The Weekender // 016

A bangin' breakfast burrito, vibes for the year of the horse, the only pajamas I want to wear for the rest of my life and more.

Welcome to THE WEEKENDER, your weekly dispatch full of ~Saturday spirit~! I fill you in briefly on the week, share a few Little Luxuries that make the mundane feel special and save the best for last with some Brain Food to mull over, expand your horizons, or discuss with your friends over a cappuccino. There are usually lots of links and pictures which perhaps will get clipped if you’re reading in your inbox— click here to read in browser!

I’m hoping your weekend is off to a great start, and if it’s not, maybe this is your moment to reset? The prospect of a 3-day weekend is enough to fill my cup. I’m increasingly radicalized towards a 4-day workweek which I believe deeply would yield to happier workforces and better work output! Speaking of being increasingly radicalized, also, fuck ICE.

There is no easy transition there! This is my 16th send of The Weekender and 16 is my lucky number, so let this one be a good one. Also, Happy Valentine’s Day!

• At this point in my life, the ultimate luxury to me is eating healthy, tasty food that I don’t have to cook myself. An amazing Valentine’s Day breakfast in bed— hell, I’d take it tomorrow, it can be belated!— would be Ali Slagle’s New Mexican Green Chile Breakfast Burritos with crispy hashbrowns inside... these seem like they’d be amazing to have stocked in the freezer. (Gift link to the New York Times Cooking recipe here!)

• One of my most clicked links so far this year was the “Airport Sweatshirt” that I snagged after spying it in Ali LaBelle’s newsletter— she has great taste, and her styling notes really caught my eye. It’s my most worn purchase in a long time, but it was a little pricy for a sweatshirt— alas! It’s on sale for 40% off! Victory!! (A sizing note: I’m a true M and 5’7” and the M/L is massive on me. If you’re shorter than me, I’d size down!)

• A really nice thing you can do for yourself this Valentine’s Day, if you are in a mood to love on yourself, is indulge a bit in the little basic things that might make your day to day feel a little nicer— unbeknownst to anyone but you, of course. I recently had a shamefully massive haul from Negative Underwear (which I’d featured before in my Best Brand series!) where I tried on pretty much everything they make. TLDR: their stuff is expensive, but their “Whipped” fabric is the best and actually justifies the cost— I kept a lot of it! Adding some of it to my PJ or undergarment stack felt like such a treat.

• My goodies from the Cadence IYKYK Sample Sale arrived! They are coincidentally very Valentine’s Day appropriate— I got a new set with the basics (squirt tops, extenders, pill cases— 25% off), and my first cases, in the clear “pebble” and opaque “merlot.” I love how magnetic everything is and how my pink pods, and pebble and merlot cases are co-mingling happily in a joyous color palette. Also delighted I won’t have to fuss with wasteful travel sized toiletries with the business travel I have coming up!

• ICYMI, I published something a little more vulnerable this week about the personal, health and financial wobblies my home office was backdrop to as I transitioned from being a start-up founder to a former founder to a start-up employee again— it went live during a brief Substack outage on Wednesday, so I don’t feel it got the eyeballs it should have, damn!

• The Diabolical Lies podcast episode about GLP-1s, body positivity, anorexia, the scrutiny of the Wicked cast for “becoming too thin” was a million times more interesting than I thought it’d be. I kind of thought I didn’t need to listen and already had a fully formed opinion, but I learned a lot— including that pretty much everything you think about how people are "getting “too thin” (and even about eating disorders) is… factually and statistically… incorrect. (This is a long episode, so you might break it up into parts!)

• How stunning is this oil painting by Andrey Remnev (via Annie Dabir)?

  

• Returning readers may remember that I am trying to write my first novel. I will write a whole post on how that has been going later this year, but this guide to writing a debut novel in 22 “easy” (hmm) steps caught my eye. I am not following this process, help! I fear that with a full-time job, a part-time job (ahem, First Rodeo), and a wedding to plan and prep for… the idea that I would finish a novel this year has my eye twitching. That said, 500 words a day sounds pretty achievable! Part of my blocker is that I’m shooting for 2-5K words a day, which means I miss days more than I hit them.

• I loved this Year of the Horse illustration from artist Lucy Porter: