What You Need Right Now Is a Rabbithole

Plus something cozy to eat and something cozy to wear

As the final denouement to what has been a long, tiring week, I woke up today with a horrible cold, which is really just adding insult to injury and wrapping it up in several snotty tissues. Talk about kicking a girl while she’s down! I am in need of coziness and comfort this week. I am finding it in several places and I thought I would share.

1. Getting very interested in something that has absolutely no stakes or consequences

Yesterday, I had a long drive to my oncologist appointment in San Francisco (routine, but still never very much fun) and I needed something to listen to in the car to pass the time. I just couldn’t deal with anything current affairs-ish, and I had no good audiobooks on the go, and my usual fun podcast about the Real Housewives just seemed a little rearranging-the-deckchairs-on-the-Titanic, so I landed on Song Exploder, which is a wonderful podcast I somehow only listen to sporadically, but always enjoy when I do. The episode that came on was about “Our House” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, a song (and band) that I feel entirely neutral about, and yet it ended up being the perfect thing to listen to: deeply interesting but also had no literal impact on my life. By the time I was in the doctor’s waiting room, I was ardently consuming Wikipedia pages about the two-year relationship between Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell, and before I got into my car on the way home, I had downloaded Nash’s memoir Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life, which I listened to all the way home.

I cannot possibly stress how much I don’t really care about Graham Nash (honestly, he’s coming across as kind of a jerk?), and yet how I am simultaneously still so unaccountably interested in his life that I found myself down some weird Internet rabbithole yesterday afternoon looking for pictures of the first of his three wives. (Rose Eccles! Ask me anything about her!) Getting momentarily fixated on something that has absolutely no bearing on my actual real life feels like a nice benign distraction, I guess is what I’m saying. Listening to an octogenarian British man tell stories about playing music with other octogenarian British men with names like “Clarkey” is so calming. I literally don’t care about it! And yet I also want to know everything about it! Yes, that is me sitting in a parked car watching YouTube videos of The Hollies playing on Top of the Pops in 1964 while I wait for my kid to get out of school!

Anyway, I highly recommend a short-lived special deep dive into a subject you have hitherto only had a glancing interest in this week. If you also end up landing on Graham Nash, let’s discuss.

2. Eating spaghetti squash

Some personal news: I recently made spaghetti squash for the first time. Massive life event! If I still used Facebook for anything other than offloading things I don’t want anymore, I would add it to my timeline. Spaghetti squash! Who knew! I mean, I guess a bunch of people knew because they’ve been making it forever, but I never really trusted it? I always thought spaghetti squash was one of those things like cauliflower crust pizza or Halo Top ice cream — a pale facsimile of the thing it was meant to be aping. Turns out, though, that spaghetti squash is actually amazing in its own right. I made Queen Ina Garten’s Spaghetti Squash Arrabbiata from her book “Modern Comfort Food” and it was incredible: a cheesy, tomato-y, tangy, filling, warm, nutritious bowl of comfort. (And my kids ate it! Well, one of them devoured it and the other ate most of it and then said “can I have something else now? My mouth is sick of every bite being the same.” But still.)

This dish is like a hug from a person you want to be hugged by. The from-scratch arrabbiata sauce is well worth making, but I’ve also just mixed in a tablespoon of storebought pesto to my roasted spaghetti squash and been extremely happy.

3. Wrapping myself in soft fibers

When I was going through chemo, I really only wanted very soft clothes touching my body. It wasn’t even just about staying warm (although I did cold cap therapy to preserve my hair, which meant I was freezing on chemo days, so it was also about staying warm), but it was more about sensitivity; I just couldn’t deal with anything that wasn’t incredibly soft.

(Side note: people often ask me what to give a friend going through chemo, and my answer is always, first and foremost, “frequent texts on random days just to let them know you’re thinking of them”—this meant the world to me during my own treatment—but also, after that, “cashmere socks.” My friend Beth, who I have known since I was 11, sent me some cashmere socks from The White Company when I started chemo, and they brought me untold comfort—not just because they were deliciously soft and cozy, but because they were way fancier than anything I would ever have bought myself.)

Anyway, I have found myself, this week, reaching for the softest, coziest sweater I own, which is the Mongolian Cashmere Fisherman Crewneck Sweater from Quince. If I could wear only one sweater for the rest of my life (ew), it would be this one. It is, like, the platonic ideal of a sweater.

This lady is doing the international sign for “ooh, so cozy.”

I have also been pleasantly surprised by this very, very soft cardigan, which is probably made from all sorts of terrible, unnatural fibers, and which I may come to regret when I wash it, but which I own in tan and have been enjoying as both a literal and metaphorical safety blanket. It literally has “cozy” in the name, so you know it’s good.

So that’s my self-care trifecta, I guess: wear something soft, eat a bowl of squash, listen to the autobiography of an aging rocker you don’t really care about! Stay safe and comfy out there, friends.