Everything I Loved in January
Line dancing, jumpsuits, comfort for flight phobia, and reconciling past selves
NEXT WEEK!!!!!!!
BOOK EVENT: WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU GET DUMPED
February 13, 2025 at 7pm in Brooklyn, New York
I’m back at Books Are Magic on Galentine’s Day to chat with mother-daughter dream team Hallie Bateman (who you probably follow on IG!) and Suzy Hopkins, who joined together again to write a big-hug-of-a-book about how Suzy nursed her heartache after her husband of 30 YEARS left her to pursue an old flame! Can you believe!!? We will be spilling the deets and healing our hearts together, and I couldn’t be more thrilled. It’s been a long time since I did a book event and I love them so. This one will be a (cry-filled) joy!!
REGISTER HERE!
SPEAKING OF WHICH…SEND ME YOUR LOVE QUESTIONS!!!
I love doing a love Q&A on Valentine’s Day! Ask about breakups, dating, singleness, relationships, whatever and I’ll answer from my heart and 20 years of experience in all of the above 💘
Okay! Happy February!
I have such a soft spot for February—heart doilies and all that. Beginning a month with an outrageously whimsical holiday devoted to the humble groundhog is a fun little oomph-boost after the never-ending month that is the last week of January.
To be honest with you, I felt like garbage for most of January, but going to Chile was a much-needed M-dash in the middle of the run-on sentence of slush days and grey skies.
Flying over the Andes during sunrise cured the majority of my New Year Woes, at least for a morning:
A mere hour or two later, my mom and I met up with Carlos the Guitarist who is a Central Park fixture—but this time in Santiago! He was visiting family and we overlapped for one day so he took us all over his old neighborhood; I just love when kismetic things like that happen.
Keep in mind I was running on about 7 and a half minutes of sleep here:
That trip, plus a hair appointment, were my January highlights.
Here’s the rest of what I loved at the beginning of 2025:
NEW-TO-ME NEW YORK FOOD & DRINK
Mocktail Bars
After a couple weeks of Damp January ;), Mr. Mari and I were jonesing to go to a bar and not a juice shop, so we were lucky ducks that Mockingbird recently opened nearby in Brooklyn.
I got excited to try all the featured mocktails, especially because a few of them arrived with great fanfare—foam clouds and smoke and what have you. It was almost as much fun to see what the bartenders could do with zero-proof bourbon as it was to excessively joke about “stumbling out of there,” etc.
Next on my list: Hekate!
Plant-Based Pleasures
After an acupuncture appointment, I was minding my own business strolling through Chinatown, when I spotted a sign advertising Vegan Vietnamese food—not something I come by very often—and I followed my nose inside Sen Saigon.
I ordered an assortment of decent-sounding dishes and then watched in wonder as the owner created them before my eyes, with the grace and artistry of a fancy calligrapher! She put intention and beauty into even the side dishes, and I could taste all the love and lemongrass when I got home and enjoyed my bounty.
Doesn’t this all look so good!?
Another delicious discovery I made on a stroll: Cloudy Donut Co, which is an enchanting shop of vegan (though you’d never know it!) donuts and baked goods that are also miniature works of art.
I was tickled to read about Cloudy Donut Co’s mission of “reverse gentrification,” meaning that the Black-owned donut shop intentionally opens locations in predominantly white, affluent neighborhoods to bring visibility and diversity.
CAPTIVATING STORIES
“What’s a book that you never wanted to end?”
….is a question I searched for on Reddit, and found my answer.
Well, 317 answers.
My brain has been a mushy clump of pink play-doh this past month; this is not the season of life to finally get around to starting Ulysses.
This is a season for gripping, compelling, riveting trash. I’ve been blasting through pulpy Vanity Fair articles and scammer podcasts and, yes, true crime, but I was in the mood to get into a juicy book during my trip (High Trash).
After sifting through a few of these Reddit threads, I decided between Lonesome Dove and 11/22/63. I went with the latter because I’m on a Stephen King kick (a lifelong kick), and I really look forward to joining the world he created again every evening. Such a good feeling to love a book!!!
Other Immersive Stories
A few other stories that grabbed my attention and wouldn’t let go:
*I looked up ‘movies that take place in rural Ireland’ because I was in that kind of mood one morning, and found The Magdalene Sisters. Geez Louise, not a fun movie by any means, but certainly immersive (true) story that I couldn’t keep my eyes off of. My only complaint is that there were no scenes of rural Ireland. (Other suggestions?)
*I was trying to find answers as to why there are so many abandoned houses around the world with all possessions in-tact, and came across a This American Life episode called House on Loon Lake. I listened to it while at the grocery store and forgot half my list because I was too intrigued by the story!
*The movie Juror #2 has an immediately engaging logline: What happens if you’re serving on a jury, and realized that you were the one who committed the crime? Now, what do you do if speaking up costs you life in prison? And you have a baby on the way? And you have the power to send a stranger to prison instead? I saw this one in the theatre and then at home, and I was glued both times from start to finish.
CARRY-ON CAPITALISM
Purchases that made traveling a smidgen easier
Ever since airport security in Miami ripped open and ruined my beloved neon floral suitcase, I’ve been reluctantly looking for a new, equally-colorful one. Fluorescent luggage is hard to come by, but I did find a suitcase whose storage situation almost makes up for its lack of luminescence.
The Solgaard Check-In Closet is a dream to use, and downright pleasurable to unpack. I loved having EVEN MORE ROOM than I thought I did, which I used to bring home bags of ceramic pigs from Chile.
I am continually refining my carry-on bag, and appreciated having every one of these for the long-haul to South America:
*my beloved rose water spray (for eye dryness) and nasya oil (for nose dryness)
*this over-the-top sleep mask that really does help you forget you’re on a plane, kind of, for a minute at least
-this throat spray my acupuncturist gave me to guard my flimsy little immune system against the army of airplane germs
-THREE toothbrushes (I brought these): one for the airport, one for the airplane, and one for arrival
-a tub of these elctrolytes to sprinkle into water bottles and glasses of airplane cranberry juice (a delicacy)
-a garbage bag which is secretly the MVP of the carry-on situation!! A couple of them came in handy for a lot of things, namely, uh, garbage. I hate leaving anything on the plane for someone else to clean up, but I find myself scrambling with an assortment of bottle caps, cocktail napkins, headset holders, and sauce-soaked takeout containers at the end of a flight. Putting it all in a dainty bag makes me feel more like a civilized person and less like a burdensome monstrosity on my fellow human.
And things I should have bought eons ago
You know the moment when you realize that you’ve been inadvertently making your life harder by not simply purchasing a cheap and readily-available thing, but now it feels somehow too late, so you just keep using your idiotic method when it would be so much easier just to switch??
That was me with pill organizers and travel toiletry bottles. And finally getting a credit card, but that’s another story.
Instead of a very useful pill organizer for my dozens of remedies, I’ve been putting them all together in a Ziploc bag and hoping I can remember that the sleeping pill is oval and the vitamin is round. What is this behavior!
Furthermore, I usually just pack full bottles of my toiletry concoctions rather than just take 5 seconds to put them in travel sizes, so my suitcase is unnecessarily heavy and sometimes I leave my fancy olive leaf Australian cream elixir for sensitive skin at the Marriott.
For Chile, I bought a pill organizer and a travel toiletry kit.
And that’s how, you too, can change your life.
RENTALS OF THE MONTH
I saved most of my rental clothes for vacation, as one must, but I got a lot of use out of this flippy flouncy skirt for winter errands and soirées:
