good things 03.12.26
napping in a loud room, apollo bagels, ANTM doc
daylight savings is awesome except for the fact that all day every day this week, it has felt like there are strings attached to my eyelids tugging them down.
1. napping in a loud room
all love and no shade to my parents, but one thing they were never going to do was leave a party on account of the fact that i was tired and wanted to go home. i don’t blame them really. i was their fifth child, after all, and i’m sure i started complaining from the moment we arrived anywhere. the schedule of events was not going to be changed on my behalf. take, for instance, the time we went to ireland. i was 7 and we went with a huge group of people and i was the youngest one. i spent the whole trip scoping out pub benches and lobby couches to sleep on. see above for proof. the following year in second grade, we had to write a short story about a time we saw the sunrise or the sunset. my story was: “i saw the sunrise in ireland because we never went to bed!” thank you to mrs. scarpino for not calling the cops on my parents. all this to say, i got really good at falling asleep in loud places and i still love napping in a loud room. over the weekend in vermont i took at least three naps in the living room while my friends chatted beside me.
2. apollo bagels - lox on a sesame bagel
i’m so annoyed that the bagels people wait in line for hours for like clowns are, in fact, unbelievably good. the pitfall of most bagel sandwiches is that the minute you take a bite, everything slides out and off the sides. but the ratio of cream cheese to lox to delicately sliced red onion to capers to dill (even though i don’t like dill) was such that this did not happen. i went at like 11 am on a thursday in williamsburg because i happened to be nearby and i think i will join the clowns in the near future on a saturday morning.
3. Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model (Netflix)
god ANTM was completely insane and it was funny / harrowing to watch the documentary and be reminded of the stuff i consumed as a teen that shaped my sense of self. between this and the biggest loser, we didn’t stand a chance!!! i am obsessed with the fact that not a single person involved takes any accountability for anything that happened. everyone just passes the buck from interview to interview. tyra banks was wearing a buttoned up trench coat shirt and i’m still wondering why. jay manuel has very unfortunately chosen to turn his face into a butt via plastic surgery.1 must be a new kind of BBL. i thought it was interesting how the stain of winning america’s next top model was more hurtful than helpful for these women, and i wonder if that would still be true today in the influencer economy. looks like we may find out. THANK YOU MOOD!
4. sheila g’s brownie brittle
what if you could have a brownie that was also a chip? that’s the genius idea behind these bags of brownie brittle that i treat myself to at the bodega when i’m feeling crazy. i always eat the whole bag which is not advisable.
5. Today in Tabs
nobody needs another newsletter to subscribe to but i really love today in tabs, which is an aggregation of links and commentary about what’s going on in the world. it had been lost in my ‘social’ tab in gmail for a while so i forgot about it, but last week’s entry about the war with iran reminded me why i love it:
“Donald Trump had a feeling. Maybe Israel forced his hand. Or maybe he forced Israel’s hand. Either way, the vibes were off. Trump knew Iran’s response to being attacked would be to fight back, so he had no choice but to attack them first in order to preëmptively respond (or pre-spond) to their anticipated attacks in re-pre-sponse to our initial pre-sponse. Or, as Marco Rubio stood in front of reporters and said out loud in his big boy voice: “We went proactively in a defensive way.”
We kicked off this war of long-distance pre-taliatory liberation by precision bombing a girls’ school and killing 165 people—“most of them girls aged between 7 and 12”—allegedly to free them from the oppressive yoke of a regime that, I’m told, won’t let girls go to school. I guess they’re free now. “All I can say is we’re investigating that,” said Defense Secretary and overcompensating hardass uncle Pete Hegseth, who clearly couldn’t care less. But when an Iranian drone managed to slip through our $5 billion dollar a day missile shield and kill six Americans in Kuwait, Hegseth could barely pretend to care about that either. “Tragic things happen,” he said. “The press only wants to make the president look bad.” He doesn’t give a shit.”
i’m so excited about the GOOD THINGS SALON!!! we have a critical mass of interested parties. next thursday i will send the topic, reading/watching/listening materials, and location! let me know if you’re coming and feel free to bring your smartest friend.