✥ Right before I began my summer-long social media break, I found a braided hairstyle on Instagram that has become my everyday go-to to keep my hair off my neck. But I lost the link, so I can't share it! I am going to attempt to describe it. Part your hair evenly in the back down the middle and braid each section on either side. I do a braid that starts pretty high up in the hair, incorporating more pieces in as you go. French braid, Dutch braid, whatever. Secure the ends with tiny rubber bands. Take each braid and sort of loop the end up to where the braid touches the nape of your neck (I am describing this badly, sorry) and secure each loop with a bigger rubber band. Cross one loop through the other at the back of your head and bobby pin in place against the back of your head. It's sort of like a Princess Leia Hoth hair style from the front, but it's not really, because that was a braided crown that circled around the whole head. Anyway, if you can decipher my instructions, I highly recommend it to keep your long hair off your sweaty neck this summer!
✥ I don't know if
these things from Toad & Co. are capri pants, exactly, but they are a little shorter than my regular pants and they are lightweight and just really perfect. Another pair of black pants, just what I need!
✥ For the past two newsletters I mentioned
BHA Salicylic Acid stuff from Paula's Choice. I typically would not bore you with something twice in a row, let alone three times, but my skin looks freaking amazing, the best it has looked in YEARS. Like, since my early 30s, maybe. At least in terms of redness and inflammation. I still have age spots and wrinkles. It's not that miraculous! But if you're someone who pays attention to recommendations and you think things like "ok yeah you like this NOW, but it's a new product in your rotation, what about 90 days from now?? I am here to tell you it's been at least that long, and I am still very happy with it. OKAY. I swear I am done talking about it.
✥
I have been making this
spiced chickpea stew with coconut and turmeric every week and I am still not tired of it. It's an Allison Roman recipe and I feel like we were supposed to cancel her for something she said to/about Chrissy Teigen (or maybe it was the fact that what she is calling “chickpea stew” is really just chana masala) but also I recall that we were supposed to cancel Chrissy Teigen for something or other, so maybe…it all just cancels each other out? And it's ok to make the recipe? I don't know. Neither cultural appropriation nor cyberbullying is a good look, but I've made so many modifications – swapping spices, adding my own touches, changing the technique – that I'm not sure it even counts as the same recipe anymore. Maybe that's enough distance from the whole mess.
✥
MAJ (a.k.a. My Analog Journal) scratches an itch I didn't know I had. Zag Erlat plays vinyl-only sets from his London apartment (and omg I deeply covet the magnificent rug under his record player set up) and each mix focuses on a specific theme – Turkish psychedelic from the '70s, Brazilian funk, Japanese city pop. It feels like hanging out in someone's living room while they play you their favorite records, and I find myself discovering music I never would have found otherwise. It's become my go-to for both background music and active listening. My favorites though, are the guest sets: I think I have listened to
Psychedelia & Acid Folk with Beirut Groove Collective and
Brazilian Samba Grooves with Batukizer a gazillion times in the past month or so.
✥ I have been obsessed with
Lusty Monk Mustard ever since my brother-in-law first introduced me to it several years ago, and I finally got my hands on a jar. I found it at a local cheese shop with an excellent, perhaps THE MOST excellent name: The Grater Good. As someone with a fanatical condiment fixation* (I am at the point where I need a separate fridge for my collection) tracking down a local source for this particular mustard felt like a real win. It is absolutely the best spicy mustard I have ever had.
*
not you, ketchup. ✥
Real Big Challenges stickers have become my favorites for decoration and validation. The gold star "I cried today" stickers are genius – why shouldn't emotional messiness get the same recognition as spelling tests? The artists behind it clearly understand that regular motivational stuff is useless when you're just trying to survive being human and their stickers reflect actual human experience instead of aspirational nonsense.
✥ A perfume I loved:
Oddity Delulu. Beautiful foolishness, madcap delight. Coloring book fruit bowls come to life scribbled wild outside every line, Aladdan’s cave jeweled jello towers giggling, wibbling, sweet reckless audacity of spinning til dizzy-drunk, dress helicopter-whirling eyeballs pinwheel-wild. Mandarin acid-bright, cartoon citrus. Rhubarb’s pink bite. Blackcurrant shadows pooling, brief gravity, wry mordancy. Peachy fuzz osmanthus, vetiver’s tannic grip, a self-aware undertow of flat champagne effervescence, Tartness with sass-filtered sweetness, bright bright primary colors, slightly chaotic energy of cars shaped like pickles and animals wearing tiny hats doing important jobs, delightfully absurd, winking impish. Breathless, tumbling; catching joy by its wrist as it races past.
It’s a scent that combines the feeling of radical kindness and demented glee and calls to mind why I love the stories of shows like Steven Universe. As a matter of fact, I think the whole cast of Steven Universe smells like this, the way they can be simultaneously deeply caring and completely unhinged with joy. That combination of genuine sweetness with chaotic energy – it’s Garnet’s cool confidence meets Amethyst’s wild abandon meets Steven’s pure-hearted enthusiasm. The fragrance has that same quality of being deeply good-natured but never boring, sweet but with enough “edge” to keep it interesting.
I just read John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet and this is a scent that sort of makes me think of what he wrote here, “You can’t see the future coming–not the terrors, for sure, but you also can’t see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.”
✥
The Anthropocene Reviewed makes me think Steven Universe desperately needs a John Green review - he would probably give it five stars for teaching us that love is an action, not just a feeling, or for showing kids that healing trauma is possible but messy and nonlinear. This book is a collection of essays adapted from Green's podcast where he reviews random aspects of human existence - everything from air conditioning to cave paintings - on a five-star scale, weaving in stories about his own struggles with mental health and finding hope during dark times. What could have been a gimmicky concept becomes something genuinely moving about how we find meaning in small things. Green includes a quote from Amy Krouse Rosenthal - "PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO. That's pretty much all the info you need" - which is essentially what the entire book is doing. I read this book as a digital library loan and I loved it so much that I bought myself a used copy.
