my hips forward. I want to be a ballerina on the water, like the legendary Swede, like the others here to help us get better. I watch them in awe. They hop onto waves I don’t even see coming, waves that are hardly waves at all. They move with such an ease; the embodiment of no stress. They aren’t surfing, they’re dancing. They’re flowing. As often as I try to catch a wave, I also try to observe them.

____________________
Our day is shaped around the water, but it isn’t overly shaped. The shape is flexible, malleable depending on the mood of the group, the vibe. We stop for a giant bag of fresh baguettes on the way home, for a few bottles of wine at a sweet little French concept store that would do very well in Brooklyn. I tell the owner this and he is pleased.

When we get home, a big, nourishing brunch awaits us. Plump berries, soft scrambled eggs with tender zucchini, four types of jam, an assortment French cheeses, sliced avocado sprinkled with ruby red pomegranate seeds, thinly sliced cucumbers with heirloom tomatoes, soft croissants, those crusty baguettes.

After nearly three hours in the water, this meal feels like what I imagine eating was intended to feel like; well-deserved nourishment. I wonder if this is how my ancestors felt after a long day tilling the fields, mealtimes in response to a signal from the body: You must feed me. Food as sustenance.

____________________

Afternoons are blissfully empty, we’re free to do whatever feels right. The group scatters to the wind. Some go on a long walk, which I later learn leads to a path with wild ponies, while others gather around the pool to practice backflips, passing around bags of cheese-flavored French chips, listening to music. At this point, I require a bit of alone time. I decide to try my first reflexology treatment.

The practitioner, I learn, is a dear friend of the chateau owners, some vaguely royal French family. She’s been coming to this place as a guest of the family for years and years. She tells me about my room, which was once the room of the family’s matriarch, the countess. Each morning, she said, the countess would sit her son down for a grand breakfast, wherein they would plan that day’s grand lunch and dinner.

Each day’s task seemingly simple; orchestrate a grand meal, perhaps two. Who would be invited? What would they serve? I imagine bone china, tiny cups of port wine, a cheese and grapes course afterward, plates cleared by hired help in tucked-in shirts.

My room mate and I were right, then. We did get the best room.

____________________

As the bottoms of my salt-crusted feet are poked and prodded by this lovely woman, my mind drifts. I’m asleep, but I’m also awake. She tells me each section of the foot is connected to a part of the body. Certain points send a sharp pain shooting through my body. I ask, what region of the is that? Your neck, she says, your shoulders. Your lower back. Makes sense; I’ve been paddling all day.

It sounds unlikely, but after the treatment, I feel as physically relaxed as I would after a deep tissue massage. She tells me my left knee is weak; I injured it skateboarding three years ago. Also, my lungs need fresh air; I am asthmatic and have been suffocating in Paris for nearly a week. Shoulder and neck are tense, as always.

I’m amazed what she can decipher about my body steered only by the compass of my feet. Amazing, when you consider the simplicity of it.

____________________

If surf anchors our mornings, yoga anchors our evenings. Just as I’d forgotten what surfing does for my mind, body and soul, I’d also forgotten what yoga can do. Lately, it’s been all strength training for me, all cortisol spikes at the gym, all hard muscles and grunting men.

Our instructor, the partner of the legendary Swede, also happens to be a wonderful surfer. She was out in the water with us this morning, as I imagine she is many mornings, and so she understands, intimately, how our bodies feel. We open or chests, stretch our shoulders, release the aching paddling muscles in our arms. Here, I feel how I hope to one day feel in the water—graceful, perfectly at ease. With each stretch of the spine, my body sings.

When it’s over and we’re all lying on our backs, our faces pointe toward the sky, I am transported. It’s such a potent feeling that to recount it is to press on a bruise. It feels like an old love, like my very first month in Costa Rica as I began to discover how deep the well could run when I spent enough time in the ocean. It feels like the first time dipping into another dimension as I practiced breath work for a full hour, the first time I feel in love with someone before knowing what their body felt like.

This feeling I’m describing has always been tied to those early days in Costa Rica, inseparable from a very specific bank of memories. But here I am, feeling it again, four years later on the coast of France. It’s a reminder that a world beyond exists; beyond New York and my to do lists and my understanding of the world, beyond my friends and my dreams and my fears.

It feels like floating up in space with your feet planted firmly on the ground. It feels like a mild panic, to acknowledge how much more there is than what you decide to do, how you decide to live. There’s a definitively spiritual element to what I’m describing. Something like transcendence.

Maybe you’ve felt it before. I hope you have.

____________________

After yoga, after showering and applying a touch of makeup, we gather for dinner. We uncork the bottles of wine we purchased earlier and recount the day. We laugh together. As we eat, I tell the group about the tradition me and my best friends do back home: everyone go around and share your favorite moment from the day. I am delighted, but not surprised, when they all play along, and so thoughtfully.

Through this ritual, I discover the choose-your-own adventure style that feels wonderfully rare for a retreat, with just enough overlap in the water and mealtimes and at yoga to feel we’ve spend lots of quality time together. We discuss tomorrow’s schedule and debrief on the day’s surf. Some people decide to go into town to watch the soccer game.

As for me, I’ve watched two full soccer games on TV since being in France, which is two more soccer games than I’ve ever watched on TV in my life. My soccer quota has been fulfilled for this trip, perhaps for the year. Perhaps for a lifetime.

I slip on my weighted eye mask and say thank you, thank you, thank you to whomever is listening, and then I fall into a deep, dreamless sleep.

M

Bits and Bobs

• A very useful New York burger map—more travel media brands should be making maps like this.

• A song I can’t get out of my head this week.

• A dreamy little film that will make you be in the water.

You made it to the end, bravo! See you tomorrow.

On a frigid evening this past December, the start of my first winter back in New York since 2021, I decided to take the walk from my apartment to Trader Joe’s. My mind began to wander as it does on a long enough stroll, and I thought, I’d like to go back to Paris soon. And then, next time I go to Paris, I’d like to visit Biarritz. I’d never been, but I knew it was a surf town in France, tucked away in the Basque Country on the border of Spain, which was all the information I needed.

I got home about an hour later, my arms weighted with bags full of celery stalks and brown eggs and salmon filets. I was just about to start chopping vegetables for a soup when my phone dinged.

Which brings me here: after a week of galavanting around Paris, trying not to melt, praising American air conditioning with a renewed reverence, mentally noting the chicest of wedding looks, committing to memory every performance, every impeccable detail of the four-day affair. After missing my original train and spending two bonus days in Paris, saying goodbye to new friends who feel old and flying to the coast, then finally smelling salt water again, finally sleeping more than 3 hours a night, I’ve arrived at the chateau that will be my home for the next week, at my very first surf retreat.

I’ll be dispatching daily(ish) for the next week. Have a read with your morning coffee, if you’re so inclined. We’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming in late July.

Cheers,

My perfect day, the bliss of the unknown, and meeting the Swedes

All these years of traveling have finally taught me an important lesson: always give yourself at least two days on the front end and one on the back end. Arriving in Biarritz, I quickly realize two days won’t be enough. But there are only two sleeps until I’m due to arrive at the chateau, to the surf retreat run by two impossibly cool Swedes—presumably, attended exclusively by Swedes. I didn’t make this up; it’s what one of the founders of the surf retreat told me a month ago, when we had a call.

“We are mostly Swedes.” Wonderful, I thought. The more situations I can be in where I’m the token American, the better.

____________________

This is a surf trip, and yet this morning, I must talk myself into it. A little voice in the back of my head says: Don’t go out to a new spot alone after not surfing for nearly a year, silly girl. Have you learned nothing? Another voice says, you can do it, now let’s go. I find a cute café, order a matcha and what I thought would be an açai bowl, but is actually a smoothie, so no real food this morning. Not a good idea, the voice warns. I promise to be extra careful, attentive, to abort if it’s too difficult. I feel fear that is mostly ego, what if I forgot how this works? What if I remember how much I love this and have to recalibrate my life again to be nearer to the ocean? Can I really be a surfer and live in New York?

Then I stop thinking. I hop on the board and paddle out.

____________________

I’d forgotten what an elastic thing time becomes in the water. No watch, nothing but the sting of the sun on your skin and pruning fingertips to account for the minutes turning into hours. I’d forgotten the delicious disconnect between body and spirit, when the body signals it’s tired, ribs ache from the pressure of the board, it’s time to go back in, but the spirit is just now waking up, it begs for one more go. At some point in this tug of war, the mind enters. The adult in the room.

Sunburnt, hungry, spaghetti arms. It’s time to get out of the water.

_____________________

My skin is crusted with sand, wet swimsuit still on, hair a tangled, salty mess. This isn’t quite a Costa Rica beach town, it’s much more posh, not everyone here is only here to surf and you must wear shoes. Still. I have a few stops I’d like to make and I don’t want to go home to shower right now.

First is Maison Adam, a beautiful pastry shop whose claim to fame is baking the macarons for the wedding of King Louis XIV. The air inside smells distinctly of almonds and burnt sugar. The woman behind the counter is sweet and receptive to my broken French. She smiles warmly, adds a few free treats to my bag. I nibble a macaron en route to my next stop. It’s impeccable, more substantial than the Parisian Ladurée’s with a bit more chew and no filling inside.

I dust the crumbs off my fingertips and head into stop two, a small consignment shop so full of treasures that I immediately regret all the shopping I did in Paris. I feel like a feral animal; I fill my arms with beautiful piece after beautiful piece. Silk shorts from an old Italian designer, a delicate white Prada cardigan that reminds me of Romeo and Juliette, a black Zadig and Voltaire dress that hangs just so. I send my sister photos of a perfect vintage Celine tote, a Miu Miu belt, an exquisitely shaped Pequin-stripe Fendi bag.

To see myself in each piece, I must exit the dressing room and join the two owners, who I later learn are Veroniqué and Sophia. They do not bullshit me about what looks good and what doesn’t, and so I trust them straight away. I love these women, their perfect little shop, better than all the shops I visited in Paris by far. If the Aritiza dressing room had an inverse, this would be it.

I leave with two beautiful pieces I will treasure forever and a smidge of guilt. But mostly, bliss. The ladies gave me a 40 euro discount.

___________________

I shower and don my new outfit for dinner at Chez Albert. I have no reservation and anticipate an attitude based on the Google reviews, but the older French gentleman is sympathetic to me. Not for the first time, I consider how the French have gotten an unfair rep as the *unfriendly* Europeans. The man tucks me into a back table and I observe the scene around me—lots of sunburnt families, kids on iPads, adults sharing bottles of wine. After the wedding weekend chaos, I am perfectly content to sit in silence for a moment, chasing each fresh, briny oyster with a small sip of Pellegrino.

I only wish for company the moment I see the waiter come out carrying an exquisite, three-tiered seafood tower. I wonder whether I could consume the tower’s contents myself. I feel I could, but I’ve already ordered my entree.

After dinner, I take a long, winding walk, parking on a bench overlooking the beach just in time for sunset. This part reminds me of Costa Rica; everyone apart but together for this fleeting evening ritual. If you’re in a place with one worth seeing, sunset is intrinsically communal. Maybe because it’s so beautiful, and it’s free.

I stare so hard at the horizon that I finally see the elusive flash of emerald green just after the sun goes down. I’ve been looking for it for years.

____________________

Today, I’m due to arrive at the chateau. It feels fitting, exactly halfway through the year, that I will be marking two things off of my annual wishlist: attending my first surf retreat and spending (just under) a month of summer in Europe. My Uber picks me up and we drive 30 minutes in total silence. I want to suggest music, but I don’t have the words in French, and I have no service.

Eventually, we reach the end of the main road. My driver turns to me with question in his eyes. I nod him on, off onto a long, winding stone path heavily wooded on either side. This goes on for some time. I hope I have not led this sweet driver astray.

Then we reach a clearing, and the chateau comes into view.

Fittingly, I am the last to arrive. We gather outside and discuss what’s to come, led by the Swedish founder, who I can already tell is a surf legend. Most of the group—mostly Swedes, a few Danes, an Irish girl—are first-time surfers. I find myself in the rare position of being one of the more experienced of the bunch.

We discuss approach. style, and it is very apparent I am no longer in snappy shortboard Costa Rica any longer. The cool Swede talks about style, what looks good, what feels good. Out here, it’s all about cruising cool. Feet together, hips forward, no stress. This is repeated over and over: No stress paddling. No stress getting on a wave. No stress.

I’ve never not been stressed while surfing, not once. But I’m keen on the idea.

We share a beautiful dinner under the sky, which remains bright long into the night. We chat, we laugh, we become fast friends. After dinner, we creep between floors in a small, giggling pack, peeking into each room, pointing out the haunting Victorian paintings, marveling at the luxe soaking tubs and the vast collection of antiques. I think, this would be a great place to play a very spooky prank on someone. Maybe in a few days, I will.

My roommate and I—Swedish, as you might have gathered—feel like sisters already. She invites me to Stockholm, I invite her to New York. We talk around half naked and talk about swapping clothes. When I realize I’ve left my eye mask in Paris, she lends me a spare. Our room, we decide, is the most opulent. It’s called The Countess Room.

I pull on the eye mask and the world goes black. We go to bed early. I know I will sleep hard. Tomorrow, early morning, we surf.

M

Bits and Bobs

• The playlist I’ve been listening to on repeat since arriving in France.

• The insane engagement music video of the aforementioned Parisian wedding—it was projected into the ceiling at the party.

• A perfect passage from the novel I’m currently reading. P2:

  

Thanks for reading along. See you on the other side.

A Note From the Editor

Earlier this year, a handful of my friends and I were splayed out around a top-floor apartment in Park Slope, discussing the previous month’s book club pick, a quirky Swedish novel about a group of people held hostage during an apartment viewing. Two of the characters, an older, retired couple, framed their lives together as a series of projects. She felt closer to him through their shared projects, feel closer to him, while he found her boring on her own, so the projects worked as a de facto mechanism for making their existence together less dull. Different POVs, same net-positive effect on their relationship.

The passage spurred a gentle debate about the merits of the shared project. Is the shared project a product of our perpetually busy, productive lives—we can’t just exist together, we must do together—and thus, not inherently enriching or romantic? Or, are shared projects crucial to a happy union, the mechanism by which a relationship might transcend the ordinariness of our predictable, day-to-day existence?

I’m a firm believer in the power of the shared project and its close cousin, the tradition. My siblings loved to rag on me growing up about my obsession with creating traditions. We would do something once—take the grueling, two-day drive from Florida to New York to visit our grandmother, play a late-night game of Dare in which we all had to do one outlandish task decided by the group, kick off movie night with a long, elaborate game of pulling out and pushing in DVDs to choose the evening’s film —and I’d rush to proclaim it a New Tradition. They would say that not everything could be a tradition. I would say, why not? I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now it’s clear to me what I was clinging to with these proposed traditions: a promise of consistency, a shared closeness that doesn’t passively dwindle at the hand of life’s unyielding pace.

In embarking on a shared project or establishing a tradition, you say: I care about you. Let’s learn something together, let’s create, let’s prioritize this relationship despite soccer practice and dance competition and grocery shopping and scrolling and flossing and, and, and. For those people who are part of your daily life, the commitment acts as a side door, leading you out of the maze of ordinary life and into someplace different—more playful, more whimsical, very likely more fun. For those you don’t get to see often because of location or busy schedules, the commitment becomes a tether, something like relationship insurance. Even if you aren’t a part of one another’s daily lives, at least you have this, and this is enough to buoy you through the time you’ll spend apart.

Being one of seven siblings who have lived away from family my entire adult life, I’ve become something of a connoisseur of these types of engagements, and I can attest to their effectiveness. Here are a few that I’ve either done, heard about, or want to do.

Sister’s Cooking Club: I bought my sister an annual New York Times Cooking subscription last year for Christmas and thought up this idea to sweeten the gift. It’s been a joy for my two older sisters and me ever since. Each week, one of us chooses a recipe and sends it out to the group. We can make the recipe at any point during the week; we just have to send each other a voice note review of the dish afterward. Sometimes, these voice notes feature a rogue opinion from my niece or nephew about the dish, which always makes me smile. If you can pick a dish the kids and the adults liked, you’ve got a home run.

• The Pros: More inspired, delicious meals, a low-stakes, everybody-wins weekly bonding moment, getting to try dishes you wouldn’t pick out yourself.

• How to Start Your Own: First, choose your configuration of people—I imagine doing this with grandparents would be super sweet. Next, choose your recipe container. I suggest New York Times Cooking, but a single cookbook would work just as well. It helps to kick things off if you gift someone in your group the cookbook / cooking app, etc., along with the Cooking Club proposal.

The Annual Shared-Pot Surprise Vacation: This isn’t my own practice, but a date once told me about it, and I love the idea. A group of about 6 friends contribute a fixed amount of money to a dedicated trip bank account at the start of each year—call is $1k each, so we have something to work with. On any given year, two of the six friends are paired up to plan the vacation. The group agrees on a date, and then the selected duo does everything else, from choosing a location to booking hotels, flights, and excursions using the shared pot of money. The duo sends the group a packing list in the weeks leading up to the trip, but otherwise, it’s a total surprise for the majority of the group. The next year, another duo is in charge.

• The Pros: A dreamy surprise trip where everything’s taken care of, a fun way to see the world, the gentle competitive spirit that surely entices each member of the group to try to one-up last year’s vacation.

• How to Start Your Own: It may be worth noting that the person who told me about this was European, as were his friends—this feels like a harder sell for the under-vacationed American set. Still, it’s possible! Propose the idea to a small group of your most-likely-to-travel friends, maybe as a one-off to start, and see how it goes. You could also limit the trips to domestic only, which would be a fun way to explore those many places you haven’t yet gotten around to in your home country while easing logistics.

The Siblings Book: I have six siblings—four older, two younger. All of the older ones have spouses and 1-4 children, meaning life is very busy and full for all of us. At some point, I realized I couldn’t recall when my siblings and I had gotten together, just us. It seemed unlikely to happen anytime in the near future, which made me consider how else we might connect on a more intimate level, like how we did when we were living under the same roof. I went out and bought a composition notebook, wrote a few pages, including some simple rules (more important rule: for our eyes only) and a proposed order of who passes the book on to whom. We could write as little or as much as we wanted, I said, so long as we kept the thing going.

• The Pros: A surprisingly poignant space to meet other sides of the people you know and love outside of the confines of your current lives, a fun way to get something in the mail when you least expect it.

• How to Start Your Own: This one’s super easy because you don’t have to get any buy-in before starting. Low lift, low expectations. Buy a notebook, write a little something by way of guidelines and who should send it to whom, and then take a trip to the post office and wait, wait to see if you ever get the book mailed back. This would work well for a group of childhood friends, camp friends, or college friends.

Bi-Weekly Doc Club: I’ve been a proud book club member for nearly a decade now (!), and discussing books with a group of intelligent women on a monthly basis has been enriching on all levels—mind, relationship, and spirit. More recently, a few of my film friends and I started a bi-weekly documentary club. Same premise as book club, with each person in charge of picking a new film every time we meet, followed by a discussion and dinner. It’s a newer commitment, but I’m already hooked. I left our first meeting feeling energized, inspired, and very grateful to know such thoughtful, creative people.

• The Pros: Standing commitment to your craft and your people, turns you into a more critical viewer, the opportunity to watch things you probably would’ve otherwise missed.

• How to Start Your Own: This can be a bi-weekly anything club, but ideally, it’s something you love or want more of in your life. Could be books, films, or magazine articles. Could also be reality shows (I would gladly join a Love Island USA club in the summer), crocheting, volunteering, taking film photos, whatever. You could even do a coffee shop club where you try a new local coffee shop every other week! Find some people who are down for the commitment and propose the idea. You’ll be surprised how willing people are to meet up in service of building community.

Multi-Gen Neighborhood Dessert and Discuss. I haven’t started this yet, but I’m dreaming of trying it in the fall, when everyone’s back home nesting. In my perfect version of this meet up, which might be a monthly thing or just an every so often thing, we meet at my home for dessert and tea. The crowd is women from my neighborhood of all different ages. I want a serious range, from 80 to 18. There would be around 8 of us, each from a different generation, and we’d pick a broad topic to discuss—aging, love, family traditions, whatever. I imagine we’d start by going around, each sharing a story and then letting the conversation free-flow from there.

• The Pros: Getting to know your neighbors, feeling more plugged in to your community, the chance to try out new desserts and hear perspectives from people of all different ages.

• How to Start Your Own: My plan for starting this is to put out a call on my local neighborhood Facebook group, inviting women who are interested to send me a message. If your neighborhood is more cohesive, you can find your crew by simply asking around. The real key here is trying to keep the neighbor circle wide and diverse rather than sticking to people you already know well.

Annual Escape-Your-Least-Favorite-Holiday Trip: Without ever officially proclaiming this as a shared tradition, it has become one amongst a handful of my New York friends. I’ve long said the worst two holidays are the Fourth of July and New Year’s. Fireworks are loud, New York in peak summer makes me feel claustrophobic; New Year’s parties are a whole thing you’ve got to be in the mood for. Knowing how I feel about these holidays, I’ve made it a point to be out of town for both of them. Fourth of July is typically spent abroad, but New Years has become something of a local tradition. After all the stress and travel of the holidays, my friends and I will often book a sweet, cozy house upstate and do a little trip together. One or two good dinner reservations are all we plan for. Otherwise, it’s big, shared meals at home, board games, long walks, and good wine. The perfect way to end, and begin, a year in my book.

• The Pros: Built-in plans for high-pressure holidays, a low-key trip, a good reason to get away.

• How to Start Your Own: This one’s as easy as finding your fellow haters. Not a fan of Christmas? Enlist a fellow Grinch and go somewhere warm. Hate dressing up for Halloween? Head out to a place where Halloween isn’t even a thing- no need to pack a costume or feel any FOMO. This would be fun to do with another person, but you could just as easily enjoy the trip solo.

_____

Cheers, my dears, and as always, thanks for reading. I’d love to hear any ongoing projects or traditions you have—I’m always in the market for new ones. Not included in this essay: a mutual aid event my friends and I threw a few years back, making a film with an all-friends crew, and hiring a friend as your interior designer on a brand new, empty apartment. All delightful.

This weekend, I’m going to see a one-woman comedy show, do some shopping for an upcoming wedding in Paris, and get a much needed massage. Have a wonderful weekend! Eat a piece of pizza, kiss an animal on the face, see how many jump ropes you can do in a row.

Share

Three Pieces of Content Worth Consuming

1. Something Shorter to Read: On The Difference Between Rest and Idleness. This article put into words something that has been teetering around in the back corners or my mind for the last few weeks, but that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Being in New York again makes me eat, sleep, and breathe a to-do list and the cycle becomes push- crash- rest. This article made me realize what I’m craving isn’t rest, but idle time. It’s worth a read to establish that difference in your mind.

2. Something to Watch: Petite Fille. This was my French friend’s first pic for the aforementioned doc club, and it was an absolute hit. This is a filmmaking feat in so many ways. For one, it’s incredibly cinematic for a documentary—the use of score, the beauty of the shots, and the consistent suspense you feel as a viewer, dying to know what’ll happen. It’s a story that humanizes a hot-button issue that many people have strong opinions about, but no real first or even second-hand experience with. Very well worth a watch and discussion, no matter what your beliefs about the situation are beforehand.

3. Something Longer to Read: Yesteryear, A Novel. I’d say I’m about 70% literary snob, and that snobbishness made me feel deeply skeptical about this book—so much so that I went to the bookstore to get it, picked it up, and put it back down. A few days later, I went back and bought the book, and I’m so glad I did. This is a thick, plot-heavy novel and a page-turner, but also cleverly constructed, well-written, and bitingly funny. A Ballerina Farm-type trad wife wakes up in the 1800s, where she must be a literal traditional wife. She isn’t sure how she got there or why; her kids sort of like hers, but not quite; same for her husband. I’m almost done, and I already know I’ll be so sad when this book is over. Absolutely worth the read.

One Good Question

I love this question. You could ask it to anyone and hear a great story.

Tell me about one person you met in the wild who you never spoke to again, but who you’ll never forget.

**Bonus Content** (Girl’s Girl)

When your oldest best friend writes a banger about the girls who bullied you in middle school, you’ve gotta get in on the action We had so much fun with this shoot.

Also, the kind of news I need, curious about this allegedly miraculous skincare device, while this one is currently in my cart, low key dying for a hotdog, the anatomy of a Knicks front row, I don’t need these but I need these, can I get an amen, and a good trick for remembering people’s names.

A Quote From A Book You Should Read:

“Natalie’s like a border collie, my mother used to say to the other women at church. She needs a project, otherwise she starts chewing the cabinet corners.”

-Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

A Note From the Editor

The first thing to know is that you can be alive without being alive. You’re in the grocery store and you realize it’s your third time wandering down the bread aisle, past the Wonder Bread and the challah, the baguettes. What did you come here for?

You’re walking down the street thinking about a conversation you had yesterday, so lost in thought that you don’t hear your name called out until you’re a few steps past. You have to turn around and still, it takes you a beat to recognize the face, a dear friend you blazed right past. I was waving to you from, like, ten feet away, they say. You were in the zone.

You’re sitting at your work-from-home desk staring at your laptop. Your work is interrupted by a loud, grumbling demand, your stomach signaling that you are, in fact, alive, and your body needs nourishment. It’s the first time you’ve come up for air since the morning. As you get up to make yourself a snack, you notice the sun shining through the window. Recall there is life outside of your box.

_________

The German girls know how to relax. I remember this from the last time we convened here, at this enchanting house, a converted monastery, in Orvieto. Back then, we were outnumbered, three Americans to seven Germans, give or take. Now, four years have passed, and our group has slightly reconfigured—four Americans to three Germans.

We arrive at various times, frazzled and sweaty and excited. We go to the grocery store in groups, picking up cartons of strawberries and bright red cherry tomatoes, pounds of salsiccia, boxes of pasta in various shapes, packages of Baci, classic and caramel, bags of potato chips large enough to feed an extended family, cartons of oat milk and lactose-free milk, containers of frutti di mare, boxes of muesli. Endless produce, artichokes and lemons, carrots and cherries.

We hug, we marvel, we catch up. We are tentative, at first, treading lightly over the time that has passed. It could be the opening scene of a film whose logline reads:
After four years apart, a group of international friends come together for a week long vacation in Italy, revealing all the ways life can come undone in adulthood.

It isn’t a sad movie, but the logline must pull you, the viewer, in.

_________

The remit for this trip is simple: to relax. We have nothing much to do, nowhere to be, there is nothing we must see because we’ve seen it all before. This, I discover, is the beauty of returning to a place. The scarcity of missing out is gone; the electric buzz of the first date replaced by the calm familiarity of the second.

Days take on a rhythm. The house awakens slowly each morning, at its own pace. One by one, we rise from our beds, pad downstairs and out to the front lawn. The willow tree is still there, never fully still, but the fig tree is now gone. We survey the morning scene. Probably, one or two friends have already settled in. The earliest risers are draped on chaise lounges, tucked into their thick books, lost in various worlds—a WASPY divorce, a time-traveling trad wife, a quartet of sisters too close for their own good.

There might be some espresso leftover in the Bialetti, but if not, one of us will put on another pot. Hours will be spent this way, going in and out of the kitchen, sipping coffees and nibbling warm croissants, staring into the sun, reading books with blankets draped over our legs.

Afternoons follow the same indolent informality. Maybe we’ll have a big, late breakfast together, maybe we won’t. Some of us will work in what we call the Wifi Lounge, which is really just the living room. It’s the only place in the house with consistent service, which suits me just fine. Some of us will go on long, winding walks through the vineyards. We’ll paint, pick herbs from the garden, lay in the sun. We’ll take naps, thirty minutes or three hours, intermittently check our phones, snack consistently and without abandon.

At some point, around 4pm or 5pm, one of the Germans will say: Spritz? There is only one right answer. We accept our beverages, Campari or Aperol clinking with ice, whether or not we’ve finished our work. One by one, laptops are slammed shut, book pages are dog-eared, and we convene near the pool. Someone pulls out a deck of cards and we’re playing a game, we’re snacking again, we’re the perfect level of tipsy, the level that can never last as long as we hope it will. We climb into the hot tub and talk about our earliest crushes, our latest heartbreaks, our jobs, our fears.

Every evening, the Germans teach us various phrases. We don’t want practical; we want silly idioms, akin to “Piece of cake.” We turn these phrases into songs to better acquaint us with their unfamiliar syllables. We learn there’s a phrase that means “Hooray, the work day is over!” I imagine it like TGIF, but less corny.

It becomes our call and response during the evening Spritz hour: Feierabend, wie das duftet! Something like, nothing smells as good as the end of the workday. The Americans sing it in unison, the Germans chuckle.

_________

The weather is unreliable. One day, it’s sunny and warm, the next, cold and rainy. It doesn’t matter; rainy days are cozy. It isn’t the dead of summer, and so it isn’t that hot. The first time I am invited to jump into the freezing cold swimming pool, I am hesitant, knowing there will be no sun to warm my bones when I exit the water.

One German and one American are jumping in. They’re old friends, they’re the connection point of this entire group; two people with a certain zeal for life. They’re always saying yes, yes and, always dreaming up things to do, making up games and activities, preparing meals that feel celebratory and are consistently, mindbogglingly outstanding, without any stress or forced formality. They are the hosts you want to visit, the friends you know you’re lucky to have. And they are fun.

I don’t give myself enough time to hesitate, for I know I will talk myself out of it if I wait. Instead, I jump in the pool, gasping for air as my head emerges from the surface of the water. It’s freezing. My body is jolted out of whatever resting state it had been in. We all three laugh like banshees, like mad witches, like three old pals.

There is no doubt about it now, limbs flailing around for warmth, head dunking under and up: I am alive.

_________

The next afternoon, I’m working on an article, disengaged from the dreamy Italian landscape surrounding me and fully immersed in the world of my laptop: a restaurant in Venice Beach that I used to frequent, a Michelin-starred brewery in Chicago. A few girls congregate in the Wifi Lounge. They’re playing Sushi Go. Do I want to play?

No is my first instinct, automatic, because technically, I have work to do. Again, I don’t give myself the time to consider. I snap my laptop closed and join the game. As we stack our Puddings and pair our Sashimi with Wasabi round after round, the space between my eyebrows starts to relax. We laugh and gossip and strategize; I get annoyed when I lose, badly. After a few rounds, I forget about the article, which isn’t even due today. We venture outside for sunset.

_________

Another time, we play with the idea of sleeping outside. We did it last time, but it was proper summer then, much warmer with guaranteed sun. It is quickly clear that only a few of us are interested in the adventure, and we are mostly lukewarm about the idea. We decide to do it.

After dinner, four of us—two Germans, two Americans—work in tandem, pulling our mattresses down the stone steps, setting them up in one long line right at the edge of the pool. We bring down loads of duvets and pillows and quilts. We discuss our contingency plan, in case of rain, and keep a light on so we can navigate to the nearest bathroom in the middle of the night. The stars are bright.

Once settled, we squeal in delight. I have never been cozier, my face cooled by the evening air, my body enveloped in a cocoon. At some point in the night, I wake to gentle patters of rain on my face. I look to my left, to my right, and my friends are still there, tucked snugly into their makeshift beds despite our contingency plan. I stay, too.

We wake with the sun, a little damp and utterly peaceful. We stay out there all morning, reading our books, drinking our coffee.

_________

On our only Saturday together, we take out a boat on the lake. It’s windy and no one is out but us. We sail past a craggy cliff, throw our anchor into the water and sip wine from paper cups. A large boat passes us with an opera singer performing on its deck, passengers watching intently. The moment is reverent. We all quiet down to listen.

We all lay together in the back of the boat, limbs all tangled. At a point that feels, to me, too soon, the token American and German decide it’s time to swim. They look to me. I have become the most likely to join their antics, which pleases me, and now my body goes into its new, temporary autopilot: yes.

We dive in one by one, coming up gasping, freezing, giggling. This time, the rest of the Americans join in, too. We swim in circles around the boat, giggling like school girls, squinty-smiling for photos, water in our eyes. I stay in even after everyone gets out, committing the coolness of the water, and the jubilance that floods my body, to memory.

_________

I wake up one morning with a patter of anxiety stronger than I’d like to admit. There’s talk or work, of freelance life, of stresses from back home, and the talk has seeped into my psyche. I think: I should spend most of today on my laptop. But the sun is shining, so I decide to read first.

Around noon, an elaborate breakfast is set outside. We share pancakes and listen to music. Later, at that same table, we each paint a vase on a piece of cardboard. We go on a flower walk, winding along the same path I’d been walking each morning since our arrival. This time, though, the walk has a different quality. We’re on a hunt, searching for bright red poppies, delicate yellow wildflowers, attractive stalks of green.

Each time we find a perfect flower, we pick it out of the ground, weaving its stem through one of the tiny holes we poked into our respective cardboard vases. I notice every poppy I pick is filled with plump, beautiful bugs. I hadn’t noticed these bugs before. We are children again, making arts and crafts, noticing our surroundings. We compare our creations.

That evening, at a comically late hour following our 11pm dinner time, we play the bowl game. We scribble down references to our learned German phrases, to our flower walk, to our outdoor sleepovers. We laugh and laugh and forget what came before.

_________

By the end of it, I learn to say yes, yes, and. I jump in the pool, accept the ice cream cone, go on the walk, play the game. I come to realize there are two types of people—it isn’t a fixed state, but it is a state—people who say no, and people who say yes.

This, I think, is their secret, the token German and American: they engage constantly, always. It’s never too ordinary a day to end with an impromptu drive from Brooklyn to the beach to watch the sunset. It’s never too complicated to take a trip with friends, even if one friend just had a baby, even if there isn’t endless money to spend. There doesn’t need to be a reason to set the table for a fancy brunch, to cook butter chicken for dinner, to go see a movie.

I vow to become more like this, to adopt a jump-in-the-pool philosophy. even if the more occasionally dulled, adult me sometimes counters, It’s not worth the hassle, wet swimsuit, things to do.

_________

Back home, I ride the wave of the good side of jet lag. My body wakes me around 5:30AM, and I don’t think before brushing my teeth, slipping on my sneakers, and walking to the park.

It’s near empty at this hour, almost spooky if it wasn’t so peaceful. The birds are waking up. I take the wooded path, and soon, I forget I’m even in Brooklyn. Everything is so green. I decide to park under a large, old tree, and I meditate there instead of on my living room floor. When I open my eyes, I’m in a delicious daze. I see two blue jays on my walk home.

I light a small beeswax candle a sweet friend gifted me from Mexico City. She said they’re good for keeping time, so I open a Google Doc and decide to creative write until the candle burns out. It’s been a while since I’ve written like this, for no real reason, inhabiting a private world created by my mind. I get lost in it and am surprised when I smell the birthday party scent of the candle burning out. I move through a module of a spiritual personal development course. I feel ready for what it’s telling me, excited to practice what I’m learning.

Later, I check the clock: 11AM. I’m shocked. How could it be so early? My day has already been so full, so rich. I’m biking to a friends house later and am awed by the greenness of the trees, the sweetness in the early summer air. I am alive.

_________

Cheers, my dears, and as always, thanks for reading. I hope you have a wonderful, warm weekend. Pick up a bunch of seasonal produce at a farmers market and let your finds dictate your menu, throw a frisbee in the park, buy tickets to an improv show.

Share

Three Recs

1. Something to Read: The Life and Times of an American Teen. I finally did it: I parked at a coffee shop, brought my physical copy of the New Yorker, and chose one story to read. I’m so glad it was this one, I was hooked within the first paragraph. An insanely eloquent, observant journalist is immersed in the world of Mira, a preteen living in SF. What follows is a time machine to that familiar world of early adolescence and a spaceship to a place none of us has ever been. Well worth a read.

2. Something to Watch: Obsession (In Theatres). Do yourself a favor and go buy a ticket to see this movie, in theatres, stat. This was the best scary movie I’ve seen in years; it was the best theatre-going experience I’ve had in recent memory. The movie is funny, deeply disturbing, and terrifying at times. My brother and I talked about it for days after. I was delighted to learn the writer/director, Curry Barker, is a 26-year-old novice filmmaker who managed to make this masterpiece in 20 shooting days with an under $1mil budget. I’m excited to watch his found footage horror film next.

3. Something to Make: Sausage with Chard and Rhubarb: At the farmers market last weekend, I was enticed by the long, bright stalks of rhubarb, a veggie that has heretofore intimidated me because I thought it was poisonous raw. I also picked up some beautiful rainbow chard from the market, so I decided to make this for dinner. Rather than prepackaged sausages I’d normally get, I picked up some fresh sausage from the meat counter and Union Market, and, wow, I hadn’t been living before. The dinner was light and rich, deeply flavorful, pleasingly seasonal.
   
   And/Or Rhubarb Cake: My little brother was visiting a few days later. I had some leftover rhubarb to put to work, and we’re both sugar monsters, so a treat was in order. The cake was perfect as is. So moist, a little crunch, a hint of brightness from the orange zest. It was gone in two days. Free idea: have a dinner party themed around one type of produce, i.e. rhubarb, and go off.

One Good Question

A simple one you could ask anyone! Must be paired with an adequately engaged follow up question:

At what time of day do you feel most alive?

And, to follow up, how do you use that time for yourself?

**Bonus Content** (A Sweet Homage to Italy)

When your friends turn your vacation into a perfect little vignette.

Plus, if you’re un NYC this weekend, see this show before it closes, I want to go to a party at this house, love that she's still at it, a good summer sneaker, and more fun than it sounds.

A Quote From A Book You Should Read:

“Sylvie had read somewhere that the more times a story was told, the less accurate it became. Humans were prone to exaggeration; they leaned away from the parts of the narrative they found boring and leaned into the exciting spots. Details and timelines changed over years of repetition. The story became more myth and less true.”

-Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

Traveling back, back, back in time
(shoot day 3 of 4)

I go to bed at 11pm the night before what feels like my first very serious shoot day. I wake up tired, hoping I still have at least 30 minutes before my alarm goes off. I check my phone. It is just past midnight. This happens again at 2am, 3am, 3:45am. It’s something like that anticipation the night before an early morning flight as an adult, or Christmas as a kid. Except this time, I’m pretty what’s waking me is more nerves than gleeful anticipation.

On the drive to meet my DP for coffee, I take deep breaths. I haven’t met him in person yet; he was one of the three Orlando-based DP’s I found and interviewed for the project. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m paying him for a service, that I don’t have to worry about what he thinks about my sister, my parents’ house, my directing. I also keep reminding myself that, to a stranger, you are only ever what you present as. Today, I would present as Capable, Calm Director.

On the schedule today, two major, high-stakes stops:

• An interview with Kaitlin’s (and my) old dance teacher, Miss Sunny. Kaitlin and I had very separate, albeit equally significant, relationships with Sunny. I was a competitive dancer and she was my high-standards, admittedly intimidating coach. At some point in high school, I quit the competitive team. For Kaitlin, she was an anchor teacher, a mother figure. Long after I graduated high school, ran from Kissimmee and never looked back, Kaitlin was still there, taking Miss Sunny’s level one classes. At 22, she finally quit dance—she was tired, presumptively, of being stuck in Groundhog Day with a bunch of little kids, never progressing.

  

  How do you tell a story without telling the whole story? How do you tell the whole story without hurting someone, without digging up parts of the past that might be better left untouched? These are questions I’ve been grappling with as I attempt to parse out this story. What details are important to me, what details are important to the film, and how much overlap is there between the two?
  
  The intent is to discover what Kaitlin wants out of life and help her get it, but to make that sort of discovery for someone who cannot speak, who has never been asked the question, “What do you want?” requires looking back, gathering critical context from the people who know her best, who were around her during those years when I wasn’t, when her speech and social skills starts to rapidly regress. Sunny is one of those people.
  
  At one point in the interview, I asked a question I could see she didn’t want to answer. I watched the footage back; her eyes searched mine, her expression pained.
  
  “Are you sure you want me to answer that?” she asks me.
  
  You don’t hear my reply, but off camera, I nod. I want to hear what she has to say, whether it lines up with my perception, though I know what happened already.

• Adam, my DP, coming to my parents house. This was probably the single biggest fear I had about this entire shoot. I was nervous to return to the house, sure, but I knew what to expect, despite having been gone for so long. Bringing a stranger into the house was something else. He would come in, and he would see a part of my past that I’ve spent my adulthood carefully concealing. Or at the very least, turning away from.
  
  How do you feel about your parents’ house? Does the state of it have any bearing on your adult self? I sometimes wonder if I had a traditional family of my own at this point, whether the weight I feel around that house would be lifted, because I would have replaced the core example of home with something else.
  
  I’ve made many homes in my adult life, all of which I’ve loved and felt proud of. Yet, there is something to the solitary home configuration versus the family-unit type of home. Especially when you come from a more traditional background.

  

  Adam arrived I the house. I did not implode.
  
  I wanted Kaitlin to feel comfortable with him as soon as possible, seeing as we only had 1.5 days left to shoot. I instructed her to give him a tour around the house while I hung back and watched on an iPad.
  
  She was thorough. She showed him everything and did some mansplaining: This is a neck pillow for a plane, she said, lifting the pillow above her head and then sliding it down on her neck to demonstrate. This is the refrigerator, this is juice, and this is a schedule for the gym. This is the bathroom, this is the couch.

  

  

  “Can you sit on the couch?” Adam asked her, eyeing a potential shot.

  
  “Not yet,” she said. There’s no directing the director.
  _________________

  The interview that wasn’t
  (shoot day 4 of 4)

  By the final day, I was utterly exhausted. physically, emotionally.
  
  We started at the Lakefront, a scenic walk Kaitlin takes with my parents every Thursday and the occasional Saturday. I’d scoped this walk already, so I knew the shots I wanted to get. It was a beautiful day, and a walk that reminded me of Florida’s appeal. We saw two gators, four cranes, five bunnies, and a family of ducks with 16 ducklings.

  

  Back at home. The Price is Right. Kaitlin lost and wasn’t willing to admit it; she kept taking the Burger king crown off of my dad, the rightful winner. I was itchy, irritable, the afternoon not going as I’d envisioned. I also knew this would be the case. There’s not a lot going on at the house, but having a DP there made me feel like I needed to manufacture more action to get more shots. I resisted the urge, though it made me antsy.

  
  Adam and I went to Panera Bread for lunch. It looked like a musty old chain hotel inside, lots of browns and patterns. Dim overhead lighting. Panera of my teen memories it was not.
  
  The main event of the afternoon was an interview with my mom. It lasted nearly two hours. In my mind, I retained a poker face. Just the interviewer, not the daughter with skin in the game. At several points, we discussed her death in detail. She spoke about how all she wanted when she was gone was for her children to remain close. She hypothesized about what might happen between all of us, citing potential chasms, and I had this strange, out-of-body sensation, like I was sitting in the interviewer chair in that upstairs hallway of my parents’ house in April of 2026, but also, like I was somewhere in the future, my mom no longer around, watching her give us instructions about how to live, after.

  
  My takeaway: the closer you are to the subject, the harder the interview will be. I didn’t get the emotional depth from the interview that I was hoping for. Maybe I didn’t ask the right questions. But it was something. It was a start.

Thanks for reading along these last few days. My one link for you: a cool, limited run immersive show in New York.

Faux transcendance
(shoot day 1 of 4)

On our first shoot day, I arrive at my parents’ house just in time to witness a daily fixture in my little sister Kaitlin’s schedule: The Price Is Right. Every day for the past five-plus years, Kaitlin has spent 11am to noon watching the show with my mom and dad. The intention of this first shoot was to document her life as it is now—a requisite first step, anthropological research—in order to establish a “before”.

I say that from a standpoint of some projection, you must understand. A before implies an after, which implies that I carry an assumption that Kaitlin’s life as it stands needs something more. More richness, more substance. more activity. I do assume that, but I assume a lot of things.

I needed this first shoot to remove myself from the equation, to pack away my assumptions and judgments. I told myself it wasn’t about me, that whatever feelings that might spring up, being back in the house I grew up in after so many years away, were irrelevant to the shoot. I was here to observe. A neutral party, bearing witness.

But does it ever really work that way?

Of course, I was getting tugged along a Lazy River of complicated feelings coming into the day. I meditated that morning, and then I prayed on my knees. Dear God, I said, please let me leave my ego outside the door of that house. It’s the only way I can do it. To tell a story about a person you love most in this world—a person who is vulnerable, who can’t really advocate for herself—as your first big project, in a field you’ve dreamt of entering for more years than you can count on one hand, was never going to be frictionless. I knew that. I also know, myself, my tendency to go straight to a thousand, for better or for worse.

I can handle anything, I said. I’ve handled situations much harder than this, many of which happened right here in this house. It’s only nerves, I said. Nothing bad can happen. Nothing bad can happen.

Kaitlin’s routine on Mondays is as follows:

5:30am- Wakeup
6:30am-10am- Volunteer at Give Kids the World Village with our mom. She usually busses tables, but sometimes she requests to work the fruit station.
10:30am-11am- She comes home, my dad makes her an egg, ham, and cheese sandwich on untoasted bread. He calls it a “World Famous,” and he made one for me, too. Would be better with toasted bread, but it’s still good. She eats it alone at the table.
11am-12pm- Kaitlin, my mom, and dad watch The Price is Right. During the Showcase Showdown, my dad and Kaitlin each have their dedicated player. Dad’s on the left, Kaitlin’s on the right. One loses, one wins, gloating ensues. Kaitlin is not a good loser.
12:15pm-1:30pm- Weekly grocery trip. Most things are repeat buys: Top Ramen for my mom, cucumber for my dad’s middle-of-the-night veggie and Swiss sandwich, Eggo’s for Kaitlin, ingredients for the World Famous. Kaitlin gets popcorn chicken, which she has for lunch every Tuesday.
4pm- Kaitlin showers in one upstairs bathroom, goes to the other upstairs bathroom to do her skincare, then goes to the downstairs bathroom to use it. The whole affair takes north of an hour. Then she eats dinner. By then, my parents had already eaten.

Between those fixed schedule points, not much happens. Kaitlin might color. She’ll certainly take a long nap. She might be on her phone or watching iCarly or Barney. She used to love Barney as a little girl and started watching it again sometime around COVID.

All things considered, day one went well. I drove back to my Airbnb feeling zen. Feeling, if I’m honest, no emotion at all. This is healing, I thought. I have transcended my past. I filmed solo all day. I shed not one tear, didn’t let my mind linger on any ghosts haunting the hallways.

I went to bed not smug, but somewhere near it.

_________________

And then, the emotional crash
(shoot day 2 of 4)

On day two, I woke up tired after only 6 hours of sleep and with not enough time to meditate. I got a matcha at Starbucks on the way to my parents’ house. My plan was to get there before Kaitlin woke up, to film her morning routine. When I was about five minutes out, I got my daily ”Good morning” text from her. I was already late.

Tuesday, I knew, was Zumba. I was excited to witness this fixture of Kaitlin’s week—she goes Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and it’s really the only regular interaction she had with adults outside of our family, outside of her Monday volunteer hours. Kaitlin grew up dancing. We went to the same studio. She always loved the stage, loved to perform, loved to move.

It may sound obvious, considering the context, that I had had certain expectations for the Zumba class. I didn’t know I had them until the class was over, and Kaitlin was rushing out the door without making eye contact with anyone, without saying goodbye to the people she referred to, at home, as her friends.

For the record, several people in the class did love her. They told me as much. Asked if I was her sister, said she comes every week, multiple times a week, she’s so dedicated. One of the teachers gifted her a gym bag with the word “ZUMBA” embossed on the front. I never doubted people loved my sister. It was the depth of her interactions with them that made my heart ache, ever so slightly. I wished for her to feel comfortable with them, to be fully herself, like she is with me.

A quick interlude on Zumba: after watching the class, I am entirely convinced it is how we should all start our days. There was whooping, booty shaking, and an overall feeling of bursting joy. Smiles everywhere I looked. It couldn’t be a Tuesday morning in St. Cloud, Florida; everyone was having far too much fun.

Kaitlin is a sensitive kitten, and so am I. We were both in a mood after Zumba. I directed my parents toward Starbucks, where I got my second matcha of the day before 11am.

Back at home, Kaitlin wasn’t so into the camera, so I let it cool off. The Price is Right got turned on in the other room. I half listened, half zoned out. Kaitlin ate her World Famous. My mom shouted at my to get my dad. “They’re playing that new game,” she said, “call him in!”

My dad and I came into the other room, and when I saw what was on the TV, my jaw hit the floor. The contestant on the game—the special game they never play, the one my mom called my dad into the room for, on the one random day I happened to be in town, at the one hour a day where The Price Is Right plays, live—was Debra, a woman who worked for me a decade ago, back when I lived in Maui.

“She has a daughter named Marina,” I told my parents.

When Debra won a brand new Porsche, she said, “I said if I won a car, I’d give it to my daughter, Marina. But not this one!”

I might’ve gotten a third matcha on my way out that afternoon, after calling the day early because the energy was off. I might’ve cried back at my Airbnb, wondered what the point of all this was, what I was trying to do, what I could or couldn’t fix about my sister’s life, my life, the world at large.

I might’ve gone to bed spiky with nerves—the next day was far higher stakes. My DP was coming, I had a big interview planned, now the director hat had to be fully pulled on. No signs of how all of this was effecting me could peek through.

And yet…Debra was on The Price Is Right. A clever trick of somebody—God? The Universe?—saying, You can’t outrun your past, hon. It’s always going to find you.

Thanks for reading along. In step with yesterday’s link, enjoy this perfect use of the song of the summer. Last one to come tomorrow!

I come to you from Kissimmee, Florida, pronounced like kiss-IM-me. It’s where the Florida Project was shot, where Disney reigns supreme, where every waterway is home to at least one or several gators. It is also where I was raised, and where my little sister, Kaitlin, lives with my parents.

I arrived here Sunday night for a week of shooting a documentary I’m making about my little sister’s life. I hadn’t been back here since 2022, and hadn’t spent more than 20 minutes at my parents’ house since 2017. We’ll get into that later.

For now, bring you an impromptu pop-up newsletter, penned from my first week of shooting. The pop-up will run for about 3 days, sent in the evening. Read it with your morning coffee or your evening glass of wine.

Cheers, and thanks for reading along

After nearly a decade, the anticipation of returning home

Here’s everything that happened the week leading up to my return to Kissimmee:

• I ran the fastest mile I’d ever run, two days in a row. My appetite wasn’t anywhere near what it usually was, especially considering how hard I was working out. The idea of eating eggs in the morning made me want to puke; I could hardly choke down a handful of berries. On the third day of my pre-workout sprint, heart pounding out of my chest, I realized, “Oh, this is anxiety.” It hadn’t reached my head, but my body was screaming at me to pay a little more attention. I decided to cool off from the gym for a few days after that. Lower the cortisol.

• I walked into B&H to buy a new lens for the camera I’ve hardly ever used. I told myself I hadn’t used it because I had the wrong lens, but really, I’d been avoiding it. The camera felt like physical proof of my self-diagnosed technical incompetence, only worsened by being afraid to put in the time needed to improve my technical skills. Fear of being bad, that old story. The camera store was like Disneyland; a sprawling, multi-floor complex in Midtown with a million counters and employees, cameras everywhere, mics and computers and tripods and every piece of equipment imaginable, everyone looking very tech savvy. I walked in and nearly walked right back out. Instead, I made myself ask all the questions I had. Cindy, the nice woman at the Cannon counter, reassured me that I knew more than I thought I knew. I bought the $600 lens she suggested. One step at a time.

• I showed up to a date frazzled, camera bag in tow. We were in the Upper East Side at an old-school Italian restaurant. It wasn’t a first, a second, or even a third date, so I wouldn’t say I was nervous. Still, my shoot date was inching closer, and I couldn’t get my heart rate down, nor could I maintain the façade of cool girl without a care. I tried conveying my fears about the upcoming shoot with guardrails that felt necessary at this stage of dating: I haven’t been home in a long time, and I wasn’t sure what I’d find there. Also, I’d never shot fully by myself, so I wasn’t sure how the footage would turn out. I’d never hired a DP, paid them a full rate with my own money, or directed without the comfort of a close creative collaborator and/or friend by my side. And probably my biggest fear of all, which I didn’t share with my date: I’ve never brought a person to my parents’ house in adulthood, let alone a stranger. The thought of it gave me the exact feeling you have in those dreams where you show up to the college lecture hall naked from the waist down. Utterly exposed.

• My date suggested impromptu massages after dinner, and we took a cab there. There is nothing in the world hotter than someone seeing you with shaky hands and a big, fake smile and proclaiming, “I think we should go get massages.” My date hailed a yellow cab straight from dinner. I hadn’t been in an old school cab in years, I commented. I carried my purse, my camera bag, and a brown bag of leftovers, my appetite still not up to snuff. In the back of the cab, I laughed at the small TV playing a strange, looped game show scene.

• We walked into the massage parlor, and I immediately realized I was one bag short. It wasn’t the brown bag of leftovers or my purse. “I left my camera bag in the cab,” I announced to the lobby of the massage parkour. We sprinted outside, but the cab had already driven off. I seriously considered cancelling the shoot—I’d been maybe, subconsciously, looking for a reason to back out of it. But earlier that afternoon, before the camera store, I’d booked a non-refundable Airbnb and rental car.

• Back at my apartment the next morning, I got an unexpected email. I’d spent the early hours of the day trying not to spiral about the camera, and trying to figure out how I was going to replace it in two days’ time. The email was from a summer documentary lab my best friend had encouraged me to apply to a few weeks earlier. The application itself had brought a massive wave of nausea-inducing discomfort: Who was I as a filmmaker? What had I done? What did I bring to the table? Why did my project matter? I told myself that applying was only an exercise. Good practice. The program only had 12 spots, its alumni list packed with decorated filmmakers.

The ironic timing of the notice—the morning after I lost my camera, two days before a shoot that I was nearly sick with worry about—wasn’t lost on me. I took it as a sign to keep going.

I ordered a new camera.

Thanks for reading along. The only link I have to share with you is this song, an absolute banger I’ve been blasting every morning this week. More to come tomorrow.

A Note From the Editor

Bernadette had big dreams. They began with a big imagination. From the ages of 4 to 9, she would commandeer dinner each night with her elaborate stories. Her mother, a patient audience of one, thought these stories were pretty cohesive, for a kid.

“Clark, the giant yellow cat who roamed the forest, was allergic to pine trees. If he stalked too close to a one, he’d have a sneezing fit. And because he was so big, his sneezes would cause a hurricane in all of the surrounding villages. He didn’t want to mess up the weather. But his favorite snack was these tiny purple berries that grew in bunches high in the pine trees. They were so hard to resist. So one day, Clark decided to ask a beautiful, rainbow colored bird to help him reach the berries. But… the bird wasn’t what he seemed. He had a plan of his own. An evil plan.”

That sort of stuff. Bernadette’s mother encouraged these stories insofar as listening to them wholeheartedly on the days when she didn’t have to work an overnight at the hospital. Those days, her mother would ooh and aah. Without Bernadette’s tiny, half-developed brain consciously clocking it, those little coos of encouragement were building into something, codifying a belief that told her she was good at this, storytelling, that she should keep going. Many years later, when she was trying to pick a college major, an old echo of those coos resurfaced somewhere in the stew of her subconscious. And so, Bernadette decided to major in creative writing.

Her mother didn’t have a strong opinion on the matter. She was a nurse, not a writer, and she couldn’t afford to pay Bernadette’s tuition, so it didn’t feel right to tell her what to do. Plus, the world was changing. Her mother didn’t know what was considered a “smart” or “safe” major anymore, what the job market might look like in two years, let alone ten, twenty.

Anyway, Bernadette was a bright girl. She’d figure it out.

______

Sam was one of those annoying kids who knew what he wanted to be from the time his brain could retain memories: a horror film director. Girls in elementary school thought it was creepy, his obsession with demons possessing dolls, zombies tearing flesh off of innocent store clerks, kids their age being exorcised by priests, their small bodies thrashing around with startling violence. He didn’t care what they thought—he was in love, and it wasn’t with any of them.

As the opening credits rolled, Sam would feel that initial jab of thrill at the base of his spine. The girl who was home alone answered the phone again. Dummy. That group of friends heading to vacation lost cell service on the drive over, and then it started to storm so hard they could hardly see five feet in front of them. Still, they didn’t turn back. The family moved into a new house and right away, their mom started acting strange, hovering over her sleeping daughter’s bed in the dead of night. The films were predictable, formulaic, and yet, they terrified him. Thrilled him.

“It’s just a movie,” he whispered to himself the first time he watched Jack Nicholson bust through the door with an axe. He was in the basement with his older brother and his older brother’s two jock friends. They were all lacrosse players, and Sam figured there were about ten bracells between the three of them.

His brother oscillated between calling him a pussy—for playing no sports and having no girlfriend—and a freak, for his obsession with horror films. “This kid’s gonna become a serial killer, just wait,” his brother often said to his friends, and they’d laugh like it was the first time they’d ever heard the joke.

Sam studied the tricks, the tropes, the characters. He shoveled snow in the winter, mowed lawns in the summer, and by the time he was 14, he had enough money to buy his first camcorder. The girls who thought he was weird just a few years ago suddenly wanted to be his friend, because they all wanted to be movie stars and he was the only kid in their school who was making movies.

By the time college came around, it was a no-brainer. Sam knew what he wanted to do. He’d known for a long time.

______

Bernadette wasn’t the first on the content team to be let go. It might’ve been easier if she had been—it would’ve saved her a lot of stomach aches and sleepless nights. Then again, she wouldn’t have had health insurance had she gotten laid off, and she needed it for her SSRI prescription.

When she started at her job, it was everything she could have asked for. She’d spent many grueling years working at a creative agency. She wrote copy for dog food brands, laundry detergent brands, lunch meat brands. Later, she started writing copy for the whack-a-mole of direct to consumer, millennial-coded CPG brands that had suddenly popped up everywhere, seemingly overnight. Protein bars with no calories, dog food again, but this time, frozen and allegedly healthier, delivered straight to your door, single-origin peanut butter in little jars that looked like space ships. Then one day, she got put onto a hot new account: the generic version of shots that promised to diminish your appetite.

It was the latter that lifted her up out of her 60 hour work weeks at the agency and landed her a job on the coveted client side, in Telehealth. This job was the answer to her prayers, with a salary nearly double what she made at the agency and better benefits. Her mother joked that Bernadette had ended up in the healthcare field after all. Like mother, like daughter.

When people asked her what she did, she would say she worked “in tech”. Technically speaking, her company did have an app, which she occasionally wrote copy for. She found this answer sparked the fewest follow up questions and implied the most prestige.

______

Sam worked in logistics.

He lived in a suburb outside LA, across the country from his parents and his older brother, now a successful divorce lawyer. His brother had three sons and a six-pack and a wife who posted every moment of her day on Instagram.

“Ok, mama bears, we’re headed to Baby Landon’s first soccer practice,” his sister-in-law said to her phone’s camera. Landon was 5-years-old.

______

The first round of layoffs was expected. There had been grumblings of changes—the downturned labor market, the slogging economy, the political unrest. As it turned out, Bernadette did technically work in tech, because her company went right along with the first big wave of downsizing led by the tech giants.

The jobs, their COO said in a 10 minute Zoom meeting, were becoming redundant because of….new tech. Now, one AI agent could do the work of five engineers. Agents didn’t need time off for vacation or healthcare coverage. Objectively, this made sense, but the irony didn’t escape Bernadette.

Over the course of five years, her company shrank to a third of its original size. They moved to a smaller office. She still had to come in four days a week, but now she hardly spoke to anyone because her team was down to three and her boss lived in a different city. Sometimes, when she was bored, she would chat with the LLMs. She became so accustomed to them that she forgot she was at work, that they weren’t real coworkers, that someone was probably monitoring this correspondence.

She decided to stop sharing her feelings, doubts, hopes, and nightly dreams with the LLMs.

You’d think all this downsizing would mean more work for Bernadette, but her tasks only became more menial. She would later discover she was only kept on as a technicality—some short lived attempt at regulation; a labor law that required companies to retain a certain ratio of human-to-bot employees in every department.

It was fine at first. She read newsletters, browsed the internet, redecorated her apartment. She started learning German, not even bothering to whisper into her phone anymore as she practiced for hours in her empty office, the new words feeling heavy and harsh in her mouth. She watched a YouTube show where a pastry chef attempted to re-create her favorite childhood snacks from scratch, a religious couple vlogging about their lives as devout Christians in Tennessee.

She kept waiting to be fired. A year passed, then another. She imagined what she would do when they let her go, how she would feel joining the ranks of her unemployed friends. A few times, she even drafted the caption she’d write on her Instagram story, announcing the firing. She wanted the caption to elicit sympathy, but not pity, and to make it sound like she had something better planned for the future.

Around year three, she still hadn’t gotten fired. She ran out of things to do at work and began to dread each day, the ticking time bomb, the increasing vapidness of the world around her. She got on an antidepressant. Forced herself to get dressed, to keep going into the empty office. If she only cried at work three times a week, it was a good week in her book.

One Tuesday, when Bernadette was consumed with a feeling she could only describe as living in a slate grey prison, she opened a Google Doc. She didn’t think much about what she was doing or what she was writing.

It would become the opening pages of her first novel.

______

Sometimes, Sam thought about what his brother said.

“This kid’s gonna become a serial killer, just wait.” And he wonders if his brother was right.

For the record, Sam had never killed anyone. He didn’t own a gun. But he did feel angry. So damn angry.

He detested his job in logistics. And yet, when he was laid off because the company had invested all their money into new tech that promised to automate the entire warehouse, he felt a deep, unexpected blow to his pride.

There was the immediate issue of how to afford rent, a car payment, gasoline. He updated his LinkedIn profile to “Open to work,” wrote a post about how his job was cut after giving so many of his highest earning potential years to the logistics company. Strangers flooded the comments, sharing stories similar to his. They were all becoming redundant. That’ll do something to a person.

He put off telling his family as long as he could. When he finally FaceTimed his parents with the news, his mom cried.

“I’m just so worried about you, Sammy,” she said. “No job, no girlfriend. There’s nothing for you there. You should move home.” The thought made him want to off himself. Moving home, at this age, with nothing to show for himself. Pathetic.

Worse than his mother’s tears was the voice note from his brother. He was panting, probably out for a 10-mile morning jog. His brother suggested Sam should come home, move back in with their parents, and work as a secretary at his law firm. A fucking secretary. Surely, the AI agents should be able to do that job by now. He told his brother as much.

“No shit, Sherlock. But mom wants me to help you out. She’s losing her mind over this.”

Sam gave himself five months to figure it out. He got a job at an Amazon factory, heaving boxes of crap people probably didn’t need onto conveyor belts and trucks. Between shifts, he drove for Uber and Lyft. He donated plasma twice a week.

He worked until he was bleary-eyed, dozed at the wheel more than once. He started having night terrors. He would wake up drenched in sweat, the sheets tangled at the foot of the bed. One week, he woke himself up screaming three nights in a row. His neighbors did a welfare check.

He couldn’t afford health insurance, let alone therapy, but he knew he needed to clear the gunk out of his head. He started jotting the nightmares down in a notebook as soon as he woke up, recounting in detail the spindly, half-dead fingers clamping around his throat, the pair of beady red eyes trailing him through the Amazon warehouse, his brother binding him to a chair in a dank basement with rope while his sister-in-law filmed it the whole thing on her phone.

After a few months of nightmare journaling, a horror story began to take shape. A script.

______

Unemployment rates rose to record highs. All around the country, the Bernadettes and Sams were beginning to make things again. They were rusty, sure, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was the act itself, a reminder that there was an alternative to letting their bodies go limp in the river of adulthood, ending up wherever the tides might take them. They made misshapen pots, amateur zines, screen-printed graphic tees, one-man plays, all acoustic EPs, poetry chapbooks. Now there was nothing but time and struggle, the two necessary ingredients for making art.

Living situations were reconfigured. Social norms, too. Individualism crumbled—it had to, no one could afford to live alone. Generations of families lived once more. Groups of friends created makeshift communes, nowhere near as bucolic as they’d imagined. Major cities degraded to the drug-and-graffiti-riddled states that people in middle America always thought they were. Alphabet City crumbled, once again populated almost exclusively by starving artists, though far less prolific ones.

______

Getting to the next part takes a while, a couple generations. By this time, the Bernadettes and Sams of the world were all very old or dead, and the kids had been reared exclusively on LLM-generated content. They don’t find it distracting to watch a movie wherein a sad houseplant attempts to make his way back to the forest, but partway through begins to periodically hiss and slither like a snake, subsequently speaking in Mandarin-sounding gibberish during a few crucial scenes.

Brain rot is not a term these kids are familiar with. They’ve never heard of DVDs or Martin Scorsese or HBO. The algorithm has taken on a life of its own and content is produced in such startling quantities that their brains struggle to retain anything for more than a few days. Everything they watch looks the same, everything they read sounds the same. It’s all shiny and colorful and, in truth, not that exciting, but they don’t know that.

______

Until one Christmas Eve, when a young boy gets a gift from his older brother. It’s some kind of tatty, hand-made book on actual printed paper. A lot of pages, too, 112. He’s never read anything that long before. His brother swears it’s awesome.

Reading off real paper is the craziest feeling. You flip each page. you have to carry the thing around. And the plot is so freaking weird and thrilling. It’s about a girl who becomes obsessed with recording what people say when she leaves the room. She ends up discovering all these deep, dark secrets. Her brother is gay, her mom is cheating, her best friends kind of hate her. He likes the book so much that he wants to order it for his best friend, but his brother tells him there isn’t another copy. It’s a one of one.

______

This is how the boy is introduced to the world of V-Con, vintage content. He gets on a secret email list. Once a month, an email goes out with the location of a storage unit filled with V-Con—printed books, hard drives with gritty movies starring real people, the editing all choppy, music tracks played by live instruments, singers crooning about their love lives or their messed-up families or whatever.

At first, it’s underground, only certain kids know about it. It isn’t long before the whole thing becomes mainstream. Now, kids have stopped streaming the houseplant/snake movie. They’re all begging their parents to book them flights to Saint Louis, Missouri, for their birthdays so they can elbow their way through an old storage unit of musty, poorly-made art.

The kids are fanatic about the stuff. They stop using their computers in favor of old-school notebooks, start writing their own novels in pencil based on the plots of the V-Con ones they love. They make movies using Super 8 cameras, starring their friends, a wildly novel concept. They discover poetry, organize readings and film festivals and book fairs with only home-made books allowed. Everything is lo-fi, the quality questionable, that is precisely the appeal.

Big tech sees an opportunity, starts churning out their own V-con knock offs, books that claim to be one-of-ones, movies starring real people. The kids aren’t fooled. Or interested.

______

Cheers, my dears, and as always, thanks for reading. This weekend, I’m going to an Easter dinner party, doing some documentary work, and spending a day out on Long Island.

Have a wonderful weekend. Eat some lamb, pick flowers and put them in a mason jar, write a story.

Share

Three Pieces of Content Worth Consuming

1. How To Look Good and Stay Fit. New York Mag has a subscriber-only newsletter called Night School that is one of my favorite things a legacy-media brand is doing online right now. Each month, writers and editors curate highly specific how-to guides on a given topic via weekly emails that are never too dense. The theme right now is How To Be A New Yorker, full of super-local tips and tricks for making life in New York easier. I loved this one, full of places I now want to try.

2. Mary Oliver: Saved By the Beauty of the World Trailer. A good reminder that a documentary can be moving poetry—fitting, given the subject. If you’re not familiar with Mary Oliver’s work, you should go buy this collection immediately. Her poetry gives this impression of a person who is thoroughly immersed in the simplest, most profound facets of life: a body of rippling water, birdsong, the beauty of the flower—yet the doc suggests a darkness that I’m intrigued by. I hope it gets picked up by a streamer.

3. The Return of Cheap Eats. I read this a while ago and was delighted, but forgot to share. New York was once the home of cheap, incredible eats. While I’ll admit I’ve fallen off obsessively tracking the local restaurant scene, I’ve had the general feeling that cheap eats don’t really exist anymore, or if they do, I wasn’t sure where to find them. Before you read, decide the upper price range you would quantify as a “cheap” eat (remember, this is based in New York) and see how your price stacks up to the one the writer set.

One Good Question

The other day, I was thinking about how I want to go about the world with more openness. New York is full of fascinating people, and I figured I was probably missing them by being plugged up with headphones all the time. A few moments later, I got on the subway, and the man next to me asked me about the book I was reading, which led to a short, fascinating conversation that made me chuckle with its ironic timing.

This question was inspired by that conversation, perfectly suitable to ask to any person, in any group configuration:

Tell me about a person you met in the wild who you never spoke to again, but you’ll never forget.

**Bonus Content** (Cat Tour)

@.drosaSooooo many cats! 🐈 🐈‍⬛ #minneapolis #wedgelive #cattour

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

The people of Minnesota know how to party.

Plus, some very cute greeting cards, I want to try apitherapy, the perfect summer cake, and seven ways to fall in love.

A Quote From A Book You Should Read:

“It’s a mistake to believe social media is all about hearts and thumbs, flames and eggplants. If everyone were only trying to be liked then it’d be kinder, and way more boring. But discourse is loneliness disguised as war. What people there really want is to be perceived on their own terms, which is so, so funny. Because if the grand promise of the internet was to be whoever you want, in reality it will make of you whatever it wants, and beneath every mask is another mask mistaken for a face.”

-Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte

A Note From the Editor

Do you feel that? The tick, the itch, the steady wave of fatigue that flings your body into bed each evening like a potato sack, so tired you can’t even get your neck in the right position, so you wake with a crick that reminds you you are, in fact, 33 years old. It’s the sort of tired that follows you through the maze of REM cycles, through the movie sets and dilapidated fourth grade classrooms of your dreams and into early morning, when you hear a faint smacking sound, feel a gentle tug on your scalp, and before you even open your eyes you know your foster cat, Saul, is chewing on the ends of your hair again. It’s breakfast time, he says, doesn’t matter how tired you are.

—————

Start by having an ultra productive Friday. Wake up tired, so tired. Schlep to CB2, recall how hostile Manhattan can be in certain weather, on certain days, dirty slush puddles and aggressive sidewalk vendors and warm morning breath on the subway. Pick up those two dining room chairs and that linen flush mount, return that overpriced marble fruit bowl. Take a very expensive cab back home to Brooklyn, praise God you live in Brooklyn. Have as many people in your new home at once as you’ve ever had—a man to install the new lights, a man to install the new bookshelves, a talented best friend slash designer to supervise, and Saul, also to supervise.

Wonder how you will possibly be able to go through with your evening plans—so tired—but decide you will, and so you do. Trek to another neighborhood, your third today. Sit beside your dear friend and admire her beauty, her grace as a new mom. Sing operatic nonsense in tandem, watch how her baby’s little legs start to kick in delight, his round face engulfed in a gummy smile. Walk to the apartment of your best friend since childhood, blood sugar looming dangerously low, only to discover her husband is making you dinner. Sit with them and eat, take the glass of wine they hand you, dip your spoon into the tiramisu for dessert. Momentarily forget how tired you are, invigorated by the calories, the conversation. Put on your jacket to leave and take it off not once, not twice, but three times. Sit back down, her husband says, and so you do.

Finally, schlep home. It is late, Saul is commanding pets, butt smacks, and your phone is pregnant with obligation. A friend who needs support, a few unanswered texts, an email that must be scheduled. It is late, your body is heavy. You must clear the queue for this experiment to work. So you stay up until 1am, getting it all done. You take a bubble bath. You text your two main group chats to alert them of your status as unavailable.

Then, you power down your phone. Watch as the screen goes blissfully black. Stash it away in your top desk drawer, then crawl into bed sometime around 2am.

—————

What could it be? Sure, the world is on fire and everything is topsy turvy, down is up, left is right, but that’s been going on for so long now. No news can surprise you anymore. You don’t even use social media, so in theory, you’re shielded from the worst of it.

And, ok, sure, it’s the dead of winter in New York. They said it would be the coldest on record and you jumped for joy. You love winter! When your best friend warned you this would come—back in December, when you were busy baking cookies and basking in the seasonally borrowed freedoms of each passing day, getting teary eyed at the sight of glittering trees peeking through brownstone windows—when she said, “You know, it’s going to get hard around February. But we’ll get through it,” you scoffed. No chance, because you love winter!

Sure, it’s your first winter back in New York in four years. Usually, you’d have a toasty golden tan by now, face smattered in freckles, evenings spent strolling on the beach. Without meaning to, you became a snowbird. After years spent reaming out your parents for fleeing the cold of New York for a life in Disney World, central Florida. The irony doesn’t escape you.

—————

Wake up Saturday morning to the gentle lip smacking, the tug of hair, and there’s Saul doing his morning self-care routine. Reach for your secret weapon, a piece of aluminum foil, his mortal enemy, and scrunch it up until he scurries away. Sleep until you finally wake naturally, bask in the glory of not having an immediate method of checking the time.

Check your iPad: 10:13am. Not bad. Meditate, but without the trusty 15 minute timer you normally set. It might’ve been six minutes or twenty, you don’t bother to check the time again. Wash your face, then dump some of that expensive essence into your palm and tap, tap, tap it into your skin using the pads of your fingers. Tap, tap, tap, for so long you sort of zone out, enjoying the rhythm, the feeling of your fingertips dancing across your cheekbones, your forehead.

Meander to your coffee shop. Order a matcha, finally get that lemon bar you’ve been eyeing for the past several months. Walk, slowly, to the park. It’s the most glorious day you’ve seen in some time. Still cold and icy, but the sun is shining, and the farmer’s market is overflowing with shrieking toddlers and couples in sweaty workout gear, shoppers with arms full of apples, kale, tulips. The meat guy has a line that goes straight through Grand Army Plaza. You’re happy for him.

Slosh through the slop of melted snow and find a seat on a park bench. Let the sun stream directly into your eyes, blinding you, the way you used to do every morning while brushing your teeth in Costa Rica. Crack open that book your therapist recommended during your first session, the one you never got, the one she subtly lent you last week. It’s a memoir, not your favorite, but why not give it a try?

Ten pages in and—wait, what? There you are, right on the page. Twenty pages in and no way. No way. It’s uncanny. Read and read, chapters and chapters, only pausing a sit on that bench and stare out into nothing, mouth agape. It’s like someone tore the most personal pages from your diary, like they used a scalpel to remove the skin on your skull en route to the brain, where they dug out a basket of your dirtiest laundry and printed it right there on the page of this New York Times best seller, under the guise of another woman’s memoir.

Walk home in a daze.

Feels like a good time to do a million loads of laundry.

At the laundromat, a place you’re surprised to discover you love—the smell, the warmth, the smiling owner who gives you your quarters in a detergent bottle cap—keep reading. Stop only to watch a man who looks very confused about how this whole operation works. Watch as he calls the owner over to clarify the empty machines are, in fact, empty. Watch as he grabs armfuls of rumpled shirts, loose socks, boxers, dropping half of them on the floor as he tosses them in the direction of the machine. Resist the urge to get up and scoop up this stranger’s dirty laundry for him. Ignore his butt crack peeking out when he scoops the clothes up himself. Keep reading.

—————

Come to think of it, you did a lot this month. A lot. Two massive snowstorms right in a row, which was kind of nice, because it gave you a reason to slow things down. Your acupuncturist tried to warm you that you were doing too much.

“You’re hemorrhaging energy outward,” he said. “It’s winter. Time to go inward. Channel that energy back into yourself.”

But how could you pour that energy back into yourself when you feel so needed?

It’s a good feeling, being needed. Someone needs advice, someone needs consoling, someone needs you to answer their call, their text, their voice note, the one you’ve been accidentally avoiding for months—not because you don’t want to talk, but because sometimes all the pings pile so high you just need a moment, and then the guilt of not replying fast enough compounds, becomes the sneaky app running in the background of your proverbial phone, quietly draining its battery.

So probably, that makes you tired. Come to think of it, you did a lot of dating this month. A best friend lost a parent. You mourned for her, with her. You started sharing your home with an animal who needs you. You started weight training and your body responded with glee, then fatigue. You pitched your documentary idea to a mentor and they said no, this won’t quite do, you’ll need to be a lot more vulnerable for this story to work. And you’ll have to be on camera.

You imagined your life being documented, a camera in your home, and the thought made you ill. You knew your mentor was right, and yet….that wasn’t the plan. So you take a little break from thinking about it, but of course, it’s running in the back of your mind, too.

So, yeah, you’re tired.

—————

On the second morning without a phone, wake up feeling markedly less peaceful. The week and all its obligations are looming, the phone whispers to you, promising a mound of unanswered messages. Or, worse, no messages at all. Make a mental list of everything You Need To Do Today. Documentary work, pulling bank statements for your tax accountant, some life housekeeping. Start to feel the engine whir—do, do do.

Stop right there. Do another no alarm meditation, write lots of pages in your journal, acknowledge the urge to do do do. And then decide, no, today is not for doing. Today is still analogue. Briefly check your email on your laptop, just to be sure your parents haven’t died overnight. No emails from your sisters. All clear.

Again, walk. to the park. More reading, more uncanny similarities. Wonder whether your therapist might be using this book to introduce a diagnosis. Make a mental note to ask her about it another time. Realize today is cold only when your hands go numb from turning the pages. Not a day for outside reading. Stroll over to the grocery store. Shop without a list, by memory, zucchini and cake flour and oat milk. When’s the last time you did that?

Back home, embark on an afternoon cooking marathon. Think of yourself on Wednesday, probably starving post-workout. She’ll need some protein. Boil chicken bones and veggie scraps for a stock, long and slow. Marinate some chicken. Make this week’s Sister Cooking Club recipe. At the last minute, decide to make a giant batch of dough. Run to the bodega with the cute cashier you occasionally flirt with. Consider the fact that he only ever sees you buying chocolate chips, briefly wonder whether he notices this.

At home, cream the butter and sugar together while Love Is Blind plays from your laptop. Discover little Chris is an absolute prick. Let the dough chill for 12 hours.

—————

And when the time comes to go to bed, you must return to the drawer. Watch as the Apple logo fills the screen, wait in anticipation to see what you’ve missed. There’s a brand new war. But there’s also a text from that guy. And your sisters, your friends. A photo that makes you laugh, a sweet email.

How lucky you are to be so loved. You go to bed cradling this knowledge in the crook of your arm. Tomorrow, you can reply all. Tomorrow, you will be recharged.

—————

Cheers my dears, and as always, thanks for reading. This weekend, I’m meeting up with a dear friend I haven’t seen in way too long, seeing a new play, and having dinner at one of my favorite places in Brooklyn.

Have a wonderful weekend. Take someone you love to the bookstore and pick out books for each other, invite a friend over for tea, play frisbee.

Share

Three Pieces of Content Worth Consuming

1. Two People Exchanging Saliva- A Short Film. One of the most blissful parts about being back in New York, despite the raging winter, is getting to see the Oscar-nominated shorts in theatres again. This was my favorite of the year’s live-action lineup. A beautiful, wildly creative short taking place in a dystopian Paris, written and directed by a pair of French artists turned filmmakers. It’s strange and sexy, sad and dark, and delightful all at the same time. Highly worth a watch.

2. The NTS Breakfast Show with Flo Dill. I was perusing the shelves of a used bookstore in my neighborhood the other day, and I noticed the music was of a particular sort. I guessed it was an NTS show, and shortly thereafter, my suspicion was confirmed. The London-based online radio system is a treasure trove of vibey music for very specific, to me, times—a dinner party, a bath, background music that won’t distract you too much. These are not getting ready to go out songs, but they fill a crucial, mood-setting function in the between moments that my Spotify could never. The morning show with Flo remains a daily listening fixture in this household.

3. I Regret Having Children. The Cut loves a little dramatic headline flair, and it does get me to click the story. This one’s worth reading if only because you don’t often see a major media company giving airtime to women who are willing to be so frank about their very valid gripes with motherhood—one of the women has active plans to leave her young son and partner, admitting she feels nothing for her son. I had guessed the comments would say things like “It’s just your lack of support system, your husband, etc.,” which they did, but there was also a lot more empathy in there than I had expected.

One Good Question

I was sweeping the floor the other day, and a big, existential thought filled every inch of space in my mind. I was so moved by the contemplation that I had to sit on the floor for a moment. That’s where this question came from. Best to ask your best friend, either in person or during a catch-up phone call.

If you could find out definitively whether or not there was an afterlife, would you?

And….if you discovered there was no afterlife, how would that change the way you plan to spend the rest of this year?

**Bonus Content** (I Asked ChatGPT)

This whole thing made me cackle.

Also, a song I recently discovered that’s been playing on repeat, crying in every language, over/under whether this is a joke, my favorite shop in Dublin, a trick that actually works, and a very cool trip concept.

A Quote From A Book You Should Read:

“What he wouldn’t know until he was much older was that no one was ever free, that to know someone and to love them was to assume the task of remembering them, even if that person was still living. No one could escape that duty, and as you aged, you grew to crave that responsibility even as you sometimes resented it, that knowledge that your life was inextricable from another’s, that a person marked their existence in part by their association with you.”

-To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

A Note From the Editor

The earliest memories are hazy; years’ worth of chalky conversation hearts and heart-shaped Reese’s all rolled into one. I am 6, 8, 10, and I decorate an old shoe box, haphazardly gluing on construction paper, cutting a rectangular slit into its top. I bring my box to school, along with a bag of cards, each scrawled with the names of my classmates. To: Ashley V., From: Meghan, To: Ashley R: From: Meghan. The cards are folded in half, sealed with a heart-shaped sticker, paired with bite-sized Snickers in festive pink wrappers. I return home with my shoebox-turned-mailbox stuffed with cards: Tweety Bird, the Tasmanian Devil, PowerPuff Girls, Spongebob. I relate this day only to colors and candy, to giving and receiving treats, to wearing red.

By high school, I was prepared for the big leagues. Candy grams and single red roses were delivered smack dab in the middle of Algebra 2, so everyone knew how popular everyone else was, or wasn’t. My first real boyfriend was campaigning for us to lose our virginities to each other, so I knew the day would be extra romantic—plus, my best friend had helped formulate a plan for him, as backup insurance. She instructed me to wear a dress. I burned my boyfriend a CD, tore out a page from my journal written the day he asked me out, the 11th of some month, confessing that “11 might just be my new favorite number” (not true, it’s 5). My mom drove me to Walmart, and I picked out a little teddy bear holding a red heart, BE MINE. He was meant to pick me up at 2:30 pm. An hour passed, then another, then another. My boyfriend was a wrestler, and I later discovered his teammates decided Valentine’s Day was a good day to bleach their hair for the upcoming state championships. It was past 7 pm by the time he finally arrived at my house, his bleach-blonde teammate in tow. The three of us saw a scary movie and ate at Burger King. He gave me a small box of chocolates and apologized; I considered keeping the burnt CD.

My college boyfriend healed the wound. Had I known what love languages were back then, I would have said his were gifts, capital G, and grand gestures. The first time I felt doubts about the relationship, he bought me a Tiffany bracelet. The second time, he came over with a DVD player, a few cheesy movies, and boxes of candy. “For a girls’ night,” he said, because I had said I wanted to spend more time with my friends. On Valentine’s Day, before the doubts started creeping in, a giant bouquet of roses was waiting for me in the lobby of my dorm. I felt the eyes of my fellow freshmen trailing as I practically skipped back to my room, feeling adored. That night, he picked me up in his Camaro, gave me a Dave Matthews Band CD, and a bag of chocolate caramel Ghirardelli squares. We had dinner at a restaurant in a mall. I ordered squid ink pasta and felt full grown. We got cheesecake from The Cheesecake Factory and went back to his, feeding each other sickly sweet bites in bed while some Zac Efron movie played on TV. I was so full of squid ink and Ghirardelli and cheesecake that I didn’t feel like having sex, so I pretended to fall asleep. His letting me fake sleep, I thought, was the most romantic part of the whole evening.

A year later, that boyfriend and I were freshly broken up. My best friend’s dad was visiting from his station in Iraq, ready to spoil us. We wanted to throw a party at our apartment; he bought us cases of Sugar Free RedBull, supplies for Irish Car Bombs, bottles and bottles of wine, plastic pink shot glasses, all the snacks we wanted. We put out plates of raw cookie dough and made our guests surrender their phones at the door. I hid them in a shoebox, not dissimilar to the sort I decorated in Valentine’s Days’ past, in the kitchen cabinet. We attempted Wine Power Hour. Somewhere around minute 40, someone began to cry, then someone began to puke. Someone poured a bowl of chips on the floor and crunched them into the carpet with their bare feet. Someone chucked an unopened can of RedBull off the balcony. Someone ripped a toilet paper holder clean off the bathroom wall. Someone fell asleep between the box spring and the mattress. Meanwhile, I snuck my phone out and texted my ex.

And then I was a young adult, 23-years-old, and deeply, hopelessly in love for the first time. We were both in Las Vegas, where we worked for the same company, and dated in secret. He was 12 years my senior, so I figured he would be an expert on Valentine’s Day by now. The night before, I made chocolate-covered strawberries and Oreo truffles—Oreos and cream cheese smashed together, rolled into balls, dipped in chocolate. I melted milk, dark, and white chocolate chips, and peanut butter chips. I spooned the chocolate into plastic baggies and cut off the tips, decorating the treats with various drizzles, sparkly sprinkles, flecks of crushed up Heath Bar. I got him a designer tie for an upcoming work gala that I would not be able to attend—the secret and all—and wrote a card that made me teary. In the morning, before work, I gave him the treats, the card, and tie. He had nothing for me. I pretended not to be bothered. Later, after work, he brought home a bouquet of cellophane-wrapped carnations, their sticky 7-Eleven price tag still intact. We went to dinner and I got drunk, cried openly on the way back to his.

I thought long and hard about what I would do for my second love. I was as close to a real adult as I’d ever been and I wanted the day to feel special; he was a good one. I picked my favorite photos of us and printed them as miniature Polaroids, then spent my lunch break tucked into a corner of the kitchen at One World Trade, writing little notes on the back of each photo. He came over and we toasted with the bottle of Veuve Clicquot I’d picked up on the way home from work. Over dinner at a vaguely Mediterranean, candle-lit restaurant, I confessed my grand plan: I would quit my job and spend the summer in France. There, I would become A Writer. He was welcome to visit as much as he wanted—I hoped he would come for at least two weeks—but he had an office to go to, an inflexible tech job. He didn’t object forthright. I thought, yes, this is romance, this is love, he isn’t trying to control me. After dinner, he surprised me with tickets to a variety show hosted by my favorite comedian. I surprised him by lifting my skirt up just enough to reveal the elaborate lingerie I’d worn under my outfit, a little surprise for later.

I didn’t quit that job or make it to France that year. Little did we know a virus was waiting right around the corner, and the earth would soon shift beneath our feet. When we broke up nearly a year later, he confessed I had crushed him at that dinner with my grand plans, my disregard. My dreams and his never seemed to fully sync.

We said our goodbyes. Not so long after, I finally did quit that job. Nearly a year after that, I made it to France. I was already a writer. And that, I suppose, was the start of it.

_____

Cheers, my dears, and as always, thanks for reading. I’ve always loved Valentine’s Day and all the iterations it takes depending on what’s happening in our love lives. This weekend, I’m having dinner with friends, attending a Galentines party, going on a sexy daytime date, and finally seeing this show.

Have a sweet, sappy weekend. Write a love letter to someone you hardly know, buy yourself an over-the-top bouquet, flirt with your gym crush, snuggle with your pet.

Share

Three Pieces of Content Worth Consuming

1. There’s A Free Grocery Store in NYC. Here’s How It Works. It’s been fascinating to watch the real-world implications of sports betting becoming legal in the US, which seems to have awakened states to the fact that legal gambling is a massive revenue stream. For proof we’ve reached peak gambling culture, see: Polymarket, the controversial site that allows people to bet on literally anything using crypto. In a clever PR stunt, the site is opening a free grocery store in New York today. Great headline fodder, but I’m curious how long this will last—feels like an aspirational, tech-bro Robin Hood fantasy to me. As an aside, here’s a real resource for finding free groceries in NYC.

2. This Close: A Poem. Dorianne Laux is one of my all-time favorite poets, and this remains the sexiest poem I’ve ever read. For more Valentine’s Day adjacent Laux poetry: a short, tender heart-wrencher and a wistful musing on the shapeshifting nature of the heart.

3. Michael Pollan Says Humanity Is About To Undergo An Evolutionary Change. If you are a person who likes to consider why we are here, what we are, and what it means to be conscious—or, if you were hooked on West World—then you must read this interview. I jotted down so many tidbits while reading: the importance of practicing of consciousness hygiene in a burning world where everything is screaming for our attention at all times, the idea that humans will be the ones to decide whether AI is conscious or not, and if it is, what moral considerations we might need to give it, and the idea what consciousness is not the same thing as having a soul. I promptly preordered this book after reading this piece. Would be very fun to discuss.

   ---

One Good Question

I like this question because it instantly puts you in the space of gratitude. Best to ask one-on-one, to a friend, a sibling, or a lover.

What is one area of your life you feel like you’ve won the lottery in?

**Bonus Content** (The Making of Jeremy O’Harris)

Jeremy O’Harris is an icon, and I loved hearing the backstory of how her seemingly rose to fame out out of nowhere. Florence and the Machine is involved.

Also, football would be so much better like this, a very funny card, two plays I want to see: one, two, so they ARE watching us, the OG heartbreak anthem, this would be such a dreamy renovation project, and how to survive the AI era.

A Quote From A Book You Should Read:

“I tell him about Mrs. Kane, her whispery voice and frizzy white dog and how she wrote books my mother wouldn’t let me read. ‘I tried to anyway, but they didn’t have them at our library.’
‘We’ll have to find them.’
‘We will.’ I look at him, then look away. I’m scared he’ll see how happy I am.”

-Heart the Lover by Lily King

A Note From the Editor

In a world where the endpoint of success and fame is idolized, and where self-documentation is undertaken with an almost religious fervor, I am perpetually dissatisfied by the lack of candid how-I-made-it narratives. It feels like the bigger an artist/creative type becomes, the smaller the story of their “before” becomes—probably a function of a well-oiled PR team. You hear that it was hard, that they got rejected a lot, and then one day, magic happened; they stopped getting rejected and here they are, on top of the world.

But I want specifics. I want to be there with them in the trenches, to understand how they felt when the only thing powering them was their own conviction. I want the nuance—not just what inspired them to write that book, or direct that film, or take that role, but the detailed account of the day they sat down with an open laptop for the first time. How long did they put off the dream before they got serious about it, how many times did they come very, very close to giving up? Who did they meet at a party that helped them get their big break? That’s why I enjoyed jeen-yus so much, especially part one. It’s the only piece of media I’m aware of that puts you right into the thick of it, with a person who was just an average guy with massive dreams, getting shut down at every turn. And you, the viewer, get the rare privilege of riding along on this monumental come up—and, eventually, come down.

That is, in part, what inspired me write today’s edition: how I’m approaching starting a massive creative endeavor from scratch. Remember last year, when I wrote a daily pop-up newsletter while working on a farm in Ireland? I imagine this is going to be like that, but it will only be a daily pop-up during those times when I’m physically in production mode on set, probably starting the week of my first shoot in a few months. For now, just a jumping off point. Starting where everything starts; somewhere.

The Project: A documentary about my little sister, Kaitlin

I have six siblings: two older brothers, two older sisters, a younger brother, and a younger sister who happen to be fraternal twins. My younger sister, Kaitlin, also happens to have Down syndrome.

Anyone who has spent a significant amount of time with Kaitlin would say she is a beacon of light. She’s funny and stubborn as an ox. She loves to dance and her hugs are sincerely therapeutic—if you’ve ever tried Reiki or felt a current of energy running through your body, that’s how hugging Kaitlin feels. It’s warmth and safety, like she’s taking whatever I’m feeling and absorbing it, or transmuting it to something softer and more bearable. I often stay in these hugs for several minutes at a time, unselfconsciously.

I’ve been Kaitlin’s older sister since I was 5. We shared a bedroom most of our lives before I went to college. All those years, I could do my part in protecting her, making her life easier, more fun, watching her back. In the decades since I left Florida and lived all over the world, my role in Kaitlin’s life has naturally been more hands-off. We see each other a few times a year, she texts me every morning, but I can’t say I’ve had any meaningful impact on her life as of late.

Now, Kaitlin is 28. She lives with our parents, and her life has a smaller footprint than it once did. After a big life change during COVID, and then being stuck at home for months, her confidence dipped. I saw it from a distance and have continued to see its manifestations of it in the years since—her speech regressed, she started watching kids’ shows again, she struggled to look waiters in the eye or order for herself at restaurants. Some vital vibrance and light that once emanated from her has dulled. It has been difficult to watch and equally difficult to acknowledge how little I’ve done to intervene.

In the last 6 months or so, Kaitlin has expressed a gentle, roundabout interest in love and dating. I think that’s what finally woke me up to the reality that she is an adult woman squarely in her life, just like me. She has desires, needs, and interests. She also has many more limitations than the rest of us—she can’t speak clearly, which prevents her from communicating those wants and needs. She can’t just get in the car and go, apply for a job, meet up with friends, form relationships. Her life is fully dependent on my parents’ lives—they are in their 70’s, she is in her 20’s. There’s a natural dissonance in interest, wants, and needs there, but it isn’t spoken clearly and plainly because it cannot be. And that, in theory, is where I come in.

I want to use this documentary to understand Kaitlin’s life as it stands—which may be very different than how I imagine it is—and then, to use my resourcefulness to help enrich her life. I’m curious about what independence can look like for her, what her life can stretch to become, what she wants and what she believes she can have.

On a more personal side, I wonder what obligations I have to Kaitlin as her big sister and whether I’ve floundered those obligations up until now. More broadly, I wonder what obligations we have as a society to care for those people who aren’t able to self-start. What do we owe each other? Can we make a real difference in someone’s life when we try? What might happen when we do?

How To Start: First, making up a pre-production checklist, then backing into a timeline

When I sat down and said, “Ok, let’s start this thing,” last Tuesday, I drew a blank. I learned a lot about production and editing in my 6-week documentary intensive last fall, but less about the step-by-step steps one needs to take when going from zero, without the support of teachers or classmates.

Luckily, I also took a month-long documentary course online through Sundance last summer and I had some materials handy from that. So first, I pulled all the reference materials I could find—mostly worksheets with high-level questions about who/what/where/why, and a big grant application that will hopefully help you win grants for your film someday, but in the interim, helps you get to the meat of your story. After looking through all of these materials, I made up a pre-production checklist, in three phases.

Which goes like this:

Phase 1:

• Working hypothesis sheet

• Beat sheet

• Beat interrogation

• Nonfiction Core Application (the big grant application)

• Conduct ongoing topic research all the while

This is where you parse out what the story is, what the scenes might look like, how the suspected conflict could play out, etc. Documentaries carry an element of surprise for both the audience and the filmmaker, but the filmmaker has to do a lot of story work on the front end. You must go into production knowing what shots you need to craft your story as you imagined. Will the story change shape during filming? Will you likely have to stray from your intended course? Probably. But still, you must go in with a plan, and that’s what this phase is all about. This phase can, and should, take a long time. Months, even. I’m attempting to super compress it so that I can start shooting next month.

Phase 2:

• Search for a cinematographer, a sound mixer, and a producer (The director can also be the producer, especially if your tight on funds. You could also have a much larger crew than this, but I’m talking about building a very scrappy, boot-strapped documentary)

• Create a preliminary budget

• Make your shoot schedule

• Start your producer work. This means making a list of all the locations you know you want to shoot in and attempting to get permission to shoot there, making a list of the people you want to interview, preparing releases, etc.

• Keep researching your topic all the while

By now, you know your story enough to pitch it to the right people. The next step is getting the team in place. It isn’t just about finding the best camera person; it’s about finding someone whose temperament is a specific match to yours and to the project’s. The only way to figure this out is to meet with someone, pitch them your project, and see how they react to it. Feel them out. Especially on a shoestring budget, you want someone who really cares about the story. And with a story as personal as this one, I’m also looking for a crew who will be extra sensitive to the environment. I want a cinematographer who can also do lighting, who has the right equipment, who is someone I like and want to spend what will likely be an emotional time with.

This is also where you figure out if you have enough money to get started. If not, you figure out how you’re going to get it. I’m taking the typical documentary approach here and just worrying about the direct next step in terms of budget. Each phase of the process requires money for different things—paying your crew, travel, permits, then paying an editor, a colorist, and then paying for festival submissions. Cumulatively, it’s too much to swallow, so take it one bite at a time. Right now, my main concern is: how much money do I need to get the first shoot done?

Phase 3:

• Meet with your team, get everyone on the same page, review the shoot schedule and what to expect

• Book travel and accommodations for your first shoot

• Ensure interviews are secured, your subject is on board with the shoot schedule, releases are ready to be signed, locations are locked

What I’m Doing Now: Speedy pre-production, research, and ethical considerations

It’s easier to write that all out than it is to actually do it. I’m about a week and a half into the process outlined above, so I’m still squarely nestled in phase one, trying to get this story in a solid place so that I can start looking for a crew. Kaitlin is coming to visit me in New York at the end of March, and my (possibly naive) hope is that by then, we can already have traveled to Florida and done our first round of shooting—mostly verité, observing of her life as it is now—so that when she’s in New York, we can film some other stuff.

I’ve also been deep in research mode this week. I had some guesses about what Kaitlin might be going through these last years, and doing this research on the physical and cognitive challenges people with Down syndrome face as they age has been both illuminating and upsetting. I’m surprised I’d never thought to look this stuff up before. Providing this sort of care requires seemingly infinite resources—financial, yes, but also of time, energy, and a general sense of resourcefulness. It would be a lot for any parent or caretaker to manage, especially with a lower income.

As I’m going through all these exercises, plotting out this idea, endless ethical inquiries arise. As I imagine where Kaitlin’s life is lacking, what might enrich it and fill it up, I must step back and consider what she actually wants, not just what I think she wants. A big piece of this story, I already know, is going to be inspecting the ways in which Kaitlin has been infantilized by teachers, by family, by me. It frustrates her, and I don’t want this film to take an infantilizing approach to enriching her life.

And yet, I won’t be able to sit her down and plainly ask her what she wants out of life, what she feels is missing, how she feels about herself. So I’ll have to toe the line, using what I know about her as her sister, the emotional energy I’ve always been attuned to, what I think is good for her, what she can tell me she wants, what she is and isn’t willing to do. It’s a tricky thing, a delicate thing. Hopefully, a fruitful thing. I have no idea where it will land.

Cheers, my dears, and as always, thanks for reading. This weekend, I’m seeing this musical, having dinner downtown, and baking this cake. I also have this vision of venturing to the park in the snow and sledding, but let’s see how treacherous things are.

Have a wonderful, warn weekend. Take a bubble bath, read for an entire afternoon, make lasagna. And stay safe!

Share

Three Pieces of Content Worth Consuming

1. The Other Shore: The Diana Nyad Story. I made a list of things to watch as I’m in pre-production, and I put this on the list because I wanted to see how a documentary was structured that had a very clear-cut mission. I did not expect this to be such a wild, touching story. At 63-years-old, the woman who already held the record for the longest ocean swim decided she wanted to get back out there and try to complete her dream swim that evaded her on her first attempt: a 60-hour swim from Cuba to Florida, without a shark cage. Incredible, insane, inspiring.

2. The Secret To Being Happier in 2026? It’s Far, Far Simpler Than You Think. An article worth reading. Especially poignant if, like me, your inner disciplinarian springs to life this time of year. It’s wild how life can get so bleak so fast when you don’t live with intention—wake up, work, work out, eat, sleep, repeat forever and ever. It doesn’t have to be that way, though, and I think this advice in this piece is an ideal approach to the year ahead. I loved the line about “the futility of fixing yourself.” Truly futile.

3. I Could Be Famous: A Short Story Collection. Even if I didn’t know the author of this debut collection, I’d highly suggest it. The stories are compulsively readable, all centered around society’s obsession with the endless varieties of fame—traditional celebrity, influencer, cam girl, etc. I feel like short stories can get a bad rep because they tend to be quite literary and not everyone’s cup of tea. These are well written, but they’re also readable, and strange, and cringy, and funny. I went to the book launch party earlier this week, and hearing the author talk about the stories made me like them even more. Excited to discuss at our next book club.

One Good Question

Technically more like five good questions, but you get the point. This one is fun to ask a date or a romantic partner.

What are five things you do better than most people?
(or) What are five things you do especially well?

**Bonus Content** (The Come Up)

This is the come up story we all need!

Also, people at lunchtime, Oscar nominations are out—if you haven’t already seen the film of the year, here’s your sign, a chic new hotel upstate , a cute idea for getting through the winter, and I want this candle.

A Quote From A Book You Should Read:

“Of two sisters
one is always the watcher,
one the dancer.”

-Descending Figure by Louise Glück

A Note From the Editor

Here we are, squarely centered in January 2026. The other side of the holiday cheer, mostly through the first real work week of the year, everybody slowly coming back online, gyms presumably full. I will report that I went to a donut shop yesterday and that was full, too. Glad to know others are also having a mid-day treat this week.

I haven’t yet written my new year letter—write a letter the first week of January, read it on New Years day the following year—nor have I made a hard and fast list of goals I want to accomplish. Last year, I created a full Google Slides presentation to prep for the year, but this year is more about a feeling for me—cultivating it, moving with it, and listening to the intelligent, all-knowing cues of my body. I know very clearly what that feeling is, but to write about it would be a whole different essay and I’m saving that sentiment for my letter. Instead of going there, I’m going all over the place today/ Here are some things I’m currently thinking about as we strap in to this fun, scary, mysterious, possibly taped together carnival ride of a year.

Slow accumulation.

Being in a new apartment and starting from nothing means I’ve had to accumulate again, strange after 3 years of slowly offloading everything I own. Last time I moved into a New York apartment by myself, I hired a designer friend and told him to surprise me. I left an empty apartment on Friday and came back Sunday to a fully outfitted space that felt ike a hotel for the first three months of living there.

I knew this time would be different. It would take one, two, three months to be “done” moving in. Practically nothing carried over, which meant (means) everything I accumulate is carefully considered. No ugly teal and orange mixing bowls from Target, no Amazon brooms with too-soft bristles, no flat throw pillows. Last time, I wanted nothing more than for my living space to be finished as quickly as possible. This time requires an entirely different energy that I had to prepare myself to wade in. Less comfortable, sitting on the floor for a month and eating dinner off the fireplace as you ponder the dining table, but sweeter, somehow. I feel intimately involved with this space. Living in unfinished helps me know what I’m missing, what I need and what I don’t.

I’m thinking about what it means to slowly accumulate, with care, not get it all done in a snap. I’m dreaming of afternoons spent slowly combing through shops in Umbria in the spring, Paris in the summer, finding soft linens, silver napkin rings, treasured trinkets that carry memories, and I’m considering and what it means to cherish your objects, your home, your ordinary life.

Seeking out non-branded spaces.

At the tail end of last year, I spent a frigid December evening at an art studio in Dumbo. We all sat on folding chairs, everyone passed around sips of Vermouth, bowls of cotton-candy grapes. The artist talked about how we were about to see some pieces—video, audio, animation—that she hadn’t yet shared with anyone, because they weren’t initially created for the consumption of others. Maybe she had a crush on someone, maybe she had an inside joke with a friend that lingered in her brain, maybe she was up and leaving her home in the city and dealing with complex emotions that came with it. Life situations had inspired these pieces, each one zanier, stranger, more tender than the next.

They were silly and wonderful and utterly pointless, and that was the point. When do we do pointless things anymore? When do we make art that we’re not being paid to make, write down a few words that we don’t intend to pitch or toss out into the digital ether or one day be salvaged from our journals by a great-grandchild who will hopefully turn them into the basis for an outstanding film? I was inspired by this making for no reason; I realized just how long it had been since I’d been moved to create in that way. At the heart of that kind of creation, art for art’s sake, is the act of resisting the machine, which has grown into a universe in and of itself.

What was once a mostly online advertising experience—Instagram ads, Google ads, paid posts, e-blasts, sponsored videos—has slowly morphed into a permeation of the culture at large, and it hit a fever pitch last year. The uproar caused by Jia Tolentino posting for Airbnb was a wake-up call to just how branded, or looked at another way, just how expensive, the world has become. My favorite internet comedian stopped posting funny videos and now only posts sponcon for CeraVe. One of the larger newsletters I read, whose USP is being cool and in-the-know, has slowly, steadily become more #sponsored, starting last year.

The newsletter intros, which used to consist primarily of name-droppy recaps of dimly lit dinners that you weren’t invited to, were often replaced with recaps of branded events. Even the coolest, most talented writer cannot give a branded event the sex appeal of that dimly lit dinner you weren’t invited to. The caviar-laden menu, the collective media clout of the guest list, not even the filled-to-the-brim goodie bags ever made me envious of the evenings described in these newsletter intros. I’m not saying cool, creative branded events don’t exist—see: the Met Gala after party—but I am saying that anyone even remotely media-adjacent knows there are an endless stream of branded events, dinners, trips, swag, etc., and the proliferation of these types of events into this otherwise uniquely positioned, in-the-know New York newsletter felt strange to me as a reader and a writer, and a marketer.

I do not wish to delve too deeply into the reality, which is that for most artists, creators, and writers, the only way to pay the bills and to have time to make the things you really want to make is by working with brands—which is not a bad thing, by the way. And I imagine once you’re getting a bigger audience, it becomes harder to avoid those proposed partnerships and the fat paychecks that come with them. It’s the influencer who makes their whole brand into branded posts, but she’s beautiful and fit and seems sweet, so people still follow, and they don’t even mind that every other post is an ad for a laser clinic, a homewares store, an appetite-reducing gummy. The ultra-online crowd openly champions especially creative marketing nowadays, calling out campaigns they like in the comments with “MARKETING!”, and that trend has become the best marketing for the cultural acceptance of #sponsored life.

I think this is why I moved to Costa Rica, why I resisted returning to America, why I got off Instagram. I don’t mind being marketed to, I don’t mind a branded post, but I do not want companies and their marketing strategies permeating my real life. Out there in the big, bad world, there are richer experiences than those that happen at a brand dinner. Sculptures that can make you cry, flirting that can make you sweat, fluffy chicks you can cup in your palms, morning sunlight spilling onto newly painted walls, frozen benches to hold your bones as you get lost in a novel, the first bite of an ice cream sundae. I’ll always be seeking out more of this.

Morning reading, evening reading.

Now that I’m back in New York, I find that anything I am not intentional about can easily slip away. And so, intentional reading enters the picture. I feel hungry for the written word. I want to read interesting articles that are long, that require attention. I want to finally finish the philosophy book I’m chipping away at and start another, and I want to get back to morning poetry. In between, I want to read novel after novel—not just my book club novels, but ones I choose. I want to spend hours reading, maybe full days. Have the occasional reading sabbath, where the phone shuts off and my only to-do list item that day is to be horizontal, ideally in some grass, while reading.

The ways cooking becomes more enjoyable, and more regular, together.

There are two philosophies on food and eating: live to eat, or eat to live. I don’t believe you get to choose which of the two you are; I think it is embedded into your person, a card slipped into the palm of the maker just before each of us is born. I also believe there are three types of cooks: naturals, those who can follow a recipe and occasionally riff, and bad cooks (who, presumably, are the eat-to-live types).

As for me, I live to eat and fall squarely in the middle camp of cooks. I’d forgotten how good food can be when I just follow instead of covering everything I eat in soy sauce and sesame oil. I’m single and live alone, so cooking elaborate meals for one is slightly less fun than cooking for someone else. The ingredients, the effort, the chopping, the payoff of only your delighted taste buds. As an aside, I’m always looking for a reason to be in constant communication with my sisters, and so the Sister Cooking Club idea was born.

We all got annual subscriptions to the New York Times cooking app. Each week, one of us picks a recipe and sends it to the group. We all make the recipe at some point that week, and then we send each other pictures and voice notes discussing what we thought of the dish, or tips we have for the ones who haven’t made it yet. I’ve decided to pick three recipes each week—one from the SCC, two of my own—and write out a little menu for myself on a Post-it note in my kitchen. I set up my iPad with the recipe on the counter, which has been much more effective than haphazardly perching my laptop near the full sink, or using garlicky fingers to scroll on my phone. I listen to music, I take my time, and I get lost in it. After, a delicious meal.

I’d forgotten that cooking requires extreme focus, not dissimilar to reading poetry. One moment of mind wandering and you’ve overcooked the ground turkey in your soup, added diced onions to the yogurt sauce. I like the attention that is required of me to follow a recipe, and I love having single portion leftovers frozen for those days I get back from a trip and have no groceries and don’t feel like ordering in.

The pipeline from fostering animals to having animals to having children.

I was lying in the sauna with one of my best friends on the first of January. We asked each other: what are your hopes and wishes for the year? Something about sweating, lying down, eyes closed made me extra open. My automatic answers—something career-related, to make my documentary, to pitch more stories, whatever—bubbled to the surface, but they didn’t feel entirely truthful. We’re talking wishes, hopes, dreams.

When I dug deeper, I realized my chief wish for this year is to tweak the shape and feel of my day-to-day life. To learn how to coexist with another living thing, to learn how to care for something and be cared for, to usher in more love. Specifically, into my living space. I know how to comfortably be alone, how to enjoy time with myself, and now I want to learn how to comfortably not be alone. Questions arise: can I root? Can I anchor and not feel trapped? So far, it all feels very good, light, exactly what I want to be doing and where I want to be.

My soft launch into this new energy is going to be fostering a cat. Hopefully, he is a special cat who doesn’t ruin my new furniture and likes to be pet and makes me work for his love a little. I’ve always thought I’d like to foster a child one day, too, so here’s my opportunity to see what it feels like to love something and care for it while knowing you have to one day let it go.

If it goes well, perhaps I keep the cat, or I realize I am capable of taking on the responsibility of another living thing for the duration of its life. Having a pet of my own, knowing what it feels like to have to think of another living thing as I move about the world, will be a teeny, tiny taste of what it might feel like to have a human child, which is something I’d like to do in the near-ish future.

Nesting and life’s perpetual cycle of newness.

I recall waiting in the airline lounge during a long layover in Kenya in 2024, on the front end of spending several months alone in Africa. I was filled with the crackling fear of the unknown, metallic on my tongue, but in the shadow of that fear was excitement. In the wake of my recent return to New York, nesting in a new-to-me, quieter neighborhood, slowly strolling the tree-lined streets, visiting the mom-and-pop shops, meeting my new neighbors, becoming a regular at a coffee shop, I’ve discovered a new sort of newness, the distant cousin to that crackling excitement I felt arriving in Africa for the first time, or moving to Costa Rica, or navigating life on a farm in northern Ireland.

This excitement is blanketed in the safety of familiarity; it is an excitement that allows for a soothed nervous system. In that way, it is more gentle, but I’ve been surprised to discover it is no less enticing than its more adventurous counterpart. With the former comes the possibility of danger—even if that danger is only the danger of sitting alone with yourself halfway around the world—while the latter provides a scaffold of familiarity. You will not fall flat on your ass because your people will break the fall, you speak the language, your family is only a short, domestic plane ride away. But both are new, and the freshness allows you the opportunity to show up differently, to experience yourself and others differently, to learn something new. This New York is not the New York I once knew; this me is not the me I once knew.

During the first minutes of 2026, I stood outside on a deck blanketed in snow. An LCD Soundsystem song played out of someone’s phone; my friends and I all stood at the edge of the deck, gazing out onto the field of white. The snow looked like fairy dust falling from the sky; it cooled the wine-warmed skin of our cheeks, we caught it on our tongues. I felt mostly sober. In that precise moment, I found myself quietly amazed at the difference a year can make.

Just 365 days prior, I spent these same moments in a slinky silk dress, elevated heart rate, bare feet in sand, bobbing to music even I couldn’t dance to. The air was thick with humidity, with body heat, and no matter how much I consumed, I could not get as lost as I wanted to be. I was not having fun and I wanted to have fun; I wanted to be kissed, to be chosen, to be in the moment. I took someone home and spent the first five days of the year in an all-consuming love nest, my sense of self and sense of boundaries fully evaporated by the end of it.

Back in the snow, I laughed at the absurdity of life. I once feared nothing would ever change, that I’d be stuck doing the same menial job, in the same loud apartment, with the same quiet, persistent sense of self-loathing forever and ever. In reality, life is always changing. Tropics to snow, snow to tropics. It’s changing even when we remain in the same place.

_____

Cheers, my dears, and welcome to 2026! Have a wonderful weekend. I plan to spend it having a cozy night in and watching a scary movie, doing a surprise update to my new apartment, going on a highly anticipated second date, and ending with a sweet Sunday supper club.

And as always, thanks for reading. I’m grateful you’re here. If you enjoy this newsletter, share it with a friend.

Share

Or better yet, check out the new section “One Good Question” and pose the question to a friend.

When I started this newsletter back in 2020, the impetus was to create fodder for more interesting conversations. These conversations don’t always happen naturally, but they can be created with a bit of guidance.

Bring something to the table for you and your friend, partner, coworker, or child to discuss and watch miracles happen. It can be the question, an article, or an idea that struck you while reading. Watch yourself be amazed by the perpetual newness that quietly lurks within the people you thought you knew wholly when probed with the right inquiry. And if a wonderful conversation spurs, do let me know how it goes.

Three Pieces of Content Worth Consuming

1. The 850-Square-Foot Brooklyn Heights Apartment is the Epitome of Romance. I spent all of December in apartment designing mode, and I’m still in it. As such. I’ve been constantly on the lookout for inspiration, which led me to this piece featuring one of my favorite apartments I’ve seen to date. I got so obsessed with that green marble pedestal table that I was hellbent on finding a marble pedestal table of my own, until I realized my space is far too small for such bulk (I came close to this one). The designer in question also has a newsletter I’ve just started reading— this edition was genius.

2. Podcast: Kimberley Quinlan on Anxiety and Self-Compassion. My new apartment is eerily quiet (God bless), but sometimes I need a little ambient sound. My general podcast consumption to date has consisted mostly of morning news podcasts and poetry podcasts, both under 10 minutes, but I’ve been venturing into longer form lately, usually in the realm of therapy-adjacent topics. This episode was fascinating and not as cheesy as the title might make it sound. I especially loved the way she explained social anxiety and the framing and scoring system of the self-compassion quiz.

3. Personals on The Cut. I don’t want to say too much about these because you should just read them, but wow. Wow! Juicy, juicy juice. Dating apps are going downhill fast and single people need more methods to connect, ideally gently enabled by tech or the reach of media orgs, but not at all touched by AI, which is where the tech bros are trying to take it. These personals are perfect. Brief, sexy, and ultra witty. Reading through them reminds me of the early days of Twitter when I would scroll through my feed and wonder how people could possibly be so quippy and clever. This format also exists (seasonally) IRL.

One Good Question

This one’s meant to be shared between two people, or a small group of trusted people.

What is one song you relate to, now, or in the past?

Describe the song and why you relate to it or feel seen by it, listen to the song, repeat.

**Bonus Content** (The Romance of Remembering)

Echoing this sentiment…”I remember” is pure romance!

Also, LA for Paris just pre-ordered this collection of short stories, plotting for dinner parties to come à la this simple dessert served in these vintage beauties, a very cute idea I want to partake in, and every time I write myself a note.

A Quote From A Book You Should Read:

“Fonny: chews on the rib, and watches me: and, in complete silence, without moving a muscle, we are laughing with each other. We are laughing for many reasons. We are together somewhere where no one can reach us, touch us, joined. We are happy, even, that we have food enough for Daniel, who eats peacefully, not knowing that we are laughing, but sensing that something wonderful has happened to us, which means that wonderful things happen, and that maybe something wonderful will happen to him. It’s wonderful, anyway, to be able to help a person have that feeling.”

-If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

A Note From the Editor

In case you haven’t checked your calendar lately, ‘tis the season of rampant capitalism. And this year, dear readers, I am a full-fledged participant in the madness. There are two reasons for this: one, I just moved into a new apartment, with not an apartment-related item to my name but a typewriter and boxes on boxes of books, and two, because I haven’t spent a winter in New York since 2021, so I am very short on warm clothing and accouterments. Paired together, these two factors are how I justified my Black Friday Blackout, in which I sat at my brother’s house over Thanksgiving and went cross-eyed ordering so much stuff that money started to feel like an entirely made-up concept. “I can always return it,” a dangerous refrain indeed.

One of my very favorite people to by gifts for is myself, because no one knows me like I know me. I’ve come to realize I’m not the easiest person to shop for. Buy me a nice candle, a book, a perfectly sized notebook, or a quality piece of jewelry and I’ll never be mad, but otherwise, it is rare for me to be truly delighted by a gift. I think this has to do with my relationship to stuff. I don’t love accumulating stuff, so the stuff I choose to keep is precious cargo. A good gift for me must be either functional, cozy/comforting, beautiful, a little luxe, a little whimsical, or all of the above. Otherwise, it’ll probably end up as a regift or a donation.

Which brings me to today’s edition: a gift guide for me—and, depending on your tastes and current interests, for you, or for whomever you’re shopping for. There are also some thoughts on gifting at the end. Because maybe I’m fully out of touch and have an inflated sense of self, but I consider myself a great gift giver.

A Gift Guide For Me—and For You

Little Treats + Stocking Stuffers

• Aquaphor sticks. I’m not talking the little tubes, I’m talking chubby sticks or bust. I use this stick to coat the back of my hands before bed and it’s made them decidedly less reptilian. The sticks are just annoyingly expensive enough that I’d be thrilled to find one or two in my stocking.

• Cashmere socks. Expensive socks aren’t something people are typically going to buy for themselves, which is what makes these a great gift. And I’m sorry to report, but they are absolutely worth the price.

• Wool insoles. Purchased on a whim from a neighborhood boutique, and they’ve transformed my previously hostile Doc Martens into a warm, cozy winter boot. Gift these inserts with the socks. They’ll be surprised by how much they use this gift.

• Snail eye patches. You could do this as a “morning self-care trio” for a person in your life who’s into morning routines. Give them these instructions: Stick these patches in the fridge, ice your face, dry brush, then seal it all in with the snail eye patch. A perfect, de-puffing morning.

• A beautiful match holder. I’d gift this with a fancy candle (haven’t tried this one, but it’s on my list). You could also do a fun box of matches instead.

• Smoked Maldon salt. I love the idea of buying quality condiments as stocking stuffers; a petite splurge that adds a lot of joy to daily life. You could also do this supreme truffle salt or some good chili crisp.

• A flower satchel. Super cute, and super useful if you bike around NYC with flowers. I can also imagine putzing around a Farmer’s Market with a big bouquet strapped on my waist. Chic!

Surprise and Delights

• An astrocartography reading. I gifted this to myself this summer—partly for a story pitch I was working on—and it was one of the best readings I’ve had. is a wise, generous owl. After the reading, I decided not to spend a month on a farm in Greece (which would have been intense, according to my Pluto line) and opted for Ireland instead. I also learned I have love lines running through Japan and the Eastern Coast of Australia, and that Brazil is allegedly a great place for me all around. A fun gift for the travelers and/or the astrology enthusiasts in your life.

• A print subscription to the New Yorker. I love a gift that spans multiple months, and this one can also spark conversation between you and your recipient (get yourself one, too!), Now that I’ve got a US home base again, I like the idea of subscribing to a few print mags. N+1 and Paris Review are also good options, published triannualy and quarterly.

• A psychic reading. I can almost guarantee that any open-minded person you gift this to will be delighted. The fun part about this gift is that it works for so many life situations—if someone’s at a personal crossroads, if they’re in the process of making a major decision, etc. I’ve “gifted” myself many, many of these sessions over the last two years.

Big Ticket Items That Are Totally Worth It

• A surprise getaway. Sure, it’s a little more leg work, but planning someone a surprise trip is the sweetest big-ticket gift idea. Plus, it’s a gift for you, a gift for them. If I were gifting this, I’d either do a classic luxury destination, like a long weekend in Napa, or cool, slightly more affordable European city, like Budapest. Pick a pretty boutique hotel, make a restaurant reservation or two, and let the rest naturally unfold when you get there.

• A Dyson Airwrap. I showed up to dinner with friends the other night, and the first thing one of them said when I sat down was, “She got the Airwrap.” That she did, and after years of contemplation, I’m happy to report it is an absolute hair game-changer. If you have someone in your life with hair who’s not necessarily great at doing hair, this is the gift.

• A creative class. A writing class, a filmmaking course, open time at a pottery studio, an improv workshop, a cooking class, you get the drift. What has your recipient always expressed interest in, but never managed to make time for? It’s a gift that encourages play and might be the push someone might need to get their creative thing going. Or to just try something new. Bonus points for an in-person, weekly class.

Tactful, But Make It Sexy

• Ceramic nontoxic cookware. Don’t let your loved ones eat off Teflon, and don’t assume they’re steel pan cooking wizards. I love the color of this cute Stanley Tucci set.

• Giant cashmere scarf. Every time I see a woman in a giant cashmere scarf, she looks put together. She can be wearing a sweatsuit, sneakers, it doesn’t matter, it’s the scarf. I’ve been hunting for the perfect one and finally found it—just the right weight, texture, and structure.

• Cute rice cooker. The most functional, multipurpose kitchen appliance they didn’t know they needed. Ideal for those who don’t have a ton of extra kitchen space. And it makes the best oatmeal!

• Sweatpant jeans. When I saw my friend in these and discovered they were not real jeans, my jaw hit the floor. Comfy, chic, and shocking? A winning gift combo.

And Finally, Some Thoughts on Gifting

• Giving a good gift is an act of attentive listening. To give someone a gift they will use, that delights them, that they wanted, or that they didn’t know they wanted means you’ve been paying attention. You know something about where they’re at in their life, how they move about their spaces, how they spend their time. A good gift is intimacy in motion.

• If you’re stuck on what to get someone, consider their current life circumstances and work from there. Did they just move into a new place? Did they just get a new job? Did they just pick up a new hobby? Do they have a pet, do they have a toddler, do they have a big trip coming up? These ins will help you get to thinking about gifts that are relevant to the person, which is a good start.

• Don’t be afraid to ask people what they want, or to ask for some general guidance.

• Always, always, always include a gift receipt. And give your recipient explicit permission to use it.

• To be an exceptional gift giver, shop for gifts year-round. At some point in time that isn’t December, you’ll likely come across the perfect gift for a person you care about. Buy it then and there. This also alleviates the pressure of the mad December dash and lessens your chance of a Black Friday Blackout.

Cheers, my dears, and as always, thanks for reading. Christmas is two weeks away, and the social calendar proves it. This weekend, I have a housewarming party, a Christmas party, and a festive sleepover—we’re watching The Family Stone. Between all that, I want to get supplies to make holiday cookies and try to sneak in a little sauna time. Next week, I want to oscillate between being horizontal and doing all the cute New York holiday activities I haven’t yet gotten to. It really is the sweetest time of year here!

Share

Perhaps You Should… Play Santa

This idea is adorable. Kids mail in letters to Santa, and you can adopt one of the letters and play Santa by ordering gifts from the letter—a good reminder of what this time of year is really about! If you’re considering doing this, Saturday’s the last day to ship gifts.

**Bonus Content** (Grossy’s Holiday Cookie Genius)

There is no corner of the internet quite as joyful as Dan Pelosi’s Instagram, especially during holiday cookie season (watch his current stories for proof). Though I’m still off IG, I’ll log in to my browser during this time of year just to consume all his cookie content.

I’m getting my holiday baking started early next week, so I’ve been all over this guide (no paywall, God bless!). I’ve made these and these in previous years, both exceptional.

A Quote From A Book You Should Read:

“There were no marble-topped tables, long mirrors, or lace curtains in the little parlor, but simple furniture, plenty of books, a fine picture or two, a stand of flowers in the bay window, and, scattered all about, the pretty gifts which came from friendly hands and were the fairer for the loving messages they brought.”

-Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

A Note From the Editor

When I returned to New York in September after a year in Costa Rica and a month working on a farm in Ireland, I felt a bit like this. I remember walking along the streets and noticing, as if for the first time, how everyone was jogging. Everyone trotting to and fro, like Sims characters. I didn’t notice all of the things that made New York feel unbearable to me in years past, and that surprised me—the trash, the noise, the crowds. Or maybe I did notice it, but with fresh eyes.

I went to Times Square early one morning to shoot some stills for my first film school assignment. I had been there so many times before. I knew the flashing lights, the costumed kiddie characters with their headpieces casually removed, dragging from a cigarette, the throngs of tourists taking selfies on the streets. But that particular morning, I arrived someplace I had never been.

I first noticed all the work being done to clean things up, to get things going. A man mopping the grime off a sidewalk, a man pulling open the shades to a newsstand, a trio of men climbing up a ladder in their heavy boots, one after the other, to attend to some mysterious construction project concealed by scaffolding. I noticed a homeless man sitting on a police barricade drinking white wine straight from the bottle, swinging his legs like a young boy. Times Square was nothing I knew, as it turned out, and I would find myself wanting to return again.

__________

I came back for a six-week documentary filmmaking intensive. I’d spent the last several years thinking about how I wanted to make documentaries, but unsure how to start or if I had the energy to. Still, I had a hunch that documentary might be something like a high calling, combining all of my skillsets while fulfilling my increasingly urgent desire to do work that feels meaningful to me.

So here I was, returning to the city that brought me, up but that had also chewed me to a bloody pulp on many occasions. I planned to use this time to flirt with life in New York. Try a new, quieter neighborhood while attempting to maintain a more regulated nervous system. Lots of curiosity, loose on the expectations.

__________

My program was intense. Five days a week in the classroom, sometimes until as late as 9pm, while finding subjects for our projects in the brief breaks between classes and during lunch. Getting in touch with said subjects, getting them to trust you, and to agree to be filmed, all within a very brief window of time. On the weekends, shooting.

We would be split into groups of three for shoot days. Each person directed their own project, while the other two crewed as cinematographer and producer/sound/lighting person. Often we’d do all three of these shoots in a single day, schlepping from a carriage house in Clinton Hill to San Genaro Festival in Little Italy to an artist’s loft in Gowanus, lugging huge, heavy equipment all the while.

I created a little morning ritual on the days I was directing: wake up, get ready, then walk to wherever I was headed while listening to this song on repeat. A flutter of nerves would walk alongside me, but then I would arrive on set and see my crew there waiting and something would click into place. I’d slide right into the flow of it.

I remember being in a tiny bedroom in Gowanus with the aforementioned artist, her sequined stage costume and cape laid out on her bed, a piano tucked in the corner, a “Fast, Free Buses” sign taped in the window. I was the cinematographer for that shoot and I felt especially unsure of my skillset. It was my first time operating the camera. There was no space for the director in the room, but she said she trusted my eye, and so I let her confidence carry me. The young artist put on a Ramones record. I swallowed my doubt and perfectionism and pressed record, and there was that click again.

l remember getting on the subway that evening, exhausted to the core, but buoyant. The day electrified me. It felt like living.

__________

Another time, I was interviewing three of my best friends at one of their apartments, a place that is very much a second home to me. We were a few weeks into the program and I was deathly ill. A constellation of stress-induced pimples decorated my left cheek, the skin beneath my eyes was swollen and dark.

Now, I’ve interviewed all kinds of people over the years for my work and I’ve always considered myself a strong interviewer—my interviews often bleed into energizing conversation, and that’s where the real gold comes out. Interviewing my friends would be the easiest task imaginable, I thought, and well-suited to my less-than-stellar physical state.

It was not.

For one, documentary interviewing is different than journalism interviewing. After each answer, there needs to be a long, loonnng beat of silence, otherwise you’ll have an annoying “mmhmm,” or “yeah,” or “I get that,” to deal with in your edit. I’d practiced these pauses beforehand, but they felt entirely unnatural while talking to three of my closest friends. You cannot hold a notebook or glance at your questions, you must maintain eye contact. Speak slowly. Set the emotional tone, create plenty of space. I felt too stiff, too formal, and it made me self-conscious.

I was constantly surprised by my nerves, more buzzy than they’d been on any previous project. At one point, it felt as though some invisible force had blown my body full of air, like I could float straight up to the ceiling. I’m actually doing this, I realized. Sitting there, interviewing three brilliant women, supported by a crew of three brilliant women. Living something I’d dreamt of many times over.

__________

We only had two days to edit that project. It was a Sisyphean task, as I had not yet edited something this non-linear and subjective. I needed to find the story, create the through line with three disparate interviews and no b-roll. As I watched my friends recite their answers again and again, it began to dawn on me that while I thought I knew everything about each of them, I in fact did not.

I thought of how, when we meet new people, our minds operate as though that person were born on the day they came into our lives. Even when we ask questions and dig into their past, we are always organizing and relating the newly acquired information to the image of the person our mind has been busy constructing from day one.

It was an odd thing, realizing this in the context of a best friend, realizing I hadn’t fully comprehended a crucial part of her life story. Though I had heard the story before and filed it away, I hadn’t clocked the emotional weight or its crucial context. It wasn’t until I watched the footage, then rewatched it, then let it sink, then walked away from it, then digested it that I began to understand how much I had missed, before.

__________

Other things happened. I went on several dates, got burnt out and then decided to pause dating, to prioritize school and writing and seeing my friends. I started in-person therapy again. I went on many walks, took many bike rides, allowed myself to be filled with the joy that is fall in New York. There’s really nothing like it. I finally watched You’ve Got Mail. I went to the movies to see blockbuster films, arthouse films, a series of short documentaries that left me feeling staticky with excitement.

I went to book club for the first time in forever. We sat around and drank wine and talked about a group of Norwegian women from the 1600s who were burned at the stake, accused of being witches for their self-sufficiency. Meanwhile, we’re all stealthily checking our phones for election results, and then the New York Times calls it, and we’re all screaming, jumping up and down, hugging each other. We opened the windows and yelled out onto the darkened sidewalks, to the passing cars. We played Frank Sinatra and swayed along, smiles plastered on our faces, drunk on hope.

I went to the New York City Marathon and screamed for the runners, danced on the stoop of a house party in Fort Greene, did the Electric Slide in the street with a bunch of strangers, saw Spike Lee perched atop a makeshift throne, his outfit impeccable. I toured apartments—tiny, large, underwhelming, overwhelming. I laid on the floor and thought about what I wanted next, then stopped thinking so hard and just listened to my body.

__________

Cheers, my dears, and as always, thank you for reading along. More space has opened up in my life lately, which means more time to get back to writing this newsletter. There are some big changes on the horizon for me, and with change comes plenty of creative fodder. I’m excited for all of it, and to have you along for the ride.

Share

Three Pieces of Content Worth Consuming

1. A Very Low Key Winter Checklist. This will be my first winter in New York since 2021 (!!!). Needless to say, I am very cold and in need of chic winter wear, but also trying to prepare for the grey doom spiral that follows the holiday season. I loved this winter checklist and am going to use it as a basis to make my own. My friends and I have talked about doing a standing Sunday supper. I’ve also been thinking of taking more trips to The Met to thoroughly explore it, finding a place for regular sauna sessions, stocking up on novels, spending more time at the movies, etc. I’m ready to nest.

2. Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now? Half of my readers will see this headline and think, “She’s late to the party.” The other half will have never heard of this viral Vogue article, and therein lies my greatest takeaway and critique. The article marginally expounds upon the headline, by asserting that heteronormative culture is changing because women who post their boyfriends online are losing followers, which must mean having a boyfriend no longer holds the same cultural cache as it once did. The author makes a handful of references, like “conversations I’ve had,” as proof points of the suggested cultural shift. My issue with pieces like this is that they take something happening online and try to transpose it onto the offline world. Rarely does the sentiment translate to lived reality. In fact, I would argue now is the golden age of heteronormative everything in America. Christianity’s decline is halting, the trade wife is booming, there are actually headlines like this. A reminder that the TikTok world and the brick-and-mortar world are often operating on two very different orbits.

3. Do Not Ask Your Children to Strive: A Poem. Though I’m not a parent, I often think about what kind of parent I’d want to be. I used to imagine myself as the type to force her children to be the best at whatever they chose to do—a tennis pro or a piano savant, perhaps—but that vision has changed over the years. Now, I’m most interested in the type of parenting this beautiful poem describes.

Perhaps You Should…Watch My Final Film Project

During the six-week documentary intensive, we were tasked with making four different short films—an insane amount of projects in such a short time. We had a rare day off during the first week of the program and I had a ton of work to do. I decided to take a mid-day walk in Prospect Park, and there I found a sick baby squirrel, which led me on a wild, multi-hour adventure that eventually led to Kris, who ended up being the subject of my final film. She is hilarious, fascinating, and generous. I feel lucky to have randomly stumbled upon her.

The footage was shot over the course of three visits, one of which was our first time with the camera. It took me many, many, many grueling hours (and many tears) to edit this film myself, just weeks after learning how to use Premiere Pro for the first time. No one but my classmates and instructors has seen this project, so you, dear readers, will be the only other audience I share it with. Enjoy!

**Bonus Content** (Remember SYTYCD?)

@layla_.mckenzieTwitch and Lauren SYTYCD hiphop #twitchdancer #twitchdance #sytycd #danceduet #dancepartner #soyouthinkyoucandance #dancecompetition #danceperformance #hiphopdance #fyp #foryou #viral #ComproDoPequeno

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Forgot how good this combo was. Rest in peace Twitch.

Also, even crappy real estate photos can’t take away the beauty of this apartment, a cute gift wrapping idea, so sad tickets for this are sold out, but I’m definitely going to see this, my friend make the most impeccable dessert for Friendsgiving, and could you withstand a total darkness retreat?

A Quote From A Book You Should Read:

“A person has only so much juice, and it’s ideally kept for your homeboys, not all pissed away on strangers before three in the day. Simple as that sounds, it was a game changer for me. I taught myself to save the juice. It’s a skill, like weight training, you do reps. Tell yourself ten times each night, don’t spend your juice on those sirens, worrying about the life screaming past on its way to getting tanked. Don’t spend it on the customers around you at Walmart Supercenter, just do your job without feeling the madness or sadness, the moms on the brink of snatching their kids bald-headed. The carts loaded with cases of PBR and Pampers.”

-Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

A Note From the Editor

Today is my 33rd birthday, and Beyonce’s 44th—how far we’ve come!

I started writing this annual birthday edition on my 28th birthday in 2020. It was COVID times, and I was in Maine with my former partner on a lovely week-long getaway. We hiked and ate big slices of blueberry pie and walked along a flower-lined path to the ocean. I was working a full-time job in creative marketing and yearning to write, though I was also deep in the interview process for a different marketing job at a major tech company. I knew I didn’t want the job, but I did want the money. It felt like a critical juncture where the path was forking—would I go for the money and say later to my dreams, which were far less clear-cut but more compelling? Or would I go for the money, ostensibly buying more time to follow my dreams later on?

At the time, I didn’t know that life would continuously route me toward such junctures, that I would always be faced with choosing this path over that one. There are many seasons that feel like fresh starts in life. I’m in one of them now, but I am under no delusion that this chapter is my final self-professed beginning. There will be chapters and chapters on end. If I’m lucky, this is one of those thick novels you see someone reading on the subway and think, damn, good for you.

I’ll never stop loving my birthday. Each year it fills me with glee; I was born, I grew and changed and lived and explored, and here I am again. I like the double number, 33. I like where I’m at with myself. My head and heart are in a solid place. There isn’t a day that I don’t feel lucky for everything I have, and excited for everything I still want. I can feel time passing by more than I did a few years ago—it happens with age, just like they always said—but the feeling only motivates me to really go for it each day. No point in holding back or being afraid.

So, in honor of my birthday, I bring to you my favorite tradition: doling out unsolicited advice. Each year, I start a note on my phone immediately after I send out this birthday edition, collecting little bits of lived wisdom as the days go by. Enjoy!

1. When you arrive at a new place, take a long, leisurely walk around the neighborhood. Notice the details—how many people are on the streets? What do they have in common? What are the lawns like, the facades of businesses? You can learn a lot about a place during an observation walk.

2. Make a note in your phone with all of the information you need to quickly reference. For me, that’s frequent flier numbers, my TSA pre-check number, my storage unit access code, and my health insurance info. It's much easier than sifting through emails and screenshots.

3. If you’re a sweaty person who wants to avoid aluminum deodorants without being stinky, try this balm. It’s kept me fresh through long runs, hard workouts, and life in the tropics.

4. Keep a running note in your phone titled “Wins and Acknowledgments, (Month Name)”. At the end of each day, write down anything you did that you’re proud of—nothing is too small. Make a habit of doing this; it’ll train you to notice your progress and will help to build your confidence.

5. If you’re driving up hill and fear you won’t make it, don’t hit the brakes! Steady on the gas and you’ll get up just fine.

6. Transform your shower into a mood. Turn off the lights, light a candle or two, play this playlist on a Bluetooth speaker. This is how you transform ordinary moments into special occasions.

7. When leaving a hotel, always leave a tip for the housekeepers. As a nice bonus, leave a thank-you note in the native language of the place you’re visiting. There’s a good chance this will make someone’s day.

8. If you find yourself noticing concessions you’re making to be liked—by a boss, a friend, a coworker, a romantic interest—don’t invest much more emotional energy into that person. Those concessions only get louder as time goes on.

9. Everyone should know their superpower(s). If you don’t know yours, you can start figuring them out by naming five things you’re especially good at.

10. If you drop something small on the ground and can’t find it, turn off the lights and use your phone flashlight. The spotlight effect makes the item much easier to find.

11. Be aware of the things you’re accumulating in real time. Create a regular practice of auditing your stuff—clothes, items in the random desk drawer, hand-me-downs, etc.—and up-cycle as you go. This will prevent the large-scale accumulation/purge cycle that happens when you move.

12. On that note, avoid taking the free gift that comes with your $100+ purchase unless it’s something you really want.

13. You don’t have to power through when you don’t feel good, physically or emotionally. Take a sick day.

14. Work on building back up your attention span. For 30 minutes each week, read something that requires ultimate concentration, like this or this. If you stop paying attention for even a moment, you’ll be lost—that’s the point.

15. Don’t book the cheapest class of airline ticket, even if it saves you $100. The flexibility to make changes and the ability to choose your seat are well worth the extra cost.

16. When you hear someone say something nice about another person, tell that person what was said about them.

17. A trick to save wilting tulips: poke a hole through the stem and watch them stand up like magic.

18. When you start feeling down, make it a point to get out of the house straight away. Get dressed and head off somewhere—the park or a coffee shop will do. Sometimes getting into a new, non-solitary space is enough to curb the spiral.

19. To become a regular at any local business, ask the cashiers, baristas, anyone you’ll regularly encounter their names. Make a list in your phone with the names and defining characteristics of each person so you can greet them by name the next time you see them. You’ll be surprised how warm your interactions become when you start doing this.

20. When learning something new, think slow to learn fast.

21. Replace your inner critic with an inner cheerleader. First, get acquainted with your inner critic—you must be able to hear them and notice when they’re speaking. Then, picture the cheerleader in full get-up, full of enthusiasm. Whenever the critic pipes up, let the cheerleader respond. This is a fun and surprisingly effective exercise.

22. Remember, all practice is good practice.

23. When making a to-do list, only ever write down 3 essential tasks. This will help you learn to prioritize what’s really important and avoid overwhelming yourself with tasks.

24. Create a ritual you follow each time you get home from a trip to soften your landing. I always make up my bed with fresh sheets before I go. When I return, I order takeout for dinner and light a candle. If I’m home early, I also pick up fresh flowers.

25. Silence is medicine. Bring it into your life more intentionally.

26. The state of your bed speaks directly to the value you see in yourself. Buy a nice mattress that suits your life and age and holds your body firmly, yet comfortably. Buy sheets made from organic material; you’ll feel the difference. Have an extra set of sheets. Discover which pillow is best for your sleeping position. Treat your bed with the reverence it deserves; this is your recharging portal.

27. On that note, nighttime rituals are priceless. A candle and tea before bed, reading each night, lavender essential oil on the wrists, seasonal bedding. Sleep is worth investing in; the direct ROI is your quality of life.

28. Always consider how you are replenishing what you are taking—from others, from the environment, from the places you visit.

29. Everything compounds, and more quickly than you’d expect. Don’t “just start,” start and get into a flow. This can happen in one afternoon, over the course of a week, a month, whatever. Once you begin putting true, inspired energy into something you’re interested in, every action will compound. It isn’t about time spent, necessarily; it’s about the energy and consistency you bring to the task.

30. When weeding your proverbial garden, always pull at the root.

31. There is no such thing as a perfect job, but your work should make you feel more alive than dead.

32. It’s only too late to pivot when you decide it's too late. Hint: it’s never too late.

33. Resourcefulness is the best insurance policy. Cultivate resourcefulness and you’ll never really be SOL.

Cheers, my dears, and thanks for reading! For once, I haven’t made grand plans for my birthday. I plan to spend today going to yoga, reading in the park, and basking in the birthday love with some sweet friends. Not being on Instagram makes birthday messages an unpredictable, precarious thing, so if you feel like wishing me a happy birthday, do it. I’m not above asking for what I want :)

Share

Thanks for reading my sixth annual birthday edition. For past birthday lists, see 28, 29, 30, 31, and 32. This list was inspired by creative genius, Kevin Kelly, whose wise list is worth reading.

Perhaps You Should…Stay In a Fancy Boutique Hotel

I used to be an Airbnb girl, but times have changed. After being told to empty the dishwasher and strip the beds one too many times, I've converted back over to hotels. There’s a time and place for Airbnbs, like when my huge family gets together, or when my friends and I go on a New Year's trip where we want to cook, but most other occasions are hotel times.

I treated myself to a lovely hotel in Dublin, and I decided there are a few things that make a hotel stay exceptional:

• It’s not a chain hotel—not easy to find in the days of the great hotel mergers, but still possible! Boutique hotels will always be more charming.

• Proper room service with a full dinner menu.

• Turndown service each night. Bonus points if the turn-down service results in a little treat.

• An electric tea kettle, a mini bar that includes a good selection of complimentary teas.

• At least one thing you want to bring back home—i.e., where are these sheets from, what is this scent, what brand is this little bar of hand soap?

• In-room waters that are regularly replenished and free.

**Bonus Content** (Virgos virgos virgos)

@ricotaquitoVirgo season ❤️😍 and guess what, i have the link right where you’d expect it to be

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Me every year, wish this weren’t true, 100% accurate, and I actually laughed out loud.

Also also, this song is my anthem for the year.

A Quote From A Book You Should Read:

“She took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy.”

-My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante