This is a scented candle I made yesterday at WeWork. I’m honestly not sure why the dudes of the “community team,” who often spend a solid chunk of the workday playing Mario Kart on a giant screen in the lobby, decided that we should all make scented candles while listening to Taylor Swift. But it was apparently part of some sort of wellness thing and it was very wholesome.
My whole life right now is rather comically wholesome. I spend a lot of time drinking tea under a blanket, and my weekends involve making enough food for a family of five people so that when I get home after working and gymming I have cute wintry dinners like this that I can heat up on the stove:
I have been doing fairly little outside the circuit of home-work-gym-home, but as some people who read this know, August - November was kind of an ongoing shit show (much of the year was actually but it really peaked in fall). By the time December rolled around I was coming off of months of fairly severe chronic insomnia, my brain was so shredded I legitimately couldn’t work, and I had no immune system to speak of. Regularly getting 8-9 hours of sleep and having an incredibly lame daily routine has honesty been amazing. I still want to, like, radically overhaul my career and possibly my entire life in the next couple of years, but right now it’s all sheet pan dinners and HBO and networking over Zoom, which is great because you can do it in your cozy pants. I am relaxed and content and honestly a little bored. It’s nice.
The result, of course, is that I have nothing interesting to report beyond random WeWork anecdotes about candle making… though there actually was a whole thing a couple of weeks ago where two large trucks worth of riot police showed up because some dude apparently walked in claiming to have a knife and then ran away without actually producing one, and my reaction to learning why there were 15-20 Polizei in literal riot gear milling around the lobby was to go “wait, just a knife?” and the Swiss guy across from me looked at me like that was the bleakest thing he’d ever heard.
Anyway, apropos of nothing, here is a legendary American record about shooting your wife by one of the best to ever do it (record things, not shoot your wife):
Speaking of how like 87% of my life these days takes place either at WeWork or on my couch, I started this post yesterday on my couch but am now finishing it at WeWork, while procrastinating the work I need to finish this afternoon and thus guaranteeing I will be here at least until 7pm on a Friday. Which is fine because it is deep winter and I am deeply boring, and have nothing planned until tomorrow when I am venturing out of my neighborhood (gasp!) to meet someone for a movie. I legitimately hesitated about this plan because I was worried that it would interfere with my Saturday cooking routine, but then I remembered I could cook like two trays worth of chicken thighs on Sunday and that I really need to get a life. Or don’t need to, per se, but that there are advantages to not being a total shut-in, even in February.
My sole hobby right now, beyond trying new recipes and then mostly forgetting to photograph the results, is in fact writing. But it’s mostly that weird fragmented sort of writing, where I’m not really writing about anything yet, but sort of fishing around for what I want to be writing about. I’ve debated putting some of this half-formed, nebulous stuff in this newsletter, and I might do it, but of course it’s running me right up against that very, very deep aversion to letting people read things when I know for a fact that they are nowhere near as good as I am capable of.
Of course, I restarted this newsletter for the EXACT purpose of forcing myself to just get over it and not care what this small circle of people may or may not think - that was the whole point, beyond the basic “discipline and accountability” part. But easier said than done, because as I have mentioned before, my ego is both fragile and quite large. And now I’m drawing even more attention to the issue of “quality” by talking about it, thereby making myself more self-conscious. So much fucking neurosis, it’s amazing I survive human society at all.
Anyway, I can’t battle through this anymore today - I have to get back to work because I don’t actually want to be here until 8pm. And at least I’ve upheld the discipline part for another two week cycle. Baby steps!
Toodles! I love you all.