Three Things

hot drink, good snack, can't lose

Oh, hiiiii! Is it frightening/frozen/thrilling/terrible/beautiful where you are? Same! I am just returned from my great and magical voyage to the UK, where the dreariness is somehow part of the charm

and where I ate my own bodyweight in, of all things, cookies, which were offered to me around every drizzling bend. (“A wee shortbread?” “A ginger biscuit?” “Go on.”)

This view from my hotel room!

Thus, relatedly, Thing One is my perfect travel snack of many, many years:

The cheese does not need to be refrigerated, the crackers are snappy and sour, and I carry them together in a large ziplock bag. It’s true that a wedge does not fit neatly on a rectangle (#geometry), but I smash one cheese between two crackers and then push the extra that squidges out back into the empty part. (?)

Somehow this is the perfect antidote to my weariness of nuts or cloyingly sweet bars. On the advice of my freshman roommate, one Suzin Cho MD, I have been eating Barebell Salty Peanut protein bars, which she thinks taste like Snickers and I think taste, happily, like a Tiger’s Milk bar from 1978. (Why do we need so much protein? I don’t know. My dad is 94 and eats approximately six grams of protein every three to five days in the form of a barely boiled egg.) But they’re not actually food, and you can eat only so many before you feel the bovine collagen catch in your throat. Hence, portable cheese and crackers! Plus a 2-cracker serving has 11% of your daily fiber, so I eat 20 and get alllllll of it.

Thing two, also related, is this kind of weird minty “hot chocolate” I’ve been drinking, in an effort to reset from my tiring, headachey cookie habit while satisfying some of my cravings.

Mug by SeinbergMade

Here’s the recipe: brew a large mug of peppermint herb tea (I like most brands of it). In a blender, whiz up the hot tea with a splash of milk (any kind, I use whole dairy), a pinch of salt, a pitted date, and a heaping teaspoon of cacao or cocoa powder. Now lower your expectations. So good! (Probably even better if you dunk a wee shortbread into it.)

Is anyone missing their yak? It’s here.

Thing three is just any joyful media that will be an antidote to cruelty and the weird derealizing feeling of everything being AI: all the glistening brown cottage cheese muffins and otter-giraffe friendships that make you feel like there must already be a German word for it—for the pleasure of seeing something nice coupled with the anxiety that it’s not real, the disappointing certainty that it’s not real, and the shame of ever having thought it was real for even a second. (Note: I first wrote A1, like the steak sauce, which would be an even worse and weirder world, so maybe we should feel lucky.)

For me, this joyful media includes:

• the Bad Bunny halftime show, which, like all six episodes of Heated Rivalry, you are totally allowed to watch as many times as you like

• the Olympics

• this Peter Coviello essay about the beautiful, baffling death of his friend, which is exquisite

• the Madi Diaz album Fatal Optimist

• my beloved Susanna Daniel’s new book Girlfriending, which I got to blurb:
  “I swallowed Girlfriending down in one big, thrilled gulp, not having realized how thirsty I was for exactly this calmly mesmerizing and fresh book about midlife. Also? It made me want to be a better person, somehow, even though it’s sexy, page-turning fiction (i.e. not self-help). I am a huge Susanna Daniel fan and will be for life.”

• Okay, not media, but: Giving money to mutual aid organizations in Minneapolis. Truly! I once wrote an article about how, like volunteering, charitable giving releases dopamine. WIN-MOTHERFUCKING-WIN. (We just donated to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota and the Open Cupboard Food Pantry.) If you can’t donate right now—I’ve been there. I am with you.

What is making you happy?

Booka Bookshop in Oswestry

Stay warm, lovelies!

xo