I’ve got a stroke of melancholia, so this was hard to come up with. But c’est la vie and I am grateful for good things. Here THEY ARE:
Conan O’Brien on Hot Ones. Everybody’s seen this by now, but if ever we needed a reminder of his cosmic genius, if ever *I* needed a reminder of what unadulterated, pure, distilled GOOD feels like, this is it. To foolishly quote myself from an interview I once did (brag), Conan was “an escape from [my] early 2000s California youthful malaise” and watching Late Night was the first time something, anything, made sense to me. Watching him screaming with hot sauce and cold milk running down his face, I remembered that feeling.
Having Friends Who Live in my Neighborhood. I am lucky to live in a neighborhood in LA where I can walk to everything. If I even think about moving to a different neighborhood - instant physical depression. I can often meet a local friend for a last minute dinner, if I am willing to peel myself away from my favorite pastime (sitting in my apartment Thinking).
My Local Blue Bottle. They have a seasonal saffron vanilla latte that makes me float. Everyone flocks to a different coffee shop down the street, but I simply refuse to wait in lines because that somehow makes me feel punk rock. This is the Blue Bottle, I might add, where Scott Speedman held the door open for me and I saw God. Also, one of my usual baristas asked me if I went to his high school. I didn’t, but I did go to one a few towns down from his, and anyway I like when people think I’ve re-emerged from their past.
Big, Big House Plants. Just, Giant Ones. It is my unwavering belief that everyone is one giant Monstera away from getting their living space featured in Architectural Digest.
Violette FR Bisou Balm. I have since bought every color of this sheer matte lipstick. It can be applied as thoughtlessly as chapstick, yet still somehow looks like your lips just naturally look like that. It’s made my lips look Not Dead! However, it is not a solution to self-hatred, which is a slight bummer.
My Mets Being in Town! You know my favorite place in the world is Citi Field, despite absolutely nothing in my personality suggesting that I am a baseball bitch. So I went to see them at LA’s worst parking lot, Dodgers Stadium, to see them. I no longer eat meat but since baseball hot dogs are sacred, I did, and, let me tell you, I’ve never had a worse hot dog in my life. Can you believe it? At a baseball stadium? I was crestfallen, disenchanted, offended. So I Toto-We’re-Not-in-Kansas-Anymore’d my way back to my seat and dreamed of Citi Field.
Hanging Out With My Nieces. God, I love them so much. At the moment they cannot stop singing Taylor Swift songs. Today I told them that I love them more than I love Taylor Swift, and they said “Impossible!” But I do, and I hope they know.
Trader Joe’s Dried Coconut. The most accessibly elusive fruit. It’s been loved, it’s been hated, it’s been watered, it’s been milked, and honey it’s been dried. It has a lot of the bad kind of fat, but I remember one camp of the internet saying that that doesn’t really matter. What do I know? What is true? I do know it’s lightly sweetened and that that probably means very sweetened.
My New (Old) Gameboy Color. Some of my college friends pooled to buy me one of these and I’ve been playing Pokemon (Blue) on it. At first I was like, how could I have possibly spent so much time on this device, but then I picked up my phone and looked at Instagram for three hours.
The Break-Up-Post-It Storyline from Sex and the City. We all know Sarah Jessica Parker is a genius on this show, and her screaming at Michael Showalter, “There is a good way to break up with someone, and it doesn’t! Include! A post-it!” is basically canon. Some version of this has happened to every woman who has ever tried to date a man. But how easy is it to be seduced by a tortured poet? (I didn’t include The Tortured Poets Department on here because that goes without saying!)