Happy April Fools! This isn’t a cheeky edition full of lies because the world is confusing enough at the moment without me adding to the chaos. This is also not a digest of the Oscars, which I did not watch and have not watched since my roommate and I furiously stormed off the living room post-La La Land’s Best Picture win—only for her to knock on my door after I had already fallen asleep to say “actually, Moonlight won!” Instead, I spent last Sunday night cuddling with Chester and watching The Golden Girls while eating some Cracker Barrel mac and cheese (the kind that comes with three different pouches of stuff to mix in, so you know it’s legit), because self care. Which inspired the theme of this week: things that have been bringing me joy!
A living thing: My plants
The pitch: They are alive, which means spending time around them could count as being social, but they will never bore me with stories about their personal lives.
Me gustan porque: I’ve been wanting to buy plants ever since I started living alone, because the room that used to be my bedroom and is now my office looked empty and I thought plants would spruce it up. That desire only grew once Chester moved in and the room filled up with his shit (I mean his toys and stuff, but also his literal shit, since his litterbox is here and I wanted at least one plant between it and my desk). So, after some of you generously donated money for my birthday, I blew it all (and then some) on Bloomscape, the Tushy of plants. My purchases took a while to ship because it was still cold winter (colder than now, which is still annoyingly cold), but eventually, my new babies arrived—a Chinese Fan Palm, pictured above, and this tall skinny legend below, a Bamboo Palm:
They were surprisingly easy to carry upstairs, and both are pretty low maintenance. I mist them once a day and water them only when their soil is dry—which takes a while, especially for the Bamboo Palm. Now that (allegedly) Spring is near, I’ll have to start fertilizing them as well, but that’s literally sprinkling some powder on them once a month before I water them. So overall, super low maintenance, they look great, and they keep sprouting new leaves which makes me feel like a proud papa—especially the Bamboo Palm (though to be fair that one also loses a lot of leaves, either because I’m doing something wrong or because that’s just the circle of life). AND Bloomscape has an app, Vera, which reminds me of all these tasks so I don’t forget. Could I have just put that in my normal reminder app? Sure! But Vera has a pastel, millennial design that makes me feel like I’m conforming to the norm, and you can’t put a price on that.
Did you get a referral discount from Bloomscape? You bet I did! Use this link to get 20% off if you spend $100 or more, and I’ll get a discount too!
Did you buy any of their accessories? Nah. I buy everything from Target. I’m a Target bitch; there is possibly no retailer I love more than Target.
Also brings me joy: Chester. To be fair, he can often bring me more joy than my plant babies (even though I love all my children equally) because he does cute things like lick my beard and rest his head on my lap while we watch TV. The plants, of course, can’t do this, because they don’t have tongues or heads—or a motor system. BUT Chester can also use his mobility to do annoying things like chewing on the plants; I had to buy a spray to keep him away, and he still tests for unsprayed spots, like a velociraptor testing for unelectrified bits of fence. In order to protect the plants from constant attacks, I’ve had to allow Chester into my bedroom at night (the allergy shots have been working at preventing me from getting a full-blown reaction to him, just a stuffy nose). On good nights he just sleeps next to me, keeping me warm; on bad ones, I wake up in the middle of the night with a cat rubbing himself all over my face and staring creepily into my eyes while purring loudly.
A food thing: Sausages
The pitch: Easy to make, multiple variations (pork, beef, chicken, vegan) to fit all diets, and will make anything it touches taste better.
Me gusta porque: Back in Brazil, my friends used to tease me because I would always ask waiters if it was possible to add a fried egg on top of the dish I was ordering. I did this is because, even if my friends couldn’t see it, a fried egg on top of something will immediately improve it (so much so that there’s a name for it in Brazil and Argentina: when you order an egg on top of a steak, you order a steak “on horseback.”) More recently, though, another passion has overtaken it: sausages. It all started when I got one of those ridiculous coupons for HelloFresh; I had been eating terribly throughout my life the lockdown and decided that maybe cooking my meals might be a way to lower my cholesterol (which is still high, I’m sad to report). I liked their recipes, and like most people, I saved them and canceled the subscription once the discount ran out, buying the ingredients at Target instead. I’m now eating a lot more vegetables and fresh ingredients, but the one thing I really credit HelloFresh with is teaching me that sausages go great with anything. Are you making some rice? Pork sausage will give it texture! Pasta? Beef sausage will mix in nicely with the tomato sauce. A salad? Chicken sausage to add flavor! (This last example is purely hypothetical, as I’d never make a salad, sausage or no sausage). Sausages are cheap, very easy to make, and you can keep them in their original shape or (what I do most of the time) dice them to provide little wonderful bites sprinkled throughout your dish.
What about sausages AND a fried egg? Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing, and this is one of those times. Sausages and scrambled eggs, though: absolutely!
How are sausages supposed to help with your cholesterol? I… cook them in olive oil?
Also brings me joy: Target’s Antioxidant Frozen Fruit Blend. I have a bowl of yogurt and granola after my morning yoga, and I’ve taken to adding fruit to it, mostly blueberries and raspberries. The former are great because they never go bad, but the latter suck and will usually crap out after a week in the fridge, regardless of how much care I put into conserving them. Then I found out Target sells frozen berries, which eliminates the problem of conserving them, and the Antioxidant blend is the best of the bunch: it has strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, cherries and pomegranate arils. It doesn’t have blackberries, which is a shame (other Target blends do) and I was skeptical of the addition of cherries because I hate cherry flavor BUT, it turns out, the artificial taste of cherry that you find in candies and cough syrup has nothing to do with the real thing, and cherries kinda slap.
Is Target sponsoring this newsletter? Not yet, but I am 100% open for business. If you know someone who works at Target, put me in touch!
A TV thing: The Golden Girls
The pitch: it’s the “grandma says raunchy things” joke in TV form—but they have full personalities beyond the raunchy things!
Me gusta porque: I usually watch at least two TV shows per night. One of them tends to be a Serious Drama that demands concentration, which I can’t do right after work, so I start with the other—a sitcom. My standard for a sitcom is simultaneously very low and very high: I need the characters to feel like family. The friends from Friends? Ride or die. Frasier’s family? My family. Brooklyn’s 99th precinct? They come over for dinner every night. I don’t need a sitcom to be particularly funny (though it helps) but I do need it to communicate closeness and hopefulness (probably why I never got into Seinfeld) that is essential to me from the hours of 6 to 8pm, before I let the Serious Drama destroy it all. Recently, I finished Friends for the 145th time, and scrolling through Hulu, I came upon The Golden Girls, which I had always heard of but never tried—I reasoned that in many ways I am already a 60 year old, so I might as well hang out with my own kin. The show takes a little bit to find its footing; some of the comedy feels dated, not because it’s offensive (though there’s some of that too) but because it sometimes relies on tropes to ask for a laugh when it’s clear that the actors and writers can do much better. And it can often slip into melodrama without earning it, which is made cringier by slow zoom-ins on the actor’s faces. BUT it’s also full of wonderful, earnest discussions about the women’s lives; discussions that most TV shows, with casts in their 20s to early 40s, do not engage in. And whenever the gang sits around the kitchen table to, as Betty White’s Rose puts it in one episode, “talk dirty and pig out,” they definitely feel like family.
Where? Hulu.
Which one are you? I thought it was obvious! I’m clearly Sophia—the immigrant with no sense of peer pressure who drops truth bombs as she walks out of a room.
Thank you for being a friend… travel down the road and back again! (Hulu does not have a “Skip Intro” button and I’m too lazy to do it manually so this song is perpetually stuck in my head.)
Also brings me joy: Sadly I cannot comment, as the other shows I’m watching are currently airing and could still shit the bed before the end. I learned the hard way recently to not recommend things that are not done. But do watch out for a “best new shows of the season” edition soon, if it all goes well!