4 days in the life-- my last in Brooklyn til September.
SHOOK by how much you liked the last one-- let's do it again!
I am a little in shock about how much you liked my last DITL post— it ended up being my fourth most popular post in nearly two years of writing this newsletter, despite the fact that I didn’t do much of anything in the four days I brought you along for. I’ll try not to take it personally that me going on a short walk to get matcha outperforms the lengthy pieces about the most challenging moments of my life…
So we’re doing it again! And maybe we’ll do it once a month, depending on how this goes. Right after I made the decision to do this, I saw the post below, lol.
Unfortunately, I also go to pilates, drink caffeinated beverages, and have Zoom meetings. Darn! Hopefully I spice it up enough to not bore you to tears.
Click here to view in browser, the images make this one LONG! Let’s spend Friday through Monday together— my last full weekend in Brooklyn before moving to Long Island for the summer!
Post-Europe jet lag has been amazing, I’m in bed at 10:00 every night and up naturally by 6:30 at the latest. Today is a bit more of a struggle than usual, but I manage to pry my eyes open to read a few pages of Banal Nightmare, which I start for the first time today.
There was a bit of a dog-has-explosive-diarrhea-in-the-middle-of-the-night-and-now-it’s-everywhere situation, my fiancé kindly tackles that for us so that I can get ready for my morning yoga class. Before going, I jot down a few quick bullets— things I’m grateful for (my fiancé for cleaning up the diarrhea), to-dos, and then I get myself to inbox (and Slack notification) zero. Normally I wouldn’t be doing this before 7:30 AM, but I have a ton to do today, and I want to come back from yoga not feeling behind!
Post-yoga, I treat myself to an iced vanilla cappuccino at Kijitora. Since getting home on Tuesday, my at-home coffee vibes have been off. Nothing I make tastes good. I recently ordered the Persian Pistachio and Cinnamon Social coffee syrups from Transcendence to rectify the situation.
After I finish yoga, I walk our dog, Canela, try on three outfits I hate before settling on the one I hate the least (button-up, pointelle shorts, similar pearl necklace, Le Bon Shoppe socks and Bombas slippers), and do some haphazard makeup with my fingers, since my makeup brushes are still wet from washing on Tuesday. (How?!) It’s feeling really chaotic. I’m so behind!!
When I finally sit down to work, I have no choice but to be insanely productive. (I kind of put my back up against a wall like this on purpose sometimes, it works for me… if I have plenty of time to do a task, I kinda don’t do it. If I have a very small amount of time to do 10 tasks, I will crush them all and destroy anything else in my path.) I crank through something I thought I needed 2.5 hours for in an hour. I use the remaining time to get back to inbox 0, catch up on my industry news, and knock out a few tasks for my boss.
Among said industry news:
Pleased to see Material Kitchen launched a new cutting board that’s 100% plastic free and biodegradable… I make a mental note to buy this later.
Selena Gomez’s mental health focused media company missed payroll and is clearly in distress! This doesn’t totally surprise me, I mostly forgot about them. I do feel bad for the employees, I have worked somewhere that ran out of money to pay me and it was brutal on my mental health. (Ironic for a mental health startup though?)
Two interesting acquisitions: Chobani acquires Daily Harvest, Church and Dwight acquires Touchland. I can’t say I saw either coming, but they both make sense.
From then on, it’s off to the races and I’m in meetings most of the day. One of my meetings gets me majorly un-stuck! My mood turns around.
The day drags by, but finally I wrap up, quickly swap out the pointelle shorts for a pair of white wide leg jeans, and go to meet my friend Sophie in the park. We walk to a wine bar in South Williamsburg that one of her friends is working at tonight to check it out. This is my first social outing since getting back to Brooklyn from Spain & Portugal and the prices for a glass of wine ($20) and bread and butter ($12) really smack me in the face…
After two glasses of wine and a few shared small plates, we take a long meandering walk back towards home and sit outside at Ray’s, people watching and shooting the shit until 10:00 or so. Sophie goes to catch the end of the Knicks game with her husband & João, who are watching together. I take a shower and tuck myself in.
I love drinking with my friends and I love being in bed before 10:30. When these things can converge… I experience nirvana.
I’m so sorry, and I swear I didn’t plan this, but the day starts with poop again. Canela is sick, and this time much worse than the day before. This is a very sobering way to begin the day. It’s like a crime scene, it’s really everywhere.
This is a team effort this time, João tackles the room and I tackle the dog. We spend a full 30 minutes in the shower with the handheld nozzle on full blast. It seems to me that most of life is just cleaning up shit: your own, your pet’s, your kid’s, your partner’s, your own. For this reason, I have decided to have an amazing attitude about PooGate, and I sing Canela little bath time songs as I scrub her to high heaven. Nothing is that serious, you know?
PooGate has induced a spontaneous clean of the house— once you’ve swiffered one room, you might as well hit the others and change the sheets while you’re at it. By 8:00 AM on Saturday morning, we’ve cleaned the house quite thoroughly. I start on an insane backlog of laundry and get ready to go to my 9 AM pilates class!
I’m dreading my first pilates class after a few weeks off and so I shoot Sophie a text asking if she wants to pickleball outside in the surprisingly good weather today— I’m hoping she says yes and I can flake on pilates, but João calls me out and tells me I need to go. I hate when he’s right! Do you know how annoying it is to live with a man who’s right!?
Pilates is indeed, so hard. But afterwards I feel kind of unstoppable, as it goes. I also am starving, so I swing over to A&C Super— I get the egg and cheese with sausage on a poppy seed roll, and the butter chicken baguette to bring home for João. I also get a large iced coconut coffee which is DIVINE, and I see God for a minute there. I try to force through a few more pages of Banal Nightmare while I chill outside and eat and drink.
After changing into my pickleball skort, I meet up with Sophie to play for a few hours. I'm already hurting from pilates, and 80 degrees on the blacktop is no joke. I get a little heatstroke-y and am not proud of my game at all, but we sure do get a workout.
I get home and collapse onto the bed after an amazing everything shower. I feel guilty about this, because João is cleaning up our filthy backyard. He does some amazing work, and then I make vodka sauce with mafaldi and tiny spicy italian sausage meatballs. We order Cafe Panna ice cream at 8PM (passionfruit with a swirl of graham cracker crumbles for me and blueberry crumble for him) and start watching The Residence on Netflix.
I’m in bed before 10PM. I feel a little bit of FOMO that all I did today was chores and exercise and that I wasn’t drinking on a rooftop somewhere like everyone else in New York… but my body is too exhausted from pilates and pickleball to consider an alternative.
NO POOP TODAY! We celebrate. How awesome to not start your day cleaning up poo! I make a gorgeous coffee with the new syrup I ordered from Transcendence. The cinnamon social syrup is calling to me first and it does not disappoint. I can finally say I’ve broken my at-home coffee slump.
Sophie and I meet up at the pickleball courts at 10AM. Today couldn’t be more different than the day before where we really pushed ourselves to the limit— we spend most of our game yapping. She meets a hilariously cute little corgi who interrupts our game to demand belly rubs. It’s a short session, and I’m back home and showered and dressed by 11:30. Gap pants and an embellished J. Crew tank (similar!) with Birk clogs. I contemplated something a little more put together or pants with a real fly and I just… couldn’t.
While I wait for João to get home from soccer, I get on my laptop and start work on a menu spreadsheet for the annual kabob BBQ we host, which this year will be sort of an engagement party edition. I want to make it easy for myself, but we also kind of want to go hard if it is really an engagement party… I flip through the new Wishbone Kitchen cookbook for inspo and sip on a Gramms protein lemonade (the best).
When João gets back from soccer, we head out to lunch— we were planning on Acre, but walk by The Snail and are surprised to see them doing lunch service outside. To hell with it! We go have breakfast at The Snail.
They sure know what they’re doing over there. I enjoy my Snail lunch experience a lot more than dinner, it’s perfect and not rushed or crowded or pretentious, and they have the most lovely little pebble ice.
We part ways after lunch and I head out to return a wedding guest dress at J. Crew. DANGER ALERT! I want EVERYTHING IN THE STORE. I add this pink top to cart on my phone while I’m in line for my return, I suspect they’ll go on sale almost immediately for Memorial Day.
I also try a new matcha spot, Nippon Cha, that I believe people are fond of. It’s good, but it’s not earth shattering! I’ll stick with my beloved Brooklyn Ball Factory and Kijitora, though both are impossibly crowded on weekends. Local advantage is being able to go on a school day!
After J. Crew, I hit Spa Palace— a reflexology spot that my old coworker Kristina introduced me to when we were working long hours on our feet setting up a pop up for Food52 in the World Trade Center. They do a 45 minute foot massage and 15 minute back massage combo for $45. This is my me-time. I rock up with my Kindle and transcend time and space. Even when it’s mid (which is often), it’s great.
There’s lots of chores to do still when I get home, but I can’t be arsed. I watch João watch the Nuggets game while I talk at him. I am finally able to shower and then I fuck around on my laptop while I start watching Four Seasons on Netflix. I custom design a phone case online through Katie Kime since mine is peeling off into ribbons in a really disgusting way.
We order takeout (a Westville Cobb Salad for moi) and I go upstairs to fold laundry, read and watch TikToks while he watches last week’s episode of The Last of Us (too scary for me personally but I support him).
Once again… in bed by 10:00. Incredible. Who is she!?
I wake up naturally at 5AM. (I love this, this is the smug superiority of going to bed at a geriatric time.) I decide to “sleep in” and go for a second sleep until 6:00!
We had talked about playing pickleball in the morning before work, but around 6:00 João alerts me that his legs are too sore to possibly try. I am disappointed, but I decide to use this time to try to finish Banal Nightmare, which I have gone from hating to now kind of needing to finish out of morbid curiosity. I read from 6:00-7:30 and finish the damn thing. Whew! I update Goodreads and leave a review immediately and then get ready to seize the day.
I am not seeing anyone or doing anything outside of Zooms today, and I have pilates after work. I go for the middle ground of outfits, which is to say I’m not going to wear my pilates clothes all day, but I am also not going to put on hard pants. Instead, I rock this Z Supply set that I have written about a few times and has gotten a staggering amount of clicks. I see why! It is the best! This is my first time wearing the “East Coast” tee shirt I saw on Meredith Hayden that I absolutely had to have, and I decide that with this weather, it’s time to pull out a few of my more summer-y necklaces.
After walking Canela, making another exquisite cinnamon social iced cappuccino and starting the laundry (the mountainous pile is still not done…), I sit down at my desk at around 8:30 to work. I can already tell that I am not going to finish everything I want to finish before my meetings start at noon, but I was too brain dead last night to try— and I also like to try to preserve weekends for, you know, weekend things whenever I can.
For some reason I’m really anxious today. I can’t seem to focus on one task for very long, and my heart is racing. After a few hours of this with no change, I take to pen and paper, make a really exhaustive list of every little thing I could possibly have to do (it’s long!) and decide to take a walk to clear my head and hopefully slow my heart rate. Sometimes it just do be that way…
I slarp a Kijitora matcha that I acquired on my walk, then gobble down the other half of last night’s salad and pair that with a really fine vintage of Diet Coke on the rocks. I take some meetings, and then chase Canela around the yard for a bit while João makes me another coffee. This one sends me over the edge into a complete anxiety fiesta. In hindsight: two shots of espresso, a matcha and a Diet Coke were plenty of caffeine in a 3 hour window before adding 2 more shots of espresso. Heart racing that I can’t seem to stop, my face gets all hot… not good!
Pilates after work helps me burn off the weird heart racing feeling— unfortunately the bulk of my productivity is going to have to happen from this point on.
I started working as a Substack/writing coach here and there a few months back, and I have an hour long session with a client after pilates, which I enjoy. I shower, and João has made us salmon burgers for dinner, which we eat while watching The Residence once more.
I do another hour or so of work while he watches The Last of Us! I also order myself more of the Soft Services Buffing Bar— my holy grail— since I see they’re having an anniversary sale for existing customers. I need it bad, I can feel my skin getting rougher!
From there, it’s time to flop into bed. I watch a few TikToks about Tudor History before we fall asleep to The Office at around 10:45…
PLEASE tell me that's a full stack of Nancy Drew novels on your bookshelf, and I'll be even more obsessed with you
What kind of dog is canela? So adorable!