In mid-2024, I’d been working at a tech company for about five and a half years when I got the opportunity to take a contract-based, government-adjacent job. The pay was good, the institution prestigious, and I had grown impatient with inertia at the tech company. I took the job and was very happy when my contract was renewed after six months.

You’ll all be at least passingly familiar with various executive orders on Federal hiring freezes and RIFs, and while these did not apply directly to the institution where I worked, they came home to roost, and my contract was not renewed. In the seven months since, if my rough calculations are correct, I’ve applied for about 500 jobs. I applied for roles I was well-suited for, and for roles that seemed like a stretch. I applied for full-time work, contract gigs, freelance assignments, anything I could find.

I have no idea how many of these applications were viewed by human eyes, and I received many strange rejection emails in the most convoluted and confusing language. I would often receive these in batches, at odd hours, like in the middle of the night or on Sunday afternoon, as if the applicant tracking systems were working together to clear a backlog.

I got interviews with ten companies (that’s a 2% response rate FWIW), three of which did not move me forward. I made it to six final rounds and, in one case, actually did get the job, only to have the role paused when the hiring manager left before the offer was extended. One company decided they needed to hire someone based in Europe; in two other cases, I simply wasn’t the final choice. And last week, I withdrew from one process after I signed an offer for another.

It’s a good role, and I like the people I met during the process. I’m obviously very glad to have found a job at all, but fortunately, I am also looking forward to the work. And for all the horror stories about bad interview processes, most of mine were pretty normal. I would say 90% of the people I dealt with were sincerely trying to provide a good experience and find the right candidate. The other 10% were either inexperienced or simply unrealistic.

There are a lot – A LOT – of problems with modern hiring practices, and specifically in hiring processes for marketing roles. AI has not helped at all. And I do feel for the recruiters and HR people who are also just trying to do their jobs, because everything is so broken that they are overwhelmed with applications from bots and LLMs and just regular people who aren’t qualified, but apply anyway because they really need to find something, and (I can tell you from direct and recent experience) often think “why not?” because everything is already completely broken, so who cares.

Anyway, I am glad to be done, though I remain so snakebit by that early fake-out that I won’t truly relax until I get started. But the agreement has been signed and countersigned, I’m all set up in various systems, and it seems like everything is progressing as it should.

I have a week to get a few things accomplished before I start my job, primarily giving my home office a once-over. It hasn’t been used much at all in half a year, and it would probably be better to start with a literal clean slate than just sitting down amongst my interview detritus and depression junk.

There is also a half-finished or maybe not even quarter-finished project up there, which is restoring a handbag that I probably should just give up on. It’s sitting on the coffee table in my office alongside all the leather tools and unguents I bought to make a go of it.

This is BY FAR not the only thing I’ve failed to accomplish during my long, unintentional sabbatical. I also meant to finish at least one quilt; I haven’t touched it. The fireproof and floodproof safe I bought last year for our important documents is still in its box in the bedroom closet. And the old ladder that was in our garage when we moved in – the one I want to cut down and make into a quilt display rack – is still sitting alongside the garage, out in the elements, waiting to be dealt with. There’s a midcentury bench in the basement that needs gluing, sanding, and refinishing. These are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

I know life is always kind of like this, but I do feel a little regretful about the wasted time. I suppose I found it difficult to think about much of anything beyond getting work, and it was often hard to enjoy Living In The Moment when a big part of my life felt like it was up in the air. (I did, however, make a lot of good bread and a lot of good food; I also highly recommend a good unemployment vacation when possible.)

As I waited for a decision about my new job, I tried to tell myself that, whatever happened, things would be okay. I felt calmer this time about the possibility of getting rejected. I’d done my best; there was literally nothing else I could do. They’d hire me or not. And of course, that was true all along, but this time when I tried to access the panic – the but what if they don’t LIKE me and what if they don’t HIRE me of it all – it simply wasn’t there.

I was as close to feeling nothing about it as possible, and then it just…happened. I don’t really believe in woo stuff like manifesting or whatever, but if that’s what worked, great. Now I will focus on not caring about recieving a massive inheritance from a mysterious benefactor.

I don’t know how many of you already know this about me, but there was a time not so long ago when I bought a LOT of nail polish, like a lot a lot, because I loved it and because I did my nails three or four times a week. I got to a point where I could give myself an excellent manicure in about 30 minutes, and I found it very relaxing and very fun. Eventually, I set myself up to do gel manicures at home, too.

This is the kind of hobby that is likely to attract a lot of negative comments, some from people who would just never paint their nails neon green (or whatever), and some from people who seemed to be jealous of those 30 minutes every other day or so. The one I got fairly often was “you must have a lot of spare time,” which was never worth responding to but was extremely nasty all the same, laden as it was with general derision and the implication I was supposed to be doing something more productive, less pleasurable, or as unpleasant as whatever the person who said it was doing.

I wish there were a device, like a speaker you could wear, that would translate in real-time what people really mean when they say shit like this, so that “you must have a lot of spare time” would come out as “I am sad my cuticles are nasty” or “I am mad that I don’t let myself enjoy things.” I am of course projecting here, but you get what I’m saying. Not everyone has to polish their nails? You don’t have to pay any attention to me at all!

Anyway, I don’t do my nails much anymore. I developed a reaction to something in the polish or the remover, I don’t know, but my nails really started to fall apart (literally), and I’ve gone mostly without for months now. In my French lesson this week, my teacher brought up nail polish for some reason, and I blurted out my terrible secret: I am a longtime nail polish hoarder. I went so far as to show her a drawer full of my treasures, and it was a nice stroll down memory lane, though I am a) acutely aware that I have somehow further damaged America's reputation and b) unsure what to do with all this nail polish.

On Sunday, the weather was very pleasant, and I spent a lot of time puttering in the kitchen. I baked some cowboy cookies (I scooped and froze the dough last week so I can bake small batches whenever cookies are needed) and made a batch of buckwheat granola for the first time in a long while. For dinner, I made a pizza with hot Italian sausage, fresh mozzarella, and the oyster mushrooms and garlic scapes from our first CSA bag of the season.

Today it is going to be hot as blazes, so I’m not sure what dinner will be, but it won’t be anything having to do with the oven. I may stovetop-steam some frozen dumplings and perhaps make this with our CSA kale. As my friend Camilla reminded me last week, kohlrabi week will be here soon enough, so I should enjoy the halcyon kale days while I can.

Welcome to my occasional, when-I-feel-like-it bonus content about secondhand shopping and selling, minor fascinations, passing fancies, and old stuff! This is the same subscription as Just Some Lady and you are (obviously!) free to skip it.

Last week I met a friend for lunch and some vintage shopping. The shop we intended to explore ended up being not so much a vintage store as a witchy (complimentary) little goth boutique with a few racks of secondhand stuff, i.e. not really my style but cute nonetheless.

This shop is in the town where I grew up, and as we walked back to our cars, I noticed that the little vintage store where I spent many an hour in high school and on breaks from college is still open. I hadn’t thought about this shop in years and assumed it was long gone, but no, it is still there, still with the same woman behind the counter, still wearing a version of the same outfit and little straw hat.

My friends and I used to go to this store to shop for jewelry to wear with our homecoming dresses and clothes to wear in theater productions. In the early 90s, I bought a three-strand faux pearl necklace there that is probably from the 1940s or 1950s; I still have it but would be afraid to wear it now, given its age (and the fact that I’m not really a pearl person). I wore that necklace on a double date to a school dance, and before the dance, we all went to a French restaurant that, in retrospect, was much too nice for a bunch of high school kids. When the chef came to our table and very Frenchly asked my date “How does it feel to be dining with two angels?” my date said, “uh…I don’t know.”

The other thing I have a very clear memory of buying at this shop is a 1960s faux-leopard coat that I wore with complete seriousness a number of times throughout my 20s and 30s. I think it is time to bring this coat back, actually. It was about $50 when I bought it thirty years ago, a fortune to me at the time, and I remember pawing it at the store several times before actually buying it. (Earlier this week, I got this coat out of storage to try it on and found a lighter in the pocket. So, it’s been a long time since I wore it.)

Anyway, walking into that store was like doing an 8-ball of premium-grade nostalgia. The classic vintage-store smell alone was enough to send me shooting into the stratosphere, but it looks exactly the same, right down to the vintage hat boxes stacked to the ceiling, the yards of costume jewelry draped over every conceivable surface, and the racks stuffed with treasure, leaving barely enough space to move around. There are even still vintage faux-leopard coats on offer, though they are from the 1990s now.

I picked through the stack of old linens and found a hand-embroidered tablecloth for our patio table. I rationalized this purchase as saving it from a tradwife Instagrammer who would otherwise turn it into a fucking romper. I also took a spin through the clothing racks, not really expecting to find anything, but ended up with this 80s-does-50s cotton dress:

It for sure needs a belt. It came with the original belt, but a previous owner “customized” it for their extremely tiny waist, and while it technically fits, it’s a) pretty uncomfortable and b) way too exaggerated. I have a few belts lying around, but I tried and rejected a black one (too bumblebee-coded), a red one (too Ronald McDonald), and a dark brown leather one (too menswear) before finding a woven raffia belt on eBay. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

As a bonus, and in the spirit of last week’s letter, I rediscovered the cork sandals I’m wearing in the picture, which won out over an old pair of Clarks that looked too costumey and some kinda-dated Target sandals that I only wore once because they gave me blisters. (I should probably pass those on.)

The fun thing I trawled eBay for last week was old pizza shop t-shirts. Pizza shop t-shirts are kind of tough because they tend to have a lot of stains, one assumes due to the pizza. Nevertheless, here is my favorite:

This one is really so good if you’re a fan of ringer t-shirts:

Next up, IYKYK:

Finally, we have this entry from Carmen’s Pizza in New Jersey. This one is notable for the saying on the front, which…what?

I’m not sure I really need a pizza shop t-shirt right at the moment, but I’m not ruling it out in the future. Weird t-shirts are an underrated way to strike up conversations with strangers, something I discovered recently at dog daycare drop-off when a woman approached me because of my Langston High t-shirt. She was very nice, even after she realized Langston High is different than her alma mater, Langston Middle. I broke the news that I was not a fellow alumnus and we had a nice little chat about our dogs instead.

Imagine running into THE Jerry of Jerry’s Pizza!

Sometimes Reddit serves me posts from the Goodwill bins subreddit and I have come to understand that a lot of these weird vintage tees are sourced from there. It is usually not some former employee of Pagliai’s who is finally parting with their beloved souvenir. This is the kind of thing that I love about secondhand stuff, it just travels around until it ends up in my closet, living a whole entire different life.

Though if you have a vintage pizza shop t-shirt hanging around your house, you should definitely just sell it for $30 and eliminate the middleman. (Follow me for more business advice.)

I’m challenging myself to get this newsletter scheduled before my self-imposed noon deadline, so let’s get right into it: I recently saw an ad that bugged me. It was for a Lancôme skin cream, one that is supposed to reverse “skin’s visible biological age.” Do you know who was shilling it? Demi Moore.

This is some real horseshit. First of all, nothing can “reverse” aging. You are aging. Every day you go to bed older than when you woke up in the morning. That is how time works. You can stave off the appearance to some extent, you can exercise to keep your bones strong and your joints limber. You can color your hair, you can get fillers, you can get surgery. You cannot stop aging and you cannot reverse it, no matter what that one techbro creep with the complexion of Data from Star Trek and all the rizz of canned vanilla pudding might tell you.

You surely know the guy I mean? I forgot his name, which is why I Google-bullied him:

All that aside, it is a new level of fuckery to put Demi Moore in an ad for an anti-aging product, given that whatever is going on with Demi Moore’s face is not down to some fucking lotion. That is a college education’s (at least a master’s degree, at a private university) worth of medical procedures. She is not dabbing on some $175 serum and looking like that.

I know this is not philosophically all that different than the long tradition of using 25-year-old models to advertise anti-aging creams, but it feels a lot worse, somehow. It is the opposite of a secret that Demi Moore has had many very skillfully done things performed on her very famous face, so how is it that a bunch of people sat around a conference table at Lancôme world headquarters (or whatever) and decided this was the right move? It seems unusually cynical, even by normal advertising standards. Like, how much of this nonsense do you really expect me to absorb? I guess it boils down to it being exactly as insulting as the rest of the experience of Being A Woman, and that’s why it’s so deeply depressing.

It seems like so long ago that I first kicked off the Summer of Salads! It’s creeping up on too-hot-to-cook season here in northeast Ohio, and I am proclaiming salad season OPEN with a slight update: it’s the Summer of Pasta Salads.

My first exposure to pasta salad (I am not talking about macaroni salad, which is its own thing and not something I’ll be discussing further) was in the late 1980s when Suddenly Salad burst onto the scene. One night, my mother left me, a bona fide latchkey kid, in charge of making the Suddenly Salad to accompany dinner, and that is when I learned that you start pasta in boiling water rather than in cold water. That Suddenly Salad was Unfortunately Inedible, but I never made that mistake again.

Suddenly Salad is still available, by the way! I think at this point it’s more Still Salad.

Anyway, I made Caroline Chambers’ charred corn and green onion miso pasta salad (paywall, but linked below!), which was great, and I’ve saved many a salad-girlie recipe on Instagram. I am frankly surprised that the salad girlies fuck with pasta salad, but I don’t need to understand them; I just need to screenshot their recipes and then forget where I saved them.

What To Cook When You Don't Feel Like Cooking

charred corn & green onion miso pasta salad

Happy Memorial Day weekend, everyone! We are grilling out by a pool with some friends today and I’m bringing THIS RECIPE! This one was a labor of love — I must have tested 15 different variations of this recipe before arriving here. I LOVE THIS PASTA SALAD…

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19 days ago · 187 likes · 57 comments · Caroline Chambers

I also made Caroline Chambers’ grilled chicken and coconut rice with mango crunch salad, and it was good, though not a bona fide do-again like this pasta salad, or her gringa cochinita, which we ate outside on the patio with generous glasses of rosé. I like that recipe because you just chop everything up, throw it in a pot, squeeze some citrus over it and forget about it for three hours. No searing or browning, which I hate doing ALWAYS and most especially when it is hot outside.

Today, before it gets a bit too warm, I am going to make Christopher Kimball’s cowboy cookies, mostly because I have a gigantic box of Rice Krispies I would like to dispense with before 2027. Christopher Kimball also paywalls his newsletter, which frosts my ass because I already pay for his silly magazine and website. (He does offer a seven-day free trial, however.) But if you want to make these cookies, you can always just get the Laura Bush version from Southern Living. That whole sentence is so retro! Her recipe does not call for cereal, but Chris Kimball and his bow tie include either Corn Flakes or Rice Krispies.

I am not sure what I will do with myself this week. I am waiting to hear back about a couple of jobs and I have already knocked out all of the laundry. I sent off the weekend’s Poshmark sales and will probably make a grocery list later today; if it’s small (and light) enough I might walk down to the store. It feels like a good day to grill something, maybe?

I have more freedom than usual today. My dogs are at daycare for no particular reason other than the mild and extraordinarily pleasant weather seems to have driven them entirely crazy. They zoom around all day and avoid their afternoon Big Nap entirely. Admittedly, they sleep very soundly at night, which is always a good thing. But by the time dinner rolls around, they are a lot like overtired children in that they really! want! your attention! and if they don’t receive it, they create situations that demand it, such as standing on the couch barking at the neighbors or trying to eat a bee, at the very moment when you want to be relaxing into the shank of the evening. So, ideally, they will tire themselves out at school today. (FYI, this rarely works as planned.)

Finally, some true crime notes: Having exhausted most of the Dateline oeuvre and not having the appetite for anything much more lurid than major network sensibilities and Keith Morrison’s dulcet tones, I’ve been reading a lot of entries from the Bizarre Unsolved Cases Substack. There are quite a few Ohio cases (I linked one below), including some I’d never heard of before. You can almost always find deep Reddit rabbit holes on these cases, too.

Bizarre Unsolved Cases

Elaine Johnson: Ohio Woman Vanishes From Apartment Building

Where Did She Go…

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9 months ago · 15 likes · 8 comments · Michelle Short

If mysterious disappearances are your thing, The Vanished has an incredibly deep archive and sometimes does follow-ups if there are developments or if people are eventually found. And I also recommend the podcast about the Sneha Philip case. Generally, I prefer cult documentaries to murder documentaries, but I do find it wild that people just…disappear without a trace. Sometimes I like to imagine these people simply pulled a Ladder of Years and started over from scratch. There are days when it sounds tempting!

(If I ever mysteriously disappear, this entry will obviously be cited on my Vanished episode.)

Welcome to my occasional, when-I-feel-like-it bonus content about secondhand shopping and selling, minor fascinations, passing fancies, and old stuff! This is the same subscription as Just Some Lady and you are (obviously!) free to skip it.

I lost my mind a little bit last weekend and bought some things online, including some not-secondhand stuff. One, I ordered a cable-knit cotton cardigan from Lands’ End because all of my cardigans are wool, somehow? (Though I did unearth an old, mostly rayon LOFT cardigan from the depths of my closet a while ago. I love forgotten clothes!) Anyway, Lands’ End had a 50% off holiday sale (to be fair, they almost always have a 50% off sale) and the Rakuten rebate was 8%, so I went for it.

Two, I got a pair of silk pajama shorts from Quince, which were not on sale but were less expensive than equivalent shorts elsewhere. I have a list of things I might like to buy when I get a job, and somewhere on that list is Lunya silk pajamas, but for now that is a dream deferred.

Levi’s jeans were 30% off on their site, but guess what, they are about 75% off if you just buy someone’s old ones, so I traded some of my hoarded Poshmark sales dollars for a pair of Wedgie straight ankle jeans. I hate the name of these so much, but c’est la vie.

I sold stuff, too. Goodbye to an old J. Crew raincoat, a Madewell blouse I never quite loved, a dress from The Limited that I bought in 2014 and didn’t wear, and a Gap linen shirt. I tried to mail this stuff at my usual post office on Sunday and found the package drawer locked or stuck shut, something that is a fairly typical occurrence at my post office, even during business hours. So I drove to the smaller one, a little farther away, and sent them off to Virginia, California, Missouri, and Minnesota. (A lot and I mean A LOT of my old clothes end up in Minnesota, for some reason.)

I was puttering around in my closet over the holiday weekend, looking for a specific pair of shoes, and decided I simply had to find a way to wear some of the weirdo shoes I have and love but don’t wear very much (or haven’t worn at all yet).

I used to have… a lot of shoes, mostly very high heels, and I maintained a visual record of them on an old Flickr account that I seem to have decommissioned at some point. This is really too bad (for me, anyway) because I’ve passed on or sold a lot of those shoes, and I am sure there were some good ones I forgot. My shoe hoard is much smaller now, and I tend to wear everything a lot more often, but there are still some good pairs that don’t see the light of day.

I’ve spent what I would call Real Adult Money on shoes fairly few times in my life, for example, the shoes I wore when I got married. Otherwise, I dwell in a Converse-Superga-Clarks-Birkenstock world and mostly buy stuff on sale. BUT I do like to trawl eBay and other internet locations for cheap high-end shoes. Usually, they are cheap because they are kind of weird.

For example, I got these Jil Sander open-toe slides for a song on eBay. I watched them and watched them until the price came wayyyyy down. They are weird! They remind me of bookends, with the toes and heels rounded on one side and squared off on the other. But I love them.

They are actually super comfortable. I tried them on with a couple of different things this weekend, and I’m going to try to wear them more this summer.

These are old Hermès, and I bought them very cheaply from a woman on Instagram who had to admit they were too small for her:

But they fit me just fine! The big question about these shoes is: are they black or navy? This picture says black, but IRL they lean navy. Maybe that is what has been deterring me. This weekend, I decided IDGAF what color they are, I’m going to wear them with whatever I want. These are also very comfortable, and at some point were resoled or had rubber soles added. Practical!

These Prada Sport sandals from The RealReal aren’t necessarily weird, but there is something about the cork and the white, nubbly sole that I think gives me pause:

So I am just telling myself to get over it. Also, looking at this shoe reminds me I should probably get a pedicure soon. Toe maintenance is a summer concern I have thus far ignored. (That, and the website Wikifeet, is why there are no pictures of me wearing the slides or the sandals.)

Every week I pin a mental note to the wall of some dusty corner of my brain, thinking “I will definitely remember this,” and of course, I don’t. On the note is a topic I think I might address here in this newsletter. Then, I sit down to write, and whoops! I can’t find the note.

Or, sometimes I do find the note, and whatever I put on it looks like gibberish. Why did I want to write about that? I’ll think, and chuck the note into oblivion. I guess the topic wasn’t that interesting, after all.

Anyway, kind of a grab bag this week.

I’ve mentioned that during this period of unemployment, I have been doing laundry like a boss. You wear a pair of socks? Guess what, you can probably also wear them tomorrow, because that’s how fast the laundry service is running in this joint (right now, anyway, no guarantees for the future). So I am often folding laundry in front of the TV, or applying for jobs in front of the TV, or doing whatever in front of the TV. I often choose something I have seen many times before, the better to ignore it. I work better with this type of background noise. I can’t work with music playing unless it is instrumental music. Don’t ask me why song lyrics are different than spoken dialogue, they just are.

For a while, this was reruns of Downton Abbey. I know every single episode by heart and it is mostly very gentle television (save the Anna SA episodes, which I tend to skip because WHAT THE FUCK). However, I’ve grown tired of it for the moment and I’ve switched to nostalgic movies. I’ve watched most of the Mission Impossible franchise (except the Phillip Seymour Hoffman one, RIP but it sucks), I’ve watched The Hunt for Red October, Clear and Present Danger, Apollo 13, When Harry Met Sally, and Sneakers. At some point soon, I will watch Mystic Pizza again and then probably Say Anything and High Fidelity. Oh, and Some Kind of Wonderful, aka the most perfect movie with the most perfect soundtrack. I have been obsessed with this movie since 1988. I recorded it on VHS during a free HBO weekend at my parents’ house at some point and watched it until it was unwatchable, a dot-matrix lower-third scroll reading WANT MORE MOVIES LIKE THIS? CALL NOW TO SUBSCRIBE the whole entire time.

Obviously, these movies make me feel safe in a way, even the one where Tom Cruise throws himself off the Burj Khalifa, even the one in the submarine. They mostly hark back to a simpler time, when evil billionaires and terrorists could be reduced to cartoonish threats easily dispatched by Harrison Ford, who wore a suit for the occasion. Sigh.

(When I worked at a local arts magazine, we took part in a business exchange program, which is how I ended up hanging out with a Russian for a couple of months. After spending Thanksgiving with his host family, he told me he’d learned that Thanksgiving is when Americans “eat all day and watch football and Harrison Ford movies.” He wasn’t wrong! I also recently found a birthday card he sent me twenty-some years ago which he signed, “Russianly yours, Sergey.”)

Last Thursday night, I made a pizza for dinner. In a little while, it will be too hot to make a pizza until September or October, so I loaded this one up with fresh mozzarella (okay, it was fresh until I put it in the freezer, but then it was, after a nice sit-down on the kitchen counter, fresh again!), soppressata, and banana pepper. I make the dough but I have mostly given over to using Rao’s sauce from a jar because it is always available at Grocery Outlet and you know my feelings about the Gross Out, a nickname I use affectionately as the Gross Out is actually very clean and not at all gross. I did, however, find this suspicious item the last time I stocked up on Rao’s:

We ordered Indian food one night last week because I had a job interview in the evening. It was too hot Monday and Tuesday to cook much of anything, so I made a caprese salad on Monday, which we ate with some nice bread, and a pasta salad with jarred pesto the following night. Life has a very unsupervised feel to it lately. We’re just out here doing whatever. Who is supposed to be supervising me, I cannot say. I guess it’s me? I’m not invested in this role at the moment.

I wrote a big, long crabby post on Substack Notes about an idiot on LinkedIn and then deleted it because what purpose did that serve? But I am still annoyed about it. However, in lieu of rehashing it, instead I will complain about this snippet of a job description (which I also complained about in a Note):

“The pace here is genuinely uncomfortable. The right person finds that fun.” MASOCHISTS WANTED, APPLY WITHIN. Also, if you have to have a section in your job description titled “Fair Warning,” then it is time to log out of LinkedIn and sit with yourself for a while. (There is a reason this role has been posted over and over again for the past year.)

Why are there so many shows about ranching on television right now? Or oil fields or other seemingly ranching-adjacent things? I wouldn’t know exactly what they are about, as I have never watched Yellowstone, 1923, The Madison, Dutton Ranch, 1883, Lawman: Bass Reeves, Marshalls, Tulsa King, Landman, or any of the related upcoming spinoffs.

I know that many of these are related to one another, that Taylor Sheridan is behind some or all of them, and that our current hyper-masculine, rugged-individualism, American-dynastic-fantasy political moment is probably to blame, HOWEVER, when is enough enough? When do we lose track of which ropy-armed Yogalates blonde is which? How many shaggy-jawed 1990s heartthrobs can one franchise possibly employ? How many innocent viewers will be harmed by leaden plot anvil after leaden plot anvil falling directly on their heads? (Again! I’m only guessing based on trailers I cannot escape!)

I know a lot of people like these shows, and I know my tastes are very different (I also did not feel called to watch Succession, a show that seemed like it was just about people being assholes to each other), but how can you possibly watch this many shows about this many assholes? It must be very compelling. If you are a fan and would recommend one or many of them, please share. There are only so many 1992-2002 classics I can watch.

Welcome to my occasional, when-I-feel-like-it bonus content about secondhand shopping and selling, minor fascinations, passing fancies, and old stuff! This is the same subscription as Just Some Lady and you are (obviously!) free to skip it.

Welp, Chinese fast-fashion giant SHEIN is buying US-based Everlane, which is really turning people inside out. I saw the headline and said, “Ew, what?!” out loud before I even read the article.

I dwell in a lot of secondhand spaces online and everyone bitches about “SHEIN crap” even when the crap in question isn’t from SHEIN. It’s now just a blanket term for garbage clothes that make the planet worse. In Paris, I blanched when I saw someone toting a big shopping bag emblazoned with SHEIN; they now occupy a significant portion of the BHV department store and people are big mad about it. (CW for that article for all kinds of disturbing shit but you will know the one I mean when you see it, should you choose to read.)

In most of the online fashion-focused spaces where I hang out, secondhand is king. It comes with its own pitfalls – weird smells, undisclosed stains, bad measurements, “condition not as described” and all the rest – but it is generally seen as worth it for the cost savings and the harm reduction. However, in other spaces, where people sincerely ask for advice on where to shop for an upcoming vacation or how to acquire work clothes for very little money, the fast-fashion demons are often summoned. I click away and I do not say what I want to say, which is “please please please do not buy anything from SHEIN or Temu. Please!”

But people vote with their increasingly limited dollars and now we have SHEverlane, and it sucks.

I’m not sure this move is going to do much for the beleaguered Everlane, to be honest. From a business perspective they’ve been struggling for a while and I haven’t exactly heard raves about their offerings in recent years (Werner Herzog was frequently invoked). Speaking personally, Everlane has never been my favorite. At full price, it’s spendy for a brand I would consider mass market. And while they long touted their commitment to ethics and promised “radical transparency,” I would be hard-pressed to tell you the difference between Everlane and any other retailer that emails me three to four times a day. (At least Gap does not expect me to pay $250 for a dress.)

In 2020, Everlane had to answer for allegations of anti-Black behavior, at one point telling the New York Times that “It would be opening a seat for a Black board member in the next year, adding a Black person to the senior leadership team in the next year, rolling out anti-racism training for the entire company… and teaming with two racism accountability organizations.”

Now, I don’t have to tell you how ridiculous it is that it takes an assload of bad PR and an internal investigation to get a company to hire A SINGLE BLACK PERSON to its senior leadership team, but it is still appalling. I wonder if they are still working with those racism accountability organizations, and how that’s going?

Everlane also frequently told customers who requested that clothes be available in extended sizes that this was “on the road map,” but it apparently never was; one customer service representative was also told to suggest a customer lose weight if he could not find the size he needed at Everlane.

In conclusion: yuck! I’m not sure why Everlane decided to Fuck Around, but based on the number of people I’ve seen posting variations on GIRL BYE this week, they’re probably Finding Out. I only ever kept one thing I ordered from Everlane and I’ve sold it (twice) on Poshmark. I hope its new owner keeps it this time.

Normally I keep a very healthy backlog of “likes” across various platforms (eBay, Poshmark, The RealReal) to help me curate stuff I might want to buy. Sometimes it is just a soothing activity, like window shopping, and other times I am really on the hunt for something. Lately I haven’t been very inspired by anything in particular. When last I glanced at my list of likes on The RealReal, most of them had been sold. (You have to act fast on TRR.)

I briefly thought I wanted a pair of traditional dark brown penny loafers but, having collated a pretty large selection on Poshmark, I am just not that excited about them. I should want boat shoes if I’m that into preppy style at the moment, but I spent enough time tying the laces of my bluchers into coil knots in middle school and I don’t think I like them enough to repeat that whole routine.

One thing has breathed life into me, however: a black eyelet or cutwork dress. I don’t need this for any reason. The Everlane dress I just mentioned selling was an eyelet dress but the lantern sleeves, I think, were not for me. Anyway, Instagram served me this a few days ago:

…which is fancier than I want and almost sold out, anyway. Then the algorithm coughed up this, from Chico’s:

I have a long-standing negative association with Chico’s but for this dress I might be able to get past it. It is also on sale. If I’m really thinking about things being wearable in my real life, though, I must admit that this looks a bit like I am going to a funeral with my friend Betty Draper.

This one that Lands’ End served up on Instagram is more day-to-day practical but I am not sure about the darts and even with my relative shortness, it might be too short:

Anyway I am obviously now trawling secondhand sites to see if I can come up with anything similar. This dress, from Talbots, is available in several sizes on Poshmark, though I am highly allergic to the term cottagecore:

I also like this one, from Zara:

And finally a contender from La Piccola Creativa, though it hews a bit close to the Everlane dress I literally just got rid of. Good pattern on the cutwork though, if you zoom in:

Obviously I am not considering colors other than black. You can wear black all summer long! I’ll throw on a red shoe and call it good.

LOL not me sitting down with some time to write, opening this draft thinking I was mostly done with it, and seeing a blank page staring back at me. Whoops!

Last week was odd. I had a small spate of job interview activity that’s continuing this week. That’s all well and good but I’m having to work extra hard to keep them all straight so I’m not talking out of my butt when I’m on the Google Meets. Sorry which company are you again? Not a cute look!

I was quickly rejected by one company last week, which was likely for the best in that it would have involved doing a lot of client-facing work, which isn’t my strong suit. The interviewer, who seemed like a nice enough person, read her interview questions verbatim off of a screen, which bothered me less than the fact she simply responded to every one of my answers with “That’s fair. Yeah.”

I…hate this? If you are not an experienced enough interviewer to ask follow-up questions or at least pick out a thread from the answer and comment on it then…don’t interview people for jobs. The rejection email came with the offer of a feedback call because “we value transparency,” and I thought…do you? Because I have some feedback for you as well. Smiley face emoji!

We are having some work done in our back yard this week, which means that part of our fence has been temporarily removed. The consequence of this is that my dogs have to be taken out on a lead every single time they need to go outside, rather than me just releasing them like banshees. (If you are a long time reader of this publication you know how much this thrills me.)

I took them to school two days last week, which is more than they have been to school in a good long while, and they are no longer the only Italian greyhounds there. I hope they are okay with some younger (and probably less weird) competition.

One complaint I have about these new Italian greyhounds is that they are almost never wearing outfits, and mine almost always are until the temperature is higher than 65 degrees. When these other dogs are wearing something, it is usually a bulky coat. What is the point of having the supermodel of the dog world if you are going to hide their light under a bushel? My littlest dog loves her clothes and I am sure she would enjoy discussing fashion with her little friends if they were ever dressed properly.

I was perusing Substack last week when I got word of this and I nearly sprained my thumb jabbing the pre-order button. I’m hoping by the time it arrives on my doorstep I will have a job and therefore less time to while away my days with a book, but never say never.

Speaking of whiling away time, I have recipes to share with you this week. These are all from the New York Times which I’m sure is annoying, but to be fair they have good newsletters and generous link-sharing policy, so.

The first and best one is for khorak-e loobia sabz which we are just calling “the Persian chicken thing” at the moment. This is extremely easy to make. I used frozen green beans because although I spent a lot of time at my Kentucky grandmother’s house picking and snapping green beans, and kind of enjoy the process for that reason, I definitely did not feel like doing it on the night that I made this. It is truly so good and improves by the time you eat the leftovers the next day.

I also made this skillet gnocchi with miso butter and asparagus. I subbed spinach for the arugula because Grocery Outlet was like “who’s Arugula?” and I didn’t have the time to go to another store. I would make this again. (If you’re not acquainted with Grocery Outlet I have shared my thoughts before.)

Finally, this lemon chicken with radishes and peas was okay but I am not sure I will ever think about it again. I grabbed chicken drumsticks because someone was taking up way too much space in the chicken section and I didn’t have the patience for their first-time ever experience of the world of poultry to come to its inevitable conclusion. The drumsticks were definitely a throwback to our saving-for-a-house days when it was one of the few cuts of meat I bought, so that was nostalgic, but the recipe was just “fine.” The preserved lemon butter is something I might use again, however.

TL;DR definitely make the Persian Chicken Thing, check out the miso butter gnocchi if you have some asparagus burning a hole in your crisper drawer, and maybe skip the sheet pan dinner.

I attended a wedding shower this weekend. I was invited and probably would not have gone, but my mother asked me to take her. So I picked her up around 10 am and set off on a three-hour drive.

I do not really like wedding showers. I did not even really like my own. Or I did like them but I felt embarrassed by them somehow. I realize this sounds ungrateful, but I got married when I was 40 years old so I felt…silly? And showers always feel so retrograde. I know people do couple’s showers now (or as my mom inexplicably calls them, “boy-girl showers”) and that seems nice in theory. I just don’t know why we continue to insist that we have a big party where we give women a bunch of cooking and nesting paraphernalia and make broad hints about having babies.

I had two wedding showers for reasons I won’t go into, but at one of them I found myself sitting at the front of a room full of something like 30 women, opening my gifts. I’d just been cornered by a neighbor of my husband’s family, telling me what a shame it was that such-and-such other neighbor wasn’t invited. Sorry, I’ve never met that person? And what do you want me to do about it now?

Anyway, after opening the third set of dish towels or mixing bowls or whatever, I kept being admonished to hold up the gifts and slowly display them, Price is Right hostess style, until everyone had seen that yes, it was in fact a mixing bowl. This seemed like a really poor use of everyone’s time. Annoyed and embarrassed, I said “Just so you know, I’m not going to do this all afternoon.”

A shocked murmur positively crackled through the room. And I still don’t know who said this, but I distinctly heard someone utter “Well, you will, too.” Like…THE FUCK? Sorry but you can all pass around these nice gifts or you can paw them after I’ve opened them. I don’t owe you a performance. I am not a pig in a poke! Some of these people have known me all my life. They surely knew what they were getting into.

The Saturday bride-to-be was much more gracious than I am (most people are). She played her part correctly whereas I am always going to be a weirdo.

(To give an example of the sort of killjoy I am: you know the thing at wedding showers where if you break a ribbon while you’re opening a gift, it means you’re going to have a baby? Someone made the mistake of reminding me of this at my shower, so I asked for a pair of scissors and cut every single ribbon. That caused many a frown to cross many a face, but don’t ask me to go along with your fertility obsession! It’s weird and gross. You don’t know if someone wants kids or will be able to have kids.)

On Saturday I sat and picked at my cake while the future Mrs. Whatsit opened a very nice set of luggage. One piece was a backpack. From somewhere in the back of the room, a woman shouted, “That would make a really good DIAPER BAG.” Not getting a reaction, she doubled down. “I said, that would be a GREAT DIAPER BAG!” I wished desperately for everyone to leave this woman alone to enjoy herself in the moment. Maybe if more people were rude like me, things would change? Big if true!

Welcome to my occasional, when-I-feel-like-it bonus content about secondhand shopping and selling, minor fascinations, passing fancies, and old stuff! This is the same subscription as Just Some Lady and you are (obviously!) free to skip it.

In April, I took two weeks away from my online resale empire. I did quite a bit of business in March, then April was (predictably) a bust with a whopping $27 in sales, and now things have picked back up a little bit. My favorite thing is when I wake up to notifications on my phone, telling me I’ve sold something in my sleep.

I did have one hiccup this month, when I sold an Everlane dress to a woman who presumably read the description, noted the size, looked at the pictures with the measurements included, ordered the dress, and then promptly reached out to me to tell me it was too big and could she return it?

This is bound to happen from time to time, and I know that a lot of people operate under the philosophy of “don’t ask, don’t get” and so they ask anyway, but ma’am…this is not the Gap. This is not even The RealReal, which sometimes does take returns. I am just a girl, standing in front of a closet, asking you to buy my old shit and keep it or resell it, something the Poshmark platform in particular makes it really easy to do.

Anyway, I rejected the premise of her question and asked her to open a case with Poshmark, assuming they would not accept the return for fit because THEY FAMOUSLY DO NOT ACCEPT RETURNS FOR FIT, but…they did.

I’m beginning to think that my style was actually frozen in time at some point around whenever it was I read The Official Preppy Handbook, which I sure as shooting wish I’d kept because it now goes for around $100 on eBay and however badly I’d like to own it again…no.

But without this formative text, do we think I would have worn this sweater vest and oxford shirt combo out to dinner in Paris?

Would I have dared tie a sweater around my shoulders like the rich-kid villain in a 1980s movie about a ski resort or country club?

Please note, nothing about my upbringing, other than the fact it took place in the 1980s and I watched a lot of television shows and movies where preppy style figured very prominently, was remotely preppy. My mom did get me a Bermuda bag with a monogrammed cover sometime around 1985, and GOD ALMIGHTLY I surely would like to know what became of it. Hindsight truly is 20/20, particularly when it comes to extremely niche 80s style.

Before we went on vacation, I had my eye on a 1980s men’s Dior windbreaker, which really treads a fine line between “oh this looks cool” and “girl what the fuck.” You can also argue whether it is more “preppy” or “1983 TV detective” but I love it, and when the seller reduced the price by 40%, I decided to go for it:

You can find quite a lot of good 80s/90s men’s windbreakers by Dior and YSL on eBay, if that’s your thing. Most of them are, like the one I bought, lower-priced lines that were licensed to department stores, but they are well-made and reasonably priced.

Here’s one in a good grey:

This YSL was more than I wanted to spend, but it’s a good classic Harrington style:

Finally, this one is a good neutral and is in a size large for all your slouchy jacket needs. It’s already in three people’s carts so act now while supplies last:

Other preppy-adjacent things: I have, going back to last fall, bought and tried many pairs of khakis or chinos or whatever you want to call them, and they have all sucked – they sucked from Old Navy, they sucked from J. Crew, they sucked from Quince and from LL Bean. I wondered aloud to my husband: “is the secret always to just buy old clothes?”

Well, I scrounged up an old pair of Gap khakis on Poshmark for $8, and they’re great. So yes, the secret is to just buy old clothes. (I’m also not ruling out these Derek Lam khakis which seem like they could go one of two ways: great, or horrendously unflattering. For now I will curate them to my watchlist for another day.)

I also discovered a huge number of Polo oxfords and other button-downs on Etsy – I’m not sure what it says about the average Etsy seller vs sellers on other platforms, but they seem much more likely to iron the clothes they’re selling – so I may give those a closer look at some point soon. I guess I won’t be satisfied until I am essentially cosplaying Alex P. Keaton.

I can’t make out a logo on Alex’s shirt, here, but I feel like Brooks Brothers would have disappointed his parents the most, so that is probably what it is.

I’m not really sure what to write about lately; I don’t feel like I’m doing much. I’m tackling small household chores and doing things like taking the dogs to their vet appointments and whatnot, but other than giving you a daily tally of how many jobs I’ve applied for I am not really sure what else there is to relate. (Spoiler alert, I will manage to figure out how to natter on for another 500 words or so.)

Speaking of the dog, I did accomplish one thing that had been weighing on my mind which is freeing ourselves of the littlest dog’s behavior vet, which is really just a regular vet practice where her dog shrink used to work. The original dog shrink left the practice years ago, and we got handed off to another vet, who subsequently has handed us off to yet another vet.

This newest person is perfectly fine but she is not intimately acquainted with my littlest dog’s mental illnesses the way the others were. Without that, it’s just a second vet that I have to see at least three times a year. And it’s an hour away. It’s incredibly stressful for my dog and by extension for me, and it’s an added expense.

Before we went to Paris (wanker!) I cadged an early medication refill out of the dog shrink and resolved once and for all to finally deal with this situation. We were still on vacation when I started getting the YOUR DOG IS NOW OVERDUE FOR SERVICES texts and emails from the regular vet, but for once instead of annoying me (with two dogs, I feel like I get these messages about every other week), it motivated me.

Accordingly, I took the little dog to her regular wellness appointment on Monday morning and we resolved the medication issue, which was basically just the vet saying “Okay yeah, we can do that.” And that is really the story of my whole entire life, wasting time dreading doing something that in actuality takes 20 seconds and is painless.

I did not watch any Met Gala coverage. I’m not sure whether it is general anhedonia brought on by societal rot, the fact the whole thing was bought and paid for by the bad guy from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and his wife Temu Cruella de Vil, or just the exhausting, unrelenting, and desperate-feeling onslaught of The Devil Wears Prada 2 promotion – a campaign so undignified and cynical in its display of PICK ME that it might have put me off movies forever – OR WHAT, but I had no taste for any red carpet anything. I can just fast-forward through The Hunger Games and watch the scenes set in The Capitol, thanks.

As I told my friend Christina I am usually all for people enjoying things, even frothy things, even in dark times, but as I saw all the pictures of various YouTubers, Kardashians, and movie “stars” who recently settled lawsuits out of court, I only heard the rattle of the guillotine somewhere stage left.

I’m all in favor of funding museums (even fancy rich ones that didn’t trouble themselves about taking a lot of money from the Sackler family over the years!) and preserving the art of fashion, but I have more or less just decided that most of these people looked ridiculous and, despite their best efforts and their memorized comments about wHaT tHiS lOoK mEaNs tO tHeM, all probably have the intellectual depth of a take-home plastic salad dressing ramekin.

I’m sure this will all sound incredibly hypocritical when I next update you about whatever dumb shit I recently bought on eBay but then again, I am sure you can all be trusted to know the difference between me (flawed but pure of heart) and Blake Lively (cringe-inducing texts, boring AF).

Anyway, a Good Thing: my husband got to vote for the first time on Tuesday and it was very nice! The poll worker ladies gave him a round of applause for being a first-time voter and he got a nice reminder of what the inside of an elementary school gym smells like, a generation after he last personally darkened the door of one.

It is nice to have this sort of thing to be excited about. All evening my husband kept tapping his “I Voted” sticker and saying, “I voted!” And I was like you sure did! You voted the hell out of some shit! After leaving and returning to the country as an American citizen for the first time just last month, and voting, he now only needs to receive a jury summons to complete his citizenship trifecta. Sometimes, when I think back to where we were on this timeline just a year ago, I can’t believe how quickly it all happened.

Yesterday I saw a social media post from a local person who said something about “voting while I still can” and honestly I think this sort of shit should be grounds for federal prison. Yes, it is a joke a lot of us have made, it is a joke I have made, but it is a shitty joke. Because of my personal experience I can say that this is a particularly shitty joke to make when there are people who are Going Through It in order to avail themselves of the right to do it, at great emotional and financial expense, and belittling that with your cynical little crack is not very cool.

Also the person who said this is a middle-aged white man who should fucking know better. It was particularly tasteless in the aftermath of last week’s SCOTUS decision which disproportionately affects…Not White People!!!, and I have fucking had it. I get that we all have our low moments but maybe blithely tossing off your little joke about the erosion of voting rights is…counterproductive? In this fucked timeline?

IN ANY EVENT.

After we voted, we got sandwiches from the bakery and finally opened our bag of tartiflette potato chips. We are getting to the very last of our France snacks, but I am proud of us for getting a bag of potato chips back largely unscathed. The next time I go, though, I want to be more strategic about the snacks. I definitely could have fit a bag of madeleines or a box of those chocolate-topped schoolboy cookies into my carryon, no problem.

This is probably something that belongs in a Two Things email, but since I am not going to send one this week, it’s going to live here.

I’m wearing a pair of wide-legged jeans today as an experiment, the experiment being: can I bring myself to wear these in public without feeling stupid?

I feel like my height of five feet four inches is fairly average, and yet I always have length trouble with pants; I bought the short length in these and while they are fine without shoes, they seem too short with shoes. I am unclear why I have to choose between having my pants puddle around my feet when I am relaxing at home or looking like a real flood-wearing poindexter when I am out in the world.

The last time I wore wide-legged jeans was probably 1998 or thereabouts, and I remember the specific pair very well and I really liked them, but this was a time when I was also wearing platform lug-soled penny loafers from Aldo, so length was never a concern. (I was also probably an inch taller as I am certain my bones have already begun their slow collapse into dust, but most likely it was the shoes.)

I’ll report back on how this experiment turns out but looking into my crystal ball I can predict with some certainty that these jeans will be up for sale on Poshmark within a week’s time.

I am who I am!

Welcome to my occasional, when-I-feel-like-it bonus content about secondhand shopping and selling, minor fascinations, passing fancies, and old stuff! This is the same subscription as Just Some Lady and you are (obviously!) free to skip it.

I’m certainly not the person to consult about Today’s Fashion Trends, but I did notice a few things whilst walking around Paris (I promise I will soon cease being a “well in Paris” wanker, but admittedly there was a lot of content in that trip) that I felt compelled to note here.

First and foremost, most people just look Regular. That’s because they are Regular: they are going to work or school or whatever, just Parisian-ly (aka they are being absolutely terrifying on a bicycle they rented through an app). Many times we seemed to find ourselves walking behind a reassuringly sturdy avocat, a word that in French means both avocado and lawyer, and it is up to you and the context clues which one is correct. In our case, it was the latter, and these Parisian dads seemed to be always clad in a very well-cut navy overcoat, swinging a shopping bag and one-shouldering a backpack, talking animatedly to their spouse on Bluetooth earbuds about le dîner or something happening at a child’s école. I liked observing this slice of daily life, these dads on their way home having stopped for something at the Monoprix and checking in with HQ. (We saw a lot of non-toxic male energy in France, notably at restaurants, but that is a topic for another day.)

Anyway I obviously paid more attention to the women and what they were wearing because I am always just sort of shopping, and the streets were like a fashion magazine come to life. This won’t be surprising to a lot of you, but all the cool-looking women in Paris were wearing wide-legged jeans, white sneakers, and slouchy leather jackets. This isn’t a look I’m sure I can pull off myself, but I like it a lot, and it was all but ubiquitous, as were voluminous trench coats, silk scarves, and very nice handbags. Parisian women in general seemed to be more bundled up than I would have expected for a sunny, 60-degree morning, but I guess if your primary mode of transport is walking, you want to be prepared.

But, because serious fashion discussion is best left to other Substackers, I want to talk about tote bags. People in Paris have their tote bag game on lock, and if you’re a person who has collected many bookstore totes and magazine giveaway totes over the years, this is your time to shine, because anything goes. Popular choices range from the reusable Monoprix bags I mentioned last time to New Yorker and Shakespeare & Company canvas totes to big Dior and Marc Jacobs versions. On our last trip there, I took my Strictly For Men tote bag, a gift from some coworkers about 20 years ago:

You can buy this tote bag on eBay, FYI!

This time I took my lady-with-a-cocktail bag from Love & Victory via my best friend Sally, ideal for porting your ham sandwiches and bottles of Perrier to a park:

I also threw in a big blue and white striped canvas tote I got free with a Vogue digital subscription I cancelled after one month. By the time the tote arrived I had already forgotten about it, but I cannot deny the size was right for a day of shopping.

There are many bad tote bags on eBay (I found a lot from Draper James and from a “Christian streetwear” brand that I shall not link here), but I stand by my old post on Esprit totes and LeBag, plus I think a good rule of thumb is just to find the weirdest thing possible, for instance this Sandra Boynton number:

Or this cute vintage Switzerland souvenir:

This 1979 Kellogg’s tote isn’t in the greatest condition but it is very appealing to me and the bidding starts at 99 cents:

Or perhaps you’re a horse girl:

Finally, here’s a very inexpensive LeBag in decent nick:

The other thing I want to natter about this week is fashion documentaries. I’m waiting to watch Marc by Sofia even though my favorite podcast gave it a – well, not a lukewarm review exactly but not a rave, either – and I recently watched McQueen (a good documentary but ultimately really sad, of course), Valentino: The Last Emperor (full of famous people, a lot of fed-up Italian arguing) and Catwalk (very of-an-era, focuses on Christy Turlington’s SS94 runway season).

Valentino is really remarkable (there’s a good, and very recent, essay by the filmmaker linked above) because it is not even 20 years old and yet really documents the end of how high fashion operated for most of the 20th century. Valentino Garavani died, at 93 (!!!), only at the beginning of this year, so it seems a particularly good time to watch.

If you want to continue exploring this bygone world, though, I really recommend Catwalk, especially if you have a lot of 90s nostalgia. Catwalk didn’t get great reviews when it was released, but it’s a nice trip back in time, and will have you marveling at how 20-year-old Kate Moss looks about 14. The full movie is available on YouTube, a lot of it is in black and white, everyone is smoking, Karl Lagerfeld is still in his plus size era. It’s Galliano pre-controversy, Carla Bruni pre-first lady of France, Anna Wintour pre-sunglasses.

Next on my list is Unzipped, which I’ll probably have to buy on DVD, speaking of nostalgia.

Finally, I will leave you with the one thing I’ve learned watching fashion documentaries over the years:

As I’m writing this, we have been back home about four days. Exactly a week ago, I was sitting down to this:

…at the same restaurant where we celebrated my 50th birthday in 2023. That time, we took a cab to the restaurant, but this year, I felt sheepish when I discovered it was quicker to walk. So we walked there and back, down some streets that sincerely look like time tunnels to the Belle Époque.

Thankfully we ended up back at our hotel and not in an opium den with Toulouse-Lautrec. Though given the news most days, it might have been an improvement.

Anyway, all that to say that I miss vacation in general and Paris specifically. Imagine, if you will, doing something like scrubbing your kitchen sink after a week of this:

I suppose one mark of a good trip out of town is that returning to normal life feels dumb and flat, however glad you feel to be home with your dogs (I did really miss them!). Nevertheless, I have done all our vacation laundry and put the suitcases away, I’ve been to the grocery store, and I’ve somewhat reluctantly returned to cooking.

Which is a good segue into some recipe talk, because I actually made some quite good things our first week back.

The day after we got home, my husband requested a summertime house favorite, Smitten Kitchen’s zucchini and ricotta galette. I usually just make this with frozen puff pastry but since I have nothing better to do, I made the pastry myself, and in the way of these things it was at least 75% nicer than it usually is.

I have been a paid subscriber to What to Cook on and off for a while, and on Wednesday decided I would wait no longer to make lemon-basil spaghetti (paywalled, trial subscription available). I marinated some chicken breasts in pesto for most of the day and grilled them as suggested and this was a 100% do-again dinner. (As the recipe suggests, you should not sleep on the crunchy bread crumb topping.)

I made spinach pesto and artichoke pizza one night; this is my go-to dough now, but the recipe as written is really nice if you’re not in the mood for a red sauce pizza. I just make the pesto with frozen spinach (I thaw it first) and it works fine.

Finally, on Friday we did a little France cosplay and had a charcuterie dinner with plenty of rosé.

This week, I want to make this. I also have a new issue of Milk Street to peruse and have no doubt I’ll find something to add to my list.

After deleting all thoughts of job hunting from my brain while on vacation, I am back to feeling a lot of job despair. I mentioned receiving another rejection when we got home from vacation. It was a pretty soft letdown in that they simply decided the role had to be based in Europe, but in a way that only made it worse. Also: I WOULD MOVE TO EUROPE at this point so talk about adding insult to injury.

This was the fourth time I’ve reached the final round of a process and it hasn’t worked out, twice for reasons that didn’t have anything to do with me (well, except for the fact I don’t live in Europe, I suppose). To say this has been “frustrating” is putting a very thin crumb coating of euphemism over something that is causing me a pretty decent amount of distress, though I know I’m far from alone.

Anyway, without a main hustle to occupy my time, I’m getting back into my side hustle. There’s not a lot left for me to peddle out of my closet, I’ve sold on most things I didn’t want and everything else is already listed. I put myself on vacation mode on Poshmark and eBay for two weeks and turned off all related phone notifications, so I’m a bit out of the habit. But this week I’m going to start posting some non-clothing items, including some crafting stuff I probably won’t use.

I’m also going to take stock of some of the childhood toys that have landed in my house and perhaps sell or just give away a few of them. These things are sentimental to me but they are also in boxes, and even our nieces and nephews have outgrown most of them. This perhaps feels more acute because my parents’ basement flooded again last week and I spent a day helping them clean up, and although my mom has been getting rid of things for a good few years now, there is still so very much stuff. They’ve lived in the house for 56 years, it just happens. But I do not like to think about someone having to deal with my collection of mostly shoeless Effanbee dolls and practically antique Duplo blocks. We’ll see how it goes when I actually have to look these things in their plastic faces, but I’d rather send them off to new homes than continue to shift them around my basement and spare bedroom for another 30 years.

Finally, I took advantage of slightly chilly weekend weather to use the madeleine pan I bought myself in Paris. I used this recipe because I usually find that site reliable, and what do you know, it worked pretty well:

They have what looks like too many big air bubbles in them but they taste good, they’re the right texture, and they have the characteristic hump although it could be more distinctive. I’m going to try a different recipe next time just for the sake of experimentation.

It feels as if I should have had something more momentous to share for a 300th issue, but maybe just sticking with it all this time is the momentous thing? Ask any teacher I had in grades 7 through 12 (or for that matter, my mom) and they will tell you I was not always known for my dedication to things, even when I was relatively good at them. I guess you can also ask some of those craft supplies I am going to sell.

I had no idea, when I started writing this (at the time) daily newsletter in the early days of the pandemic, that I’d still be writing it more than six years later. It has not been daily for a while and at times it was not even weekly, though I like to impose that on myself now. Thank you for reading any of it, at any time. I’ve emailed you at least three hundred times and I hope they have all found you well.

Welcome to my occasional, when-I-feel-like-it bonus content about secondhand shopping and selling, minor fascinations, passing fancies, and old stuff! This is the same subscription as Just Some Lady and you are (obviously!) free to skip it.

I’m not very good at packing for any kind of trip. I tend to imagine outfits I think will look good and then I get to my destination and they not only don’t look very good but they are also impractical for some reason – not comfortable for walking, shirt doesn’t actually go with pants, shoes look dumb, whatever.

Before we left for Paris in mid-April, I had a great brainwave, which was to try on the outfits I had in mind and take pictures of same. This is probably something a lot of much smarter people already know about, but I was quite pleased with myself.

Also this time around, I insisted on checking a bag. I know it’s a risk with connecting flights, but I wanted space to bring some things back and I also didn’t want to run out of clothes to wear. I don’t mind doing some sink laundry if there’s a heated towel rack for drying, and I travel with these Tide sink packets and this drain cover my friend Miriam recommended (hotel sink drains might not have stoppers or the stoppers might not work). But I would rather not do this a lot, and I am still traumatized by our last Paris trip when I underpacked for a heat wave and was washing everything constantly.

(Somewhat related, the most unhinged person on the internet once ranted at a forum full of women for not at least rinsing their bras out every night, calling into question their “standards of personal daintiness,” and I have never forgotten it, and now I do this. Never think you aren’t making a difference in someone’s life!)

Anyway, here is what I took, which seemed fairly reasonable (a lot of stuff is in the two packing cubes I’ve used for a long time now):

That includes shoes, tote bags, and scarves but not jackets. I ended up not needing my raincoat, which was a shame in a way because it is quite cute. I also took my J. Crew downtown field jacket and my denim jacket, which I wore to travel there and back.

Anyway! I took a lot of secondhand stuff with me: a Gap linen button down, two Kule tees (one long-sleeved and one short-sleeved), a Spanx dress (this one), my raincoat, two pairs of jeans, a striped Eileen Fisher cotton sweater, a knit Polo sweater vest from the 80s, and a few silk scarves.

I wore the scarves a lot, actually! Some of this was definitely French lady cosplay but some of it was to keep the chill away in the morning or evening, or just perk up an otherwise plain outfit:

LOL at the photo behind me.

I took the $5 Sonia Rykiel crossbody I mentioned a couple of weeks ago and did not even get the Uniqlo bag out of the suitcase. The Sonia Rykiel bag had the right amount of space and the right number of pockets, and I am particularly fond of the front pocket that is exactly the right size for a phone. Just like last time, I saw a lot of the Uniqlo bags on both men and women in the streets of Paris! But it doesn’t have a lot of structure and chucking, say, a phone and a wallet in it makes it seem heavier than it really is. (It is also $5 more than it was in 2023.)

Not secondhand, but I took my Eileen Fisher oval dress on the trip and wore it lots, including to travel home. It really is great for packing and it can be dressy or not. I did take these shoes in the picture with me, they are block heels and therefore decent when traversing cobblestones.

Anyway! I was very pleased with what I brought; it all worked. It didn’t hurt that the weather was perfect all week long – no rain, 70-degree highs and 50-degree lows.

I did not buy any clothes on this trip, though I saw so many stylish Parisian women in trench coats I was very tempted to buy one at Monoprix. I didn’t get to a Monoprix last time, but this time we went twice, once to get things for a picnic and once to get some hazelnut KitKats and another bag of tartiflette-flavored potato chips because OH MY GOD. I also bought a few of their Monoprix-branded reusable shopping bags, including one with an Eiffel Tower motif that was once the subject of a very nasty travel forum throw-down. (In short, they were hard to find for a while, a lady posted on the forum that she’d found a bunch and bought something like eight bags, she was immediately and vehemently canceled.)

Here is the one I chose to keep for myself, already in action!

On my previous trip to Paris I went into a pharmacy but quickly got overwhelmed and didn’t buy anything. This time I did a bit more homework and got a few things:

That deodorant is “all natural” and therefore will not work, but I was intrigued by the scent and also the cuteness. If I had one suggestion here it would be to maybe not worry about hitting the Citypharma in Saint-Germain-des-Prés? A lot of people recommend it and a lot of people complain about how mobbed it is. Just go into literally any pharmacy, because they are everywhere and will have a decent selection of the most common stuff.

Not pictured, I went into the Aesop store to get some more of my hand cream and was suckered into buying this hand serum, which I began using right away and have been enjoying.

On the last day of the trip we went to this chocolate store and bought a number of things from one of the best-looking men I’ve ever seen in real life. The chocolate is also very nice.

I feel like these are reasonably useful/consumable purchases, and everything fit into our bags for the trip home, though our larger suitcase weighed in right at the limit. The only thing I sort of missed out on was poking around a vintage store. I walked past any number of interesting-looking places, but we were always on our way somewhere else or I didn’t want to be carrying something around for the rest of the day, so it didn’t work out this time. I did however get to E. Dehillerin for a madeleine pan, and I’m going to attempt to make some soon, probably this weekend when it gets chilly and rainy again.

We also did not get to poke around any flea markets – the one time we encountered a brocante in the wild was right before we went to the Moulin Rouge, so we couldn’t shop. Considering how creatively we had to swaddle a couple bottles of Champagne for the trip home, it’s probably for the best.

There were two times I was moved to tears in Paris: once upon walking into Notre-Dame, and once while watching a pair of acrobats perform to a 70s French ballad at the Moulin Rouge. What can I say? We all contain multitudes.

My husband booked our travel and hotel for this trip a couple of months ago and we really did not make a lot of plans beyond just getting there. The first time we went, in September 2023, we planned quite a bit in advance. This time we finalized a few things (mostly dinner reservations, it must be said) a week or so before we went, leaving the rest up to each day’s whim.

I had a lot of anxiety around the trip, not just the air travel (which I truly hate) but getting the dogs sorted, getting myself packed – this in particular seemed overwhelming until very nearly the last minute – and the notion that it is just plain stupid to go on vacation when you are out of work. But, as I myself said on Instagram a week later from a Marais hotel room, you can mostly do whatever you want. So, we went.

This time we did not take the metro one single time, not really by design, but we saw much more of the city simply by walking so much of it. We had perfect, literally absolutely perfect, weather, so it was conducive to wandering.

In the middle of the week, we took a day trip to Champagne and briefly stopped in a tabac in a wee Beauty-and-the-Beast village. I sipped a very strong coffee out of a tiny cup and made a joke in French to the proprietor. It reminded me of driving with my husband from Dublin to Cork and stopping at a gas station that had a couple of donkeys in a pen alongside the parking lot. Welcome to real Ireland, my husband told me. This was like that. I have been to Paris twice, but to France once.

(It was during this day trip that I saw, but sadly did not use, a baguette vending machine. We also saw a pizza vending machine, something our French-speaking Italian tour guide had very strong feelings about.)

Every single day was good, and we kept lucking into short lines or lulls at places that are typically mobbed. We had the Palais-Royal practically all to ourselves:

On Saturday we walked to Monoprix and bought some things for a picnic, which we ate sitting in the grass in the Place des Vosges. I mean:

That night we splurged on a fancy French chicken in Montmartre and then at my husband’s insistence, walked over to Sacré-Coeur. My husband can walk around with no destination in mind for literal hours, and this is something that actually drives me very crazy because where are we going? But this time it worked out because the church was still open and it was hushed and peaceful and not crowded inside, and then we walked out to all of Paris spread before us at dusk:

Anyway, it was a beautiful trip. We visited the Conciergerie and the National Archives and used the Batobus as our primary mode of transport one day (I remain a very staunch advocate of the Batobus and its €23 all-day hop-on-and-off ticket, you simply owe it to yourself to do this). I had chocolate mousse twice, pâté en croute thrice, frites many times, and this is all before I even get to the Moulin Rouge, which was actually just incredible?

I did not think about America much at all while we were out of it. We had dinner at our hotel midweek and some Americans sat down next to us, and I didn’t hear exactly what they were discussing with the French server but I heard the president’s name come up. The American woman at the table said “Well anyway, I just can’t stand him! YUCK!” and as I told my friend, my heart grew three sizes.

Finally, at the risk of sounding like a true jackass, I did very well with my French! I was shocked, SHOCKED at how much I could understand, though I remain less impressed with my confidence in pratique orale. There were for sure some awkward exchanges, for example when the very nice saleswoman at Aesop was trying to tell me about the ingredients in one of their potions and I lost complete track of what she was talking about (any conversation that involves specialized terminology is still above my abilities), but I bought the hand serum she was selling, so I figure it all worked out.

There were also very rewarding moments, such as when our tour guide at one of the Champagne houses asked me if this was my first time in France. In French I said no, it’s our second visit, we were last here in 2023. In English she replied “you speak well” and I dined out on that for the rest of the week. (If this is a very French way of saying “you suck” please don’t tell me.)

The day after we got back, I got rejected from yet another final round interview process, which was extremely disappointing, but I think I took it a little better than I would have had I not been on vacation. Check back with me in a week to see if I still have this mature perspective, I guess, but for the time being, what can you do?

I’m going to write a Two Things about secondhand stuff I packed for the trip and the little handful of stuff I bought (spoiler alert, mostly pharmacy stuff and chocolate). So if that is your thing, stay tuned.

Happy belated Easter to those who celebrate either Easter or Reese’s peanut butter eggs, which I missed out on this year. My mother gave me my traditional gift of a fondant peanut butter egg from a local candy shop, and this is one of those things that is either not as good as I remember it being or I simply no longer have the palate of a seven-year-old. Or maybe both! It is also about 60% smaller than it was in my maiden youth, and that is not my imagination. That’s shrinkflation, baby, and the Cadbury Bunny does not approve of the tiny eggs being sold under his good name.

We leave for vacation on Sunday and I would like to go into hibernation until then, but unfortunately there are mountains of things to do, mostly really boring things like cleaning the house. My top travel tip, if you are interested, is to buy a frozen pizza to eat when you get home, and to put out a pair of clean pajamas or sweatpants to wear while you eat the pizza. Take that, Condé Nast Traveler.

I’ve completed many dumb tasks in the last few days, including taking our old phones to the Verizon store to reap their questionable trade-in value. This experience was pretty painless as things like “going to the Verizon store” go, and the store was so shiny and new it still smelled like construction materials.

I also took on some very boring house tasks such as cleaning the refrigerator, which always manages to be more disgusting than I think it should be; and washing my kitchen curtains. Goodbye, smells of dinners past! I love a soft surface, but woof.

Another task I must face this week: completely recombobulating my closet, which I discombobulated so the plumbers could cut a hole in the wall of it in order to fix our dumb double sinks. If you have double sinks and love them then fair play to you, but IMO they really don’t belong in my average-sized 1925 house, and I’m unsure of why the previous owners forced the issue and then plumbed them incorrectly to boot. In any event they are now working and I no longer have to brush my teeth at the bathtub faucet. Luxury!

Anyway, in the interest of saving some time this week, here now follows some Two Things content! The two things in question are jeans and a crossbody bag.

I can count on one finger the jeans I had (in my whole life!!) that I really, truly liked: they were a pair of wide-legged DKNYs from Macy’s circa 1998 so…it’s been a while. During the pandemic I just decided not to buy or wear them anymore at all.

Recently I tried to go back to jeans and decided that the solution to my dilemma was just to spend more money; I bought a pair of Madewell Way-High jeans and surprise! I hated them too. So last fall I ordered something like nine pairs of jeans from Gap and Old Navy, in all different styles and a couple different sizes. I settled on Old Navy’s version of boyfriend jeans, and everything else went back.

But [Backstreet Boys melody] tell me why-eee these Old Navy boyfriend jeans in the SHORT length have to be rolled up twice to expose my ankle bone correctly? I am 5’4”. This should not be necessary! Nevertheless, I can live with it for the price, which are pretty cheap to begin with and around $10-$12 secondhand.

Because I loved my late 90s jeans so much, I also went looking into the past. I read a Substack last year about vintage jeans and subsequently hunted down a pair of Ralph Lauren (the label on the back says “RL Polo Jeans Company” but honestly who has time for all of Papa Ralph’s brands) Saturday jeans. I bought the cropped style in an effort to avoid any issues with length, and I really like them, despite them being about 25 years old. Also, they are 100% cotton so they don’t have any stretch. I actually quite like this about them but it is very different after so many years of strrrrrreeettch jeans.

Anyway these reliably go for around $30 and include your basic straight leg styles, like so:

Or boot cut if you prefer a bit more nostalgia:

And cropped (up to you how “pre-distressed” you like your jeans):

If you are interested, remember that vintage sizes (even from 20 or so years ago) can be humbling, the best indicator of fit is always measurements.

Second thing: A couple of months ago, I decided I wanted a different crossbody bag to take on vacation. I debated with myself because it seemed silly to get another one – I have the very popular and bare-bones nylon Uniqlo version, which is easily handed off between my husband and I and looks fine as a shoulder bag, too. I also have a fancier Milly crossbody I bought years ago in the Barney’s Warehouse sale (RIP), which is nice for going out to dinner but not very secure for touristing.

I favorited several All Saints and APC leather crossbodies, but kept getting distracted by early 90s Sonia Rykiel alphabet print bags. I found one – the camera bag style – in perfect condition for a pretty reasonable price that was quickly rendered unreasonable due to being located in Canada and therefore subject to import duties. Happily, I found a slightly less pristine one, right here in These United States, via old-fashioned eBay auction and I won it for $5. It has a few separate pockets, including one that will be very handy for my phone, and will work during the day or at night as needed.

The alphabet print is available in a couple of styles, including this crossbody/shoulder bag combo:

And this tote/bowling bag style that’s in good condition, even if some of the photos were taken with a potato:

And aside from the alphabet print, there are also some cute SR rainbow bags and wallets out there looking for nice people to adopt them:

I’m not sending anything next week while we’re out of town, but will provide travel anecdotes when I return!

My husband and I have a tradition called Driving Middle Finger, which is when you give the finger below the dashboard to another driver or pedestrian who has just done something dick. So through the windshield, it appears you are being accommodating, but the Driving Middle Finger tells the tale.

I gave the Driving Middle Finger quite a few times on my way to and from the dentist last week. I think it’s clear that people are not really doing well, mentally, and they are doing some dumb shit on the roads. I myself missed my exit (for the dentist I have been going to for about TEN YEARS) simply because my head was in the clouds.

At the dentist, my teeth were fine. The hygienist slipped me a full-size tube of whitening toothpaste, so he is forever in my heart. When the dentist came in to do his bit, he judged me good overall but then asked, “Have you been clenching your teeth?”

Haha. Hahahahahahaha! HAAAHAA. Sir. Yes, I have been clenching my teeth for years at this point. FOR YEARS. Haven’t you???!?!?!

Anyway, I would like to give Driving Middle Finger to…well mostly everything this week (and yes it’s only Tuesday, as I write this). This is for a variety of reasons, some having to do with my laptop trying very hard to croak – it was my consolation prize for being laid off from a job in 2018 so…I’ve pushed it about as far as it can go – my dog’s brain pills being hung up somewhere in mail hell, trying to replace our phones and completing AND PAYING FOR that order, only to find out they are backordered until ???? who knows???? lol, and the weather being either grossly humid, too cold, or physically threatening (more storms?? AWESOME!!!).

That is a very long-winded way of telling you this newsletter is an island of misfit toys, the toys being the thoughts in my progressively softening brain. Forgive me!

I have been making almost daily trips to the post office the last couple of weeks. I don’t mind this, really, though it would be nice if there were one in convenient walking distance. As I told my friend Christine recently, the surest way for me to sell something on Poshmark is to drop off a Poshmark package. Last week after a haircut I went to the charming little Chagrin Falls post office and got a sold notification on my phone while I was there.

Now I realize I just talked shit about the post office, but in general I find post offices reassuring in our troubled times: they smell the same, their basic function has not changed, the services work pretty well considering, and there is always a no-nonsense lady in charge who runs the place like it’s the Navy. And I like that you can go in some post offices after hours and drop off packages and use the little shipping kiosk in absolute silence!

I watched the new Peaky Blinders movie recently and am devastated to tell you that it is really terribly bad, despite being absolutely juiced to the rafters with multiple Oscar, BAFTA, IFTA, Golden Globe, Emmy, SAG, and Critic’s Choice nominated and winning actors. I mean it was barely coherent. I only watched a couple of seasons of the television show, was it also terrible? I no longer remember.

On the topic of terrible shows, my husband and I are enjoying Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, which sprang from the loins of the Godzilla oeuvre. It is really stupid! Kurt Russell and his son are in it (they play the same guy, there’s a time jump) along with a bunch of other people. I would be hard pressed to tell you the plot. We sort of watch and make fun of it in between looking at our phones. Perfect 2026 television.

True confession: I love most of the contemporary Godzilla movies, although none of them are very good. I find Godzilla’s annoyance at being awakened from a sound subterranean slumber because humans cannot leave well enough alone to be extremely relatable. I also like how he usually defeats his enemy by just screaming. Again, relatable! He simply screams fire at whatever is bothering him and then turns around and stomps back into the ocean. Leave him alone!

What have I cooked lately? Over the weekend, I made the World’s Best Lasagna (that’s its government name, I don’t make the rules). I don’t know if you’ve ever encountered this phenomenon before but it is reliably very loved by crowds of people and also in my house of two people. Obviously this makes way too much lasagna for two people, but if you eat it two nights in a row and freeze the rest (or make it in two pans and freeze one) it works out really well.

I went looking for the lore behind this recipe and discovered to my dismay that the creator died a few years ago. This is obviously a huge bummer but I am happy his legacy lives on through this crowd-pleaser. I think my mom found this recipe and shared it with me, and while very basic it does not require much expertise or anything exotic. If you need to feed 12 people, this is your jam. If you are not a meat person this is my other favorite lasagna recipe, and while sort of a faff, it is worth it.

I’ve also been making the blueberry oatmeal yogurt pancakes I mentioned a few weeks ago, which freeze very well and warm up nicely in a moderate oven. It feels quite luxurious to have pancakes on demand on a weekday. I usually much prefer waffles to pancakes but these are a manageable size and have some minor redeeming nutritional qualities, if you need convincing.

A while ago I started baking bread pretty much every week, and my husband has judged this recipe to be ideal for a nostalgic childhood lunch: the crisp butty. To make this treat you need Kerrygold butter, Snyder of Berlin Bar-B-Q potato chips (any BBQ chip will do but this is my husband’s preferred chip), and two slices of bread. Butter one slice of the bread, arrange chips on top, put the other slice on top of the chips and smash it down. Crisp butty! I will admit to not being as charmed by this as he is.

For dinner this week I am pulling three recipes from the most recent issue of Milk Street: black bean and cheese quesadillas (I’m also making pico and cilantro-lime rice to go with), curried chicken and cashew meatballs (kachumber salad on the side), and orzotto alfredo with sweet peas and Italian sausage (I added the sausage). I only found the orzotto recipe sans paywall, but I think if you create a free profile on Milk Street you might be able to cadge a recipe or two.

BTW if you are curious about what I have planned for Friday, here is what it says in my Notes app:

Welcome to my occasional, when-I-feel-like-it bonus content about secondhand shopping and selling, minor fascinations, passing fancies, and old stuff! This is the same subscription as Just Some Lady and you are (obviously!) free to skip it.

Earlier this week I tortured myself with some internet window shopping, aka adding things to a cart and then running away. I did this with makeup (that I don’t need) and I did it with some hair products (one thing I did ‘need’ and eventually bought but more on that shortly) and I did it with some nifty crossbody purses that I could make an argument for needing but probably don’t.

I would rather spend my money on vacation in a couple of weeks than on fripperies at home, so that is one reason I didn’t buy anything. I am also trying to use up a lot of things I bought and OMGLOVED briefly before falling for more magpie bait. However, I did get very sick of seeing the fan of feeble little broken hairs at the top of my head catching the light on every video interview I’ve done in the last several weeks.

My hair stylist says the hack to smoothing these down is to spray hairspray on your hand and lightly brush them over the sticky-uppy bits. It does work, but I don’t like spraying hairspray on my hand. My friend Miriam sent me news of this but I economized somewhat and bought the $8 drugstore version of same. It works fine! Also, it smells like everything Garnier Fructis has ever made, which is to say, the early aughts. (Hot tip, this is great for next-day hair if you spent the previous night hanging out in a smoke-filled bar, which I realize virtually nobody does anymore, but still.)

Have you ever lost a garment that you loved? I lost a pair of mittens that I knit myself from yarn I bought in Ireland, and that is extremely sad to me. Just this winter I lost the grey cashmere Quince gloves I bought last year, which was inconvenient but not sad (they weren’t that great). And about 20 years ago I lost a Bill Blass Jeans corduroy jacket (a lot like this one but mine was olive green), but several months later the jacket turned up in a bar I frequented, hanging on the lost and found peg. The universe giveth and the universe taketh away.

One thing the universe tooketh away from me was an openwork shawl that I still think about all the time. I found it in a thrift store, of course, and I wore it a lot 2003-2005, aka peak Carrie Bradshaw cosplay. In a lot of ways it was similar to this one – very loose knit, long fringe, triangle shape – but mine wasn’t beaded and was made from a silky, champagne-colored thread. I looooooooved that thing and wore it all kinds of ways for years, until I left it at a winery I visited on a weekend away with my best high school friend.

I called the winery a couple of times but they claimed nobody had turned anything in, so as much as it pains me, maybe somebody claimed it as their own and has it still. Maybe it ended up in another thrift store and some other girl bought it! In any event i still miss it. It was just a thing that was Signature Me™ in a specific epoch and if I still had it, I’d like to think I’d be trying to figure out a way to bring it back into rotation.

Anyway! Let’s look at some shawls that are definitely not MY shawl but share some DNA. This first one is nice and more geometric than floral if that’s not your thing:

Wear this one and use it to hypnotize people if the need arises:

The floral pattern on this one reads more 60s-70s boho to me than Victorian lady:

Speaking of boho. I like this one a lot and it is really quite dramatic without being too costume-y:

HEAR ME OUT, I think this one is fun. I can almost feel the crunchy acrylic yarn!

Tell me about a piece of clothing you lost and will never get over in the comments! And if you want more shawl content there’s a (paywalled but worth it) article from Neverworns that will fit the bill.

NEVERWORNS

All You Need Is a Sexy Summer Shawl

Today on #NEVERWORNS, I’m talking about the endless allure of the shawl. It might be the most erotic thing that many of us already have in our wardrobe. As always, subscribe and watch #NEVERWORNS, especially this freak-friendly episode with James Veloria…

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3 years ago · 35 likes · 10 comments · Liana Satenstein

I had a very long week last week, and I am tired in my bones. There were errands, there was cleaning, there were home repairs, there were multiple medical appointments, there was Family Time, there were job interviews, there were vet appointments. It was A Lot.

One of the family time things was my sister-in-law’s birthday, which was dinner out and drinks after. I dressed up and we took an Uber, you may recognize this as the 50+ version of X-tremely Ready To Partayyyyy (i.e., have more than one drink and get home after 10 pm). The drinks portion of the evening was at a bar I have been visiting for more than 20 years, though not for the last several years and not since it changed ownership.

This bar used to be in a nowhere neighborhood, where you’d not want to park your car too far away or walk alone after dark. Now it is surrounded by half-million dollar condos and the streets are clean and well-lit. It’s not bad but it is different.

Twenty years ago the bar had a private, members-only back room. The owner was a mysterious older gentleman who ran a tight ship (no big hair, no white zinfandel, no stretch limos according to a small sign out front) and the bar was completely closed on St Patrick’s Day and New Years Eve. Back when you could smoke in bars, $9 got you a pack of Dunhills on a silver tray, one cigarette already pulled halfway out, alongside a box of wooden matches. The cocktails were outstanding and cost $15, which is of course quite typical now but at the time was mind-boggling.

I first went there with my best friend, and variously with dates and boyfriends and once with a guy I very definitely should not have had anything to do with, and then finally with my now-husband. By the time we were dating, the smoking ban was in effect and the Dunhills were a thing of the past and you had to smoke your own cigarettes in a not-unpleasant alleyway between the bar and an old, possibly abandoned or at least minimally occupied industrial building. That building is now full of one-bedroom apartments going for about $2,000 a month.

Anyway, none of that is terribly interesting at face value, but when I texted my friend that I was at the bar we had a brief conversation about how nostalgia is often really grief, and what are we mourning exactly? The passing of time? No, because being alive is good. Not being young anymore? Maybe, but there are things about my 20s and 30s that I am fine with saying goodbye to. What I really wanted was to feel exactly what it felt like – not just remember what it felt like – to park my crappy car and run across a crumbling street in my high heels and my weird little outfit to have an adventure…but also to know how good I had it and how glorious it was to just exist in that moment. To have awareness of how you will one day look at your husband across a table and say, without using words or even really moving your face, I’m tired and ready to go home, where once you would have stayed out all night trying to read some man’s mind.

And you both will and won’t miss the old times, in ways that are (clearly) impossible to accurately describe, and a lot of the details will get lost to time and everything will soften around the edges. You will forget driving home on a quarter tank of gas you can’t refill yet because you just spent $50 on cocktails, you will forget the guys that never called again, you will not forget some of the bad decisions. And the only people that really know what it was like are the ones who were there with you, which is why you spend so much time texting and also writing about it on your Substack.

This week I have to go to the dentist and I’m pretty annoyed about it, not because I mind the dentist so much but because it is the appointment where they take all the x-rays and for some reason, this always feels like it takes forever. In reality it is probably six or eight x-rays but it seems like 1,200. I usually leave the office blinking in the bright outdoor light like I’ve been in a cave for ten days. It’s disorienting.

On the plus side, spring weather seems to finally have gotten its teeth into northeast Ohio (despite a slight dusting of snow that arrived late last night). Paired with the “extra” hour of daylight, this has been a big bonus to my circadian rhythm and general outlook on life. Landscapers came by the house a couple of weeks ago and trimmed back all the trees and flowering things, so they should be heavy with blooms this spring and summer, and I can’t wait.

I feel like I should have more plans, or at least more concepts of a plan, for myself these days, but I can’t manage to think more than 48 hours ahead. This has made preparing for an upcoming vacation very difficult, because being without a job has distorted my sense of time. What day is it? How many days until we leave, and how many of those days can I reasonably spend in sensory deprivation, distancing myself from everything that’s stressing me out? REPLY HAZY, says my internal Magic 8 Ball. ASK AGAIN LATER, OR MAYBE DON'T BECAUSE I WON’T KNOW THEN, EITHER.

My husband is the type of person, e.g. a functioning adult, who makes a list of things that we need and want to do to the house each year. He divides these up by quarter and prioritizes them by must-do and nice-to-have. He is the one who puts all of this stuff in motion and gets multiple quotes and I am very glad, because I would definitely already be in my Grey Gardens era if left to my own devices.

However, when he talks about things like a bathroom remodel, I start to initiate a brain shutdown sequence because in my current state of disorientation I cannot conceive of such things. Tear apart…a bathroom? Have people in the house, coming and going, asking questions, needing us to make decisions? This is paralyzing to me, sorry! We can use the ugly bathroom with the nonfunctioning sinks forever! (Don’t worry, we’re getting the sinks fixed next week. The vision of Grey Gardens recedes, for now.)

Welcome to my occasional, when-I-feel-like-it bonus content about secondhand shopping and selling, minor fascinations, passing fancies, and old stuff! This is the same subscription as Just Some Lady and you are (obviously!) free to skip it.

For years, I have been very true to one specific piece of sleepwear, which is the Soma Cool Nights short-sleeve sleepshirt. I freely admit to being A Little Weird about this, having bought them repeatedly for about a decade. I don’t like to buy them new from Soma because $52? In cette economie? Mais non. But I do like to buy them new with tags on eBay for about half that. And that’s what I did recently when I realized all my night clothes were looking a little Miss Hannigan, aka, they’d seen better days.

But maybe you would like something more fancy, in cotton or perhaps silk? One Substacker I follow points her readers to a British brand where you can find a nice cotton nightshirt for upwards of $150 and silk sleepwear for somewhere between $300 and $500. That’s adorable, and obviously they are all very pretty, but I think we can do a bit better on the resale market.

I realize secondhand sleepwear might press your “yuck” button! But fancy nightwear that still looks nice 20 to 30 years after it was manufactured probably wasn’t worn very often, if ever. Reassuring! You will even find some of them with the tags still attached, untouched since Valentine’s Day 1998 or whatever.

Because a good chunk of my DNA has been carried across the years from some down-on-her-luck dowager duchess mouldering away in a crumbling manse, I first decided to see where I could get with silk. Where I ended up was late 90s Victoria’s Secret, which for a time was apparently just pumping out 100% silk nightgowns at a mass market price?

One thing you have to contend with in this particular niche market is that you are looking at a pretty narrow window of time, and a lot of these silk nightshirts probably got ruined in the washing machine, and they had their heyday about 30 years ago. And then there are the colors…jewel tones are de rigeur so if you’re not into gold, burgundy, hot pink, and teal, you might be out of luck. There are some patterned ones which toe the line between 90s nostalgia and just regular ugly, but even regular ugly can be kind of fun if you’re just swanning around your house or conked out in bed.

But you could also go for red:

Or a floral robe:

Here is a 90s VS cotton nightgown that will have you looking like a bodice-ripper heroine:

This one is very pretty, I like the pintuck detail:

These garments are pricier ($30-$75 and up) than you might imagine and some of them look like they were stored wadded up inside a sock for a couple decades (resellers: get a steamer). But several weeks ago, I found two examples at the lower end of that range, made modestly discounted offers, and ended up with two 100% silk night shirts. A pro tip from me to you: always look for a picture of the fabric content tags on anything “silk” as a lot of people quite honestly believe that anything silky aka polyester satin is “silk.” It is not! It is sweaty.

Online selling is starting to pick back up as a few things happen simultaneously (in business ghostwriting I would call these “market forces” or “multiple levers” like a wanker). One, people are paying off their holiday spending. Two, the season is about to change or is already changing across most of the US. And three, people are getting tax refunds.

I’ve also noticed a pattern, which is that I often do quite a brisk business on Fridays and Sundays. As my friend Christine noted, this is when people are either “drunk or sad” and while I do think that paychecks hitting bank accounts probably has something to do with it, I can’t ignore the fact that retail therapy can go a long way toward ameliorating both existential dread and the Sunday scaries.

Accordingly, business has been brisk. I’ve even sold some things that have sat online for months. I had a moment of mild panic one day, when I noticed a faint mark on the front of a white shirt I was packing up to mail off. Three rounds off Tide Rescue, Biz, and warm-water presoak later and the shirt is mark-free and in the hands of the USPS. And it is CLEAN, honey.

I’m not shopping for anything to wear right now; I’m mostly enjoying watching my “to sell” closet become empty. Every now and again I will “like” something sort of weird like an old Forenza sweater vest or a pair of 1970s velvet pants from I. Magnin, and my algorithm will get strange for a while. This has been fun and led me to many corners of the resale internet.

Yesterday Poshmark served me a pair of 100% wool Casual Corner pants from the 80s. Imagine buying 100% wool pants at whatever today’s equivalent of Casual Corner is? Those pants probably cost about $40 in 1988! They are similarly priced on Poshmark today; ten times that will get you 97% wool and a bit of stretch at Vince. I am sure we all have some idea about how we arrived here, but I will leave you with an article about fast fashion and its impact on pricing and, perhaps more critically, value.

Lastly, a question: if you have ever used those little Cadence containers for travel, or you have something similar that you like, would you let me know in the comments? I’m interested and hear mostly positive things but would like MOAR OPINIONS.

Last week, my husband went on a business trip. He was only away for two nights, which is, to me, the sensible limit for such an excursion. It was not always that way but fortunately (?) many companies have less money to spend on such things, or at least less appetite to spend it, than they used to.

In 2017, I spent a very long Sunday through Thursday at Oracle OpenWorld (now enshittified to Oracle AI World) and took daily Ubers to a brewery at 5:30 am so I could set up my team’s Customer Welcome Center on the second floor. I dragged high-top tables into position and covered them in bright red table socks. I set up monitors for the demo stations. I arranged the swag, which dwindled as the week went on, and then all day I would scan badges of Big Important Men from airlines and industrial equipment manufacturers and foreign governments.

On the day of my flight home, I stopped in the hotel’s business center before calling my sunrise Uber and printed out an offer letter for a new job, signed it, and faxed it back. At the brewery, I packed everything into boxes and labeled them for storage. I would still have to give notice and work out my two weeks but I felt free and very done with OpenWorld.

When the rest of the team finally trickled in1, a senior director whose attitude toward me had taken a decidedly nasty turn2 in the run-up to the event, mentioned something about everyone meeting for breakfast the next morning. I told her I was leaving that afternoon and she barked “Next year, you need to understand you don’t leave until Friday, okay?” And because I’d signed that offer letter and by next year OpenWorld would be but a figment of my imagination, I just said “okay.” I gave my notice on Monday morning and my manager laughed because I was the second person on her team to quit that day.

As I interview for a new job, however far I get in the interview process, there is always a moment where I think – are these my new people? The people I’ll see on Zoom most every day, and in person hopefully very rarely, because I don’t love work travel (see above)? Sometimes it feels very overwhelming. Get to know more people? In this timeline? Seems unthinkable.

I made one of those “me in the 90s” instagram videos, like a real sucker. I felt justified because the 90s was when I graduated from high school, finished college, got my first job and moved into my first apartment. A lot happened! There were a few outtakes I didn’t include, for instance this senior picture proof that I did not order copies of:

The chokehold that turtlenecks had on my generation!

Here is me holding a friend’s baby, whose identity is obscured by his sunglasses and also by the fact that he is nearly thirty years old now:

I lost a lot of photos from this era when the basement of our duplex apartment flooded sometime around 2012. So I’m glad I have what I have, including this example of business-wear-as-club-wear:

Here are a bunch of my college friends at my parents’ house sometime around 1995 or 1996 and will you look at our feet. I mean.

Finally I was properly sad when the hoodie in this picture went missing:

I don’t remember where it was from, but I wore it constantly.

In going through these pictures I considered doing a theme issue of “me wearing flannel” or “me holding a beer” but there are just too many of both. Sadly I don’t think I have any pictures of me smoking? Which is odd because for a time in the 1990s I STAYED SMOKING but if any evidence exists, I don’t have it. I also do not have any pictures where you can clearly see my pierced eyebrow. Incidentally, I got it pierced on that Arizona trip by a shirtless man who worked out of an old house with a cactus planted in a toilet in the front yard. Colorful!

Despite having lost all this photographic evidence, and despite knowing the pictures I do have are destined to clutter my house until I die, I remain grateful that phone cameras and social media were Not A Thing in the 90s. I don’t know how kids today do it, to be honest. It’s one thing to know there’s a print photo of me clearly high as hell and wearing a Macbeth t-shirt that was probably from the Wireless catalog, but at least it is not going to go viral without me doing it myself (hence why it is not shared here, I mean Macbeth???!?!?).

Did you watch the Oscars? I did, though I missed large parts of it because we were eating dinner in the dining room like real aristocrats. I really don’t understand how a broadcast in which nothing happens can take so long? I’m not even sure why the orchestra bothers playing people off, as I’m not sure it would add that much time to simply let people say a few words. It’s an especially bad look because the people who get played off are usually not white, or not from the US, or women! Funny that!

There was one point where I walked out of the room in total disinterest, which was when Anna Wintour and Anne Hathaway appeared on stage to present. I feel whatever about Anna Wintour, but I am disgusted by her embrace of tacky Bezos money and this, to me, seems like an attempt to lean into appearing to have a sense of humor about herself in hopes of goosing her image somewhat.

I am also well documented as having never been able to stand Hathaway, I’m sorry, I do not get it at all! For evidence I submit each incredibly cringe thing she has ever done, including accepting her Oscar for Les Miserables (unforgivable casting, I will never see it) and telling her director in an upcoming film that “I have to apologize, because I think what's going to come out of me will hurt you.3” I have to apologize, because please give me a motherfucking break.

Anyway, all that to say, I could really care less about The Devil Wears Prada sequel, and I love that movie, despite its star. I clearly (see above!) am subject to nostalgia, but we are drowning in it at the expense of creating new stuff (also coming in 2026: another Meet the Parents movie). I also just find it sad that two out of the four stars of this thing look like they have aged appropriately in the last 20 years, and two of them look exactly the same only weirder because WHY HAVEN’T YOU AGED IN THE LAST 20 YEARS. People’s uncanny valley faces are another reason why it’s sort of depressing to watch the Oscars anymore, I’m aware this is far from an original line of thinking but it’s hard not to feel some kind of way looking at Demi Moore and Nicole Kidman.

In closing, my favorite Oscar winner was this woman, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who won for Best Cinematography for Sinners, a movie I will unfortunately never see because I am a baby:

She looked regal, she was chill but heartfelt, her colleagues seemed fucking JAZZED for her, her son has amazing hair. More of everything like this, please!

I’ve been housewife-ing really hard the last several weeks. I know the term is problematic! In reality I am just doing things around my house, things any adult of any gender and relationship status can do, but sometimes I complete a chore and think wow, my clueless 1950s ad exec husband sure would have bragged to the boys at work about me and my homemade bread, on-time dinners, and clean laundry! Or would he? I have my doubts about what value this imaginary and no-doubt disappointing man would have placed on my domestic contributions.

This morning I made a batch of blueberry oatmeal yogurt pancakes, for no other reason than I had the time (and, admittedly, a surfeit of oats and Greek yogurt). I split a couple with my husband and froze the rest, which now occupy valuable freezer real estate alongside a batch of meatballs, several containers of homemade bone broth, and probably some other things I have forgotten about already.

I swing back and forth between having boundless energy to produce elaborate baked goods and intricate dinners, and having no energy to do anything at all, something that puzzles and delights my dogs by turn. They don’t know whether to follow me anxiously around the house, trying very hard to trip me down the stairs and collect life insurance, or to lay down next to me and pretend to be unconscious for several hours at a stretch. It could be either!

My varying energy levels likely have a lot to do with how well or not well I have been sleeping lately, which is mostly “not well.” Last week I had two job interviews at 7:30 am on consecutive mornings, and while I felt fine for the interviews themselves, I was wrecked for a couple of days afterward. I am typically awake for the day sometime between six and seven whether or not I set an alarm, but there is a difference between making coffee and feeding the dogs in my PJ pants and performing competence and XTREME enthusiasm to a stranger. Maybe I just spent all my Care Units too early in the day, or maybe I am spending Care Units I don’t have on interviews that hold an outsized importance right now.

Also – and I’m not sure if this is due to the time change or the general anxiety of existing all the time but especially right now or what – I keep waking up sometime between 1:30 and 3:30 am and then just…not going back to sleep. When this happens I know the absolute wrong thing to do is look at my stupid phone, even to read a book, but occasionally I will do it until I drop it on my own face, an idiot signal that I am finally tired enough to cadge a few more hours of shuteye.

Earlier this week my friend Christina (not her real name but an inside joke similar to her real name) shared a writing prompt of “where were you when.” I have lived long enough to accumulate a lot of these, like where were you when September 11 happened and where were you when Bean Dad bean dadded.

As I told Christina, I definitely have memories of the day Reagan was shot, mostly because my mother was glued to the television and it was not General Hospital, but rather Walter Cronkite and his contemporaries. The news men were giving conflicting reports on whether or not the shooting was fatal, and if so, to whom. “IS HE DEAD OR NOT??!?!” I remember her yelling at the TV, and whereas at seven years old I would have said her voice sounded “mad,” I can now say she sounded distraught. Not because she loved Ronald Reagan so much but because she was 22 when Kennedy was killed and this would have evoked her own “where were you when.”

The first major news event I remember was the hostage crisis at the US embassy in Iran, which began just a month or two after I turned six. My parents were nightly news watchers and I was never sent out of the room, so I mostly remember seeing images of the hostages wearing hoods (although in my googling it looks like blindfolds rather than hoods) and for some reason I found this deeply horrific.

I was also afraid of Khomeini specifically. (It is a real trip to examine how these things get ingrained in us! I knew who the Ayatollah was almost before I knew Santa wasn’t real!) I remember an issue of Time magazine on which he appeared, perhaps in January 1980 when he was named Man of the Year, and showing it to my dad and whispering “I think this man should shut his mouth” to which his response was probably: girl what????

I was afraid of the Ayatollah until sometime around 1983, when Yuri Andropov began to seem much scarier. Obviously I was still watching the nightly news quite raptly. It was either that, or watching The Day After. My parents were, perhaps, not vigilant about whatever the early 80s version of parental controls were, see also me reading Mayflower Madam and Fatal Vision before entering middle school.

Anyway, re: Iran, here we are 47 years later and, well. If I – lacking the nuances of the situation that can really only be gained by being in it oneself or studying it and not just reading “takes” – can see that what’s happening now is not going to suddenly and magically give Iranians what they want and need, then it’s pretty depressing that the Big Important Men cannot or will not and even more depressing when you accept that absolutely none of this is done with the welfare of actual humans in mind. It is all dick-measuring and posturing and pwning no0bs or whatever, and it is shitty and tiring. It is undoubtedly at least partly why I wake up at 1:30 in the morning and why yes, I am sad about it and scared about it but mostly I am incandescently angry about it, and I don’t know what to do. Going back to sleep seems like both the correct thing (stay rested, fill your own cup first, blah blah blah) and desperately careless (how can I sleep when everything is so terrible, I am the worst).

To bring this back around to where we started, this morning I simply made pancakes about it. Yes, we have to enjoy things, but also measuring 1 1/4 teaspoons of baking powder and one cup of blueberries and putting 1/3 cup of batter on the griddle and robotically turning it after two minutes frees my brain to not try and fix the unfixable, just for a while.