Friday Five: 10/06/23

Hope you like word games and earrings and skincare and being hypnotized to sleep.

Hello, hello! It’s time for the second ever Friday Five, in which I laud the amazingness of four things I’m loving right now and gently roast one that I’m not. (Or as my friend Anna Goldfarb described it, “four hell yeahs and a resounding hell no.” Anna is a fellow freelance writer and is currently working on a book about friendship that I cannot wait to buy; she has her own Substack about the nuances of friendship that you should definitely subscribe to. Wait, that doesn’t count as one of my four “hell yeahs,” even though it absolutely is one.)

1. First up: Connections, the new NYT game.

Listen, I don’t want to make it my whole personality or whatever, but I have never really been into Wordle. I’m sure the people who (still!) share their Wordle scores on Instagram are lovely people, but I literally cannot skip through those posts fast enough because I just cannot identify with wanting to play that game (it feels so stressful to me!) Spelling Bee, on the other hand, I absolutely love; my husband and I will often play separately all day and then compare scores in the evening, welcome to the excitement of married life. But what I love most of all is this new NYT game called Connections, where you have to group 16 words into four groups of four and you only have four “lives” to squander on silly mistakes. At first you’re like “omg, this is so easy,” but the editors are sneaky and they’re always throwing in little zingers to trip you up, and I am fairly certain this game is staving off some sort of inevitable cognitive decline for me, as well as being extremely fun. My kids are also really into it now, to the point that we have had to instigate a rotating system where I play Connections with one of them one night while my husband plays with the other, then we switch off. (I love how this makes us sound so twee and intellectual, as though they are not also straight-up injecting Teen Titans into their veins the rest of the time.)

2. Switching gears (or switching EARS?), I have the perfect earrings for you!

Apologies if you are not an earring-wearer, but I just need to talk about these earrings for a minute. I receive roughly one compliment a day on them and they cost $7.99. They are from Target, as are all good things, and I have been wearing them non-stop (like literally, I never take them off; sleep in them, shower in them, swim in them etc.) They are extremely lightweight, they don’t turn your ears green (surprising, given the price tag!), and they immediately make you look slightly more put together than you feel. I have occasionally lost one, and instead of feeling gut-wrenching panic (I cannot wear expensive earrings anymore, because I cannot deal with this feeling!), I have just been like, “welp, better add another pair to the old Target drive-up order.”) In short: a timeless classic! For eight bucks.

3. Do not operate heavy machinery while indulging in this next recommendation.

Okay, quick story: I’ve had the Hatch Restore alarm clock for a few years (another recommendation for another time!) and one of my favorite parts about it was always these “sleep stories” they had that you could play to put you to sleep. There were two in particular that my husband and I listened to every night, and I swear to god they, like, hypnotized us into sleep; they were so weirdly specific and detailed, but also about nothing at all. We listened to them obsessively for about six months, during which we were both sleeping so well, and then Hatch suddenly took them off the Restore and replaced them with some really awful sleep stories that did not hypnotize us at all, and for like a year we mourned the loss of these hypnotizing sleep stories and didn’t know how we would ever find them again. For a while, we were even like, “wait, did those actually exist? Did we imagine them?” And then one day I had the idea—which honestly should have occured to me much sooner—to google one of the lines from one of the sleep stories, and I FOUND THEM because it turns out they had all been taken from a very popular podcast called Nothing Much Happens, which is a veritable treasure trove of hypnotizing sleep stories. I mean, when I tell you it made my entire week! So now, order is restored, all is right in the world, and we fall asleep every night listening to either “A Block From Home,” “Closing Up Shop,” or a random wild card story that is about something similarly cozy and nothing-y, like making soup or wandering through the library. Bliss!

4. This is going to sound very “a lot of you have been asking me about my skincare routine,” but bear with me: I have found an excellent trifecta of morning products!

For the last couple of months, I’ve been combining the three products above in my hand and applying them to my face, neck, and décolletage every morning, and I have never had so many people say nice things about my skin! (I mean, I am also using a retinol in the evening, plus a few other things, so take this with a grain of salt. Also one of the people saying nice things about my skin was my mother, so take that with a grain of salt too.) I know there are products that do all of these things in one single product, but I have tried them and I like this better. The Vanicream moisturizer is super basic and inexpensive, but it gets the job done; the tanning drops give you just a little glow without looking too fake; and the sunscreen, well, you know what sunscreen does (and I assume you also know that this Trader Joe’s one is a direct dupe of Supergoop’s Unseen, my favorite facial sunscreen ever, except it’s $8.99 instead of $38.) I will use this combination as long as they keep making all this stuff!

And now here it is: the one thing that didn’t work out for me. It pains me to say it, but we’re talking Birkenstocks. Oh yes, we are.

Look how cute these are! Adorable, right? Well, these are the Birkenstock Madrid Big Buckle in Sandcastle, and they are legitimate torture devices. I wanted so badly for these to work out for me, because a) I have enjoyed other Birkenstocks in the past, b) Birkenstocks are supposed to be insanely comfortable! Everyone talks about how comfortable they are!, and c) these are neutral and pretty and on-trend and would go with a lot of things. The thing is: they just did not work for me, which was extremely sad. I gave it a valiant effort—I did the whole “break them in slowly” thing, wearing them with socks around the house and then outside in 30-minute increments; I googled things like “Big Buckle Madrid does it take longer than normal to break in” and committed to two whole months of trying to make it work; I bought LARGE PACKAGES OF MOLESKIN online.

But in the end, every time I wore them, I regretted wearing them with all of my heart; they looked cute, but they felt like hell. And why would you wear Birkenstocks and also feel like hell? Isn’t the point of Birkenstocks not to feel like hell? Like, you’re sacrificing a little bit of cuteness to the god of Birkenstocks but in exchange they’re like “these are going to be the most comfortables shoes you’ve ever worn, trust us” and so you weigh it up and you’re like “eh, seems like a good deal”? Isn’t that the whole jam? Well, that was not the whole jam with these shoes, at least for me (I think the main problem was that the buckle hit at the exact wrong point on my foot and just dug in like crazy every time I walked.) So I sold them and bought the classic Birkenstock Arizona instead, which I had in 2001, which admittedly are not quite as cute (I went with the taupe suede this time) but are at least not making me cry with pain. Which, I don’t know, call me crazy, seems kind of important for shoes.