The butterfly effect & studying abroad in your thirties. 🦋
And now, something a bit more vulnerable than usual. Please be nice.
Happy Thursday! It’s rainy and grey here in New York which means I can only sit at the armchair by the window of my home office, looking out of it wistfully, and not at my desk. (I don’t make the rules, but this is how rainy days work.)
Portugal and Spain were the best (see above, duh!) and my heart feels really crazy full after watching one of my oldest friends get married to someone who is so great for her that it’s almost as though they were made for each other in a lab.
Before we get into the deep stuff, how about a few recent highlights?
Is there anything better than getting home after a long trip away and being reunited with your lotions and potions? I took a long everything-shower and returned to the warm embrace of my line-up of— very much not travel-sized— favorites. Ah, the joy of cracking open a new bottle of the best leave-in conditioner, finally exfoliating with a holy grail face mask, and making the bathroom smell like a spa with this elite soap refill! The full ritual took forever and it was absolutely heavenly. I really think there is nothing better than an everything-shower after a long time away from home.
This read about chestnut trees (and a mouthwatering chestnut brownie recipe) from
was inspiring in more ways than one. I used to be pretty into alternative flours and would mill my own in my studio apartment. Maybe it’s time to break out that KitchenAid attachment again…I actually really loved Lena Dunham’s New Yorker essay on leaving New York for London, sort of a reverse of Didion’s Goodbye to All That. I talk a little bit about my foray into leaving New York— one summer or month long sojourn to Portugal at a time— below.
Excited to see how
’s Book of the Summer predictions pan out!
And now, something a bit more vulnerable than usual. (Feel like that’s saying something since I have exposed some of the most painful moments of my life to you on a barely-edited platter.)
Before I say all of the semi-unhinged things I’m going to say, I’d like to state this once, quite loudly, for the record: I am a Sagittarius.
Therefore, I can’t help it. Anyways!
If you’d have asked me even in 2022 if my life would look this way, it’d have been an emphatic no! And I’m not talking about parting with my company. (For once...)