Friday Five: 3/29/24

Okay fine, it's Saturday now, but I started writing this last night.

It’s Friday! [Narrator voice: It was no longer Friday.] We’re way overdue for another Friday Five, a “regular” feature I decided to add to this newsletter and yet somehow haven’t done since LAST year (I mean, it was the last day of last year, but come on.)

Before I begin the Friday Five — four things I’ve been loving lately, one that was a giant bust — may I just gently direct you to a piece I wrote for The Cut this week? It’s about how moms who’ve had cancer feel about Kate Middleton’s recent diagnosis, and specifically about how it felt to tell their kids they were sick. I got the assignment late last Friday afternoon and spent the evening finding sources, interviewed four amazing women on Saturday, went wedding dress shopping with my sister on Sunday (not related to the piece, just a fun time!), then spent all day Monday writing, finally laying my head on my pillow at 1:30am and then waking up at 6:30am so I could read through the story one more time, move a few commas, and send it to my editor who was three hours ahead in New York. It was a pretty tight turnaround and the subject matter was a little painful to relive, but I’m so happy with how it turned out, and I’m so happy to have finally (finally!) achieved my 2020 goal of writing for The Cut, which was a truly wonderful, supportive, seamless experience all around. I only hope it’s not gonna take another 4 years to write something else for them.

Anyway, onward with the Friday Five! (Standard disclaimer that I literally wouldn’t even know how to make these into affiliate links if I tried, so I’m making no money from recommending these things and you can therefore trust me implicitly.)

1. First up, a veritable bonanza of santal! A santalapalooza! (Okay, it’s just two santal-scented things you can buy at Target.)

   

Did you, like 90% of the population in San Francisco and Brooklyn, wear Le Labo’s Santal 33 for much of 2018 and 2019? I did, and I smelled amazing! In fact, I smelled like the Gramercy Park Hotel. (RIP, Gramercy Park Hotel, which closed in 2020. They used to burn this scent in their lobby and so it always smelled incredible in there. There was a brief period of time when every single person on my team at Instagram would stay at the Gramercy Park Hotel when we went to New York for work and thereafter we would always talk about how good it smelled. One day, I walked into a meeting back in the Bay Area, wearing Le Labo Santal 33, and one of my male co-workers said “wow, you smell……well, HR prohibits me from telling you that you smell fantastic, so I will just say that you smell like the Gramercy Park Hotel.” It remains one of my favorite compliments ever.)

If you too want to smell — or at least want your hands to smell — like the Gramercy Park Hotel, I am going to recommend the Method Aluminum Gel Hand Soap in Vetiver + Amber, which, despite not having a whiff of “santal” in its name, smells very strongly of the stuff. It definitely smells like you paid more than $6.99 for it, anyway. Nobody would fault you for decanting this into a much fancier container and pretending you’re the sort of person who spends $70 on hand soap (although would you actually want to be a person who spends $70 on hand soap? Or friends with a person who spends $70 on hand soap? Not that the real Le Labo hand soap even costs $70, but $70 hand soaps do exist, my friends. I’m not gonna say that this Method one smells like it could cost $70, because who even knows what that smells like, probably the tears of a small Norwegian unicorn, but it does smell expensive and delicious and you can get it for curbside pickup the next time you need paper towels, so there you go.)

And while you’re throwing that in your cart, might as well get the Saltair Santal Bloom Serum Body Wash too, which smells amazing and whose chic packaging passes the “would I want people to see that I have this is my shower?” test. (On a scale of Suave to Aesop, I put it about three-quarters of the way up.)

2. Next up, a cottage cheese that is—listen, I can’t even believe I’m saying this—delicious.

   

Let me tell you a story about cottage cheese: I have never liked the stuff. There, that is basically the story. Maybe it’s the memory of my dad ordering things like the “Dieter’s Special” in a diner (literally just a bowl of cottage cheese and a few cantaloupe slices), but it has always been synonymous with weird ’80s and ’90s diet culture for me and also all those little curds just give me the ick. And yet, like many ladies in their early 40s, I am trying to eat more protein; I eat very little meat (and no chicken and no fish) and so it’s always a struggle to find protein-rich things that sound appealing. And until last month, when my friend Laura told me about this concoction she had eaten for lunch every day for the last few weeks, cottage cheese was not one of those things. But she promised me that this would be delicious: cottage cheese, tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, a generous glug of olive oil, a sprinkle of sea salt, and a shaking of za’atar. (She said it was a recipe from Melissa Ben-Ishay, the founder of Baked By Melissa, but I cannot find it online anywhere, so maybe I hallucinated that?)

Anyway, intrigued — I do love a shaking of za’atar — I randomly picked up a tub of Good Culture cottage cheese and made it. And it was incredible!

This is the picture my friend sent me; mine wasn’t as pretty.

So in summary: this is a delicious protein-rich lunch that I cannot stop eating, and I think using this particular brand of cottage cheese is imperative. I used the Trader Joe’s one a few times and it was serviceable, but not nearly as good.

2. I like my tomatoes red and the skin around my nose…..not red. That was the most awkward segue into my next recommendation: the Erborian CC Red Correct Cream.

Okay, I discovered this stuff by accident last year, when I read an article about how amazing the Erborian BB cream was. I bought a tube, because I am like a magpie distracted by shiny things, and there was some sort of promotion where I could get this CC cream corrector for free, so I added it to my order and was like “eh, I’ll probably never use it, but worth a try.”

Glorious Substack readers, I USE IT EVERY DAY. Just a teeny-tiny dab under my eyes and around my nose — seriously, I got the small 15ml tube and it’s lasted me since February 2023, that’s how teeny-tiny of a dab you need — and your skin just looks…….I don’t know a better way to say this than expensive. Like, even and dewy and well-moisturized and poreless and supple. You’re actually supposed to put the BB cream over it and……I don’t. In fact, I barely ever use that BB cream, except for maybe a big night out when I want to look a bit more “done.” But just a very small amount of this alarmingly green potion rubbed into your skin does wonders, somehow, and I don’t understand the science of it but I’m going with it, and I’m soon going to order another tube. Maybe even the full-size this time! Which will last me until 2034!

4. I thought I was done with podcasts until I found this new one, perfect for people (like me!) who are both nosy and nostalgic.

When I was working in an office and commuting first from San Francisco to Menlo Park (which is very far) and then from the East Bay to San Francisco (less far, but still half an hour on public transit), I listened to a lot of podcasts to pass the time and make the journey more enjoyable. When I stopped going into an office, I mostly stopped listening to podcasts; I find that I’m just not in the car long enough to make it worth it (or rather, I’m in the car a lot, but it’s for like seven minutes each time and I frequently have children with me who want to listen to either Michael Jackson or Taylor Swift, depending on the child, or, if they’re both with me, have an argument about whether we should listen to Michael Jackson or Taylor Swift.)

But then my friend Alison introduced me to the One Year podcast, which covers one year in American history in each season (available so far: 1942, 1955, 1977, 1986, 1990, and 1995.) Sometimes the events they talk about are the sort of “defining” events of that year and sometimes they’re far more random and esoteric, but they’re always completely fascinating and the show is so well-produced. It almost makes me want to get a job where I have to commute a long distance ag—HAHAHA no, I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s excellent for long walks around the neighborhood or the brief interludes where I am driving longer than seven minutes and not refereeing a battle between Billie Jean and You Belong With Me.

5. And now for the “nah” to balance out these four “hell yeahs”: Mother Jeans.

Listen, I hear nothing but a stream of non-stop incredible praise for these jeans. People are obsessed with them! They can’t stop talking about them! I dutifully tried some on, then tried another pair on, then tried another pair on, then tried another pair on……and I just kept trying different pairs on and they just kept not looking good on me. Eventually I got kind of sick of trekking to the UPS Store to return packages of Mother jeans, so I decided just to call it and admit that I feel about this brand the way that Berger feels about Carrie in season 6 of Sex and the City:

It’s not you, Mother jeans, it’s me. Wait no, it’s totally you.