A Few Of My Favorite Things

No, it's not a gift-getting guide

Do end-of-the-year lists stress you out? Do they make you feel like you must curate one list (to rule them all!!) that perfectly encapsulates everything delightful and lovely and profound and life-changingly transformative that you have done/read/achieved/listened to/bought?

Yeah, same.

So, instead, here’s a non-inclusive, imperfect, semi-sloppily slapped up messy collection of a few things that delight me right now.

There’s also some free stuff for you at the bottom if you want to skimscroll (but don’t, get a cup of coffee and be delighted instead!). And coffee is, of course, what we’ll start with!

My favorite treats

What I drink every day:

Peet’s Hazelnut Mocha, plus Chobani Vanilla Oatmilk, plus Costco Pure Maple Syrup, plus one of my favorite mugs (this one’s from World Market). Thanks to my lovely friends Tara and Valerie for telling me about putting maple syrup in my coffee. I guess it’s an East Coast thing nobody ever told me about before!! Wut???

Vegan GF treats that don’t taste like shit:

The good, the bad, the soggy bottoms. There are a gazillion vegan, GF bakers and recipes out there. Most of them are inedible or average at best. Baking vegan is hard. Baking gluten-free is hard. Vegan GF baking is fucking nuts.

Expectation:

Reality:

If you’re interested in expletive-laden reviews of the most delicious things I’ve baked, including pictures of my messy kitchen and recipes, you can find them here:

Vegan GF treats that don’t taste like shit

Yes, these sugar cookies are included.

Some of my favorite Substacks

Seven Senses

- Slow, deliberate, delightful creative living, incorporating all your senses

I got an actual package in the mail from Sabrina as a thank you for supporting her Substack. It had a wax-sealed custom poem in the tote!!

Writing in the Dark with Jeannine Ouellette

- Best writing advice, hands down

The Isolation Journals with Suleika Jaouad

- A beautiful, creative community

Letters From Love with Elizabeth Gilbert

- One of my all-time favorite writing practices

Journaling

Do you hate it? Do you love it? Do you think a new journal will fix you? Me, too.

My extremely smart and curious and kind friend Sandy just told me about “junk journaling,” which is just slapping random shit of the day into a notebook. This is a page of the day she bought her Kindle and includes receipts, stickers, a reading list, a quote, and washi tape. She says it helps her be playful, experimental, and creative without having to be perfect and efficient (which she is in her career as a business coach). She said it’s a huge stress relief and almost a meditative activity. Also, doesn’t she just have the most beautiful handwriting?? I wrote about my five favorite writing practices here. What’s yours?

Favorite books I’ve worked on this year

No, I’m not getting paid for saying this and these peeps don’t know that I’m highlighting their books. Massimo’s book is out, Dasha’s and Amber’s are available for pre-order. If you’re interested in reading these, you can use bookshop.org to support your local bookstore :) Or, you can use the free apps Libby or Hoopla to connect to your local library system to check them out for free!! Thanks, Sandy, for the tip :)

SOME of my favorite books

• Four Thousand Weeks isn’t really about time management, it’s about how efficiency won’t allow you to do everything you want in your life and you just gotta deal with your mortality.

• Sorrow and Bliss is a funny yet harrowing story of mental illness and what it does to relationships.

• The wilderness that bears your name is gorgeous poetry about the natural world (if you love trees, you will love this).

• The Way of Integrity is full of exercises that actually help you live honestly and wholly.

• Loving what is pissed me off, then broke my brain, and now I’m finally starting to get it.

• No bad parts is about Internal Family Systems, the therapy approach that might work for you if you hate the idea of “loving detachment” and just being a “witnessing observer” to your life.

• Such a fun age is a novel with the best kid character I’ve ever read.

• Grief is for people is all the fucking stages swirled together in a book.

• You could make this place beautiful is a memoir about the aftermath of getting cheated but without villains and victims.

• No mistakes is a weird and wonderful creativity workbook by Lane from Gilmore Girls.

• Lord of the Butterflies and You better be lightning are poetry collections by the brilliant Andrea Gibson. I put two books of theirs on this list because that’s how much I love their work. If you ignore all of these books, just try Andrea’s or follow them on Substack or Instagram. Absolutely beautiful, gorgeous, outrageously deep and smart and so so so lovely.

My favorite things to do when I’m angry

• Weightlifting five times a week (one of the top three most impactful things for my mental health), screaming in the car, going to the manual car wash and going crazy with the pressure washer.

But also these two exercises (thanks to my somatic therapist Molly):

• Push against a wall as hard as I can, tensing every muscle, hold as long as you can, or until your arms start shaking, release. Repeat until you can cry, the anger lessens, or a new feeling comes up.

• Take a small hand towel, twist it, and then hold at both ends and try to rip it apart. Pull until your arms fall off (or slightly before then). Repeat until you’re tired of it.

Things that calm my ass down

This lovely drawing:

This little self-soothing exercise Liz Gilbert taught at a workshop:

This yoga pose (especially on conditioning days at the gym when I’m not sure if I will faint or throw up or both):

You can put a pillow or bolster under your lower back if it’s more comfortable.

Lay on the floor, scoot your butt close to the wall, put your legs up the wall. Breathe in slowly through your nose, out through your nose or mouth (make exhales about twice as long as inhales). This gives your heart a break from pumping so hard, which is apparently one of the main reasons that this pose regulates your heart rate, nervous system, and overall feelings of “I’m going to die!”

Watercolor painting

Good paper, paints, and brushes do make a difference but either way the process of making tiny watercolor paintings is almost meditative for me.

Things that make me laugh

Funny people’s commentary on wildlife videos:

@animal.hystericsOne lucky escape 😂😂😱#animalhysterics #wild #wildlife #nature #animals #beautifull #crocodile #funny

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“Why you are in the water, stupid?”

This hilarious and surprsingly catchy tune about Facebook beef:

And also these:

And now, here are some gifts for you to find a few of your new favorite things

Binge Unmentionables

The “Bah Humbug” house in my town makes me happy.

For the month of December, I removed the paywall from all my archived posts, so you can binge-read if you’d like. Here are some of my favorite posts:

Get In The Car!

On Days I’m Too Sad To Write

What Offline Healing Looks Like

An Evolution of Grief

Shrimpmukkah

Think Christmas plus Hanukkah. Origin: from Chrismukkah, popularized by the TV show The O.C. with Adam Brody (long before he was the hot rabbi in “Nobody Wants This”).

This is the annual free gift giving getting guide from Laura Belgray’s Shrimp Club (it’s a weird, non-seafood-related, creative business owner group). If you own a business or are a creative entrepreneur, this freebie list is full of resources on how to land your first speaking gig, use Pinterest for your business, write non-scammy email subject lines, price your services, track business KPIs without going insane, or download a workbook for your end-of-year reflection.

My freebie for Shrimpmukkah this year is my Complete Pitch Guide - Zero to Bylines.

Permission Slip

Okay, this is it for today. I’d love to know about some of your favorite things. As we’re hurtling toward the holidays, I’m giving myself permission to not do stuff, to not buy stuff, to not attend stuff, to not participate in things that don’t delight me. And I wish the same for you. This little bird below is obviously German and she’s saying “nope.”

My extremely talented friend Schnuddel made this drawing for me decades ago and it still hangs above my desk as the ultimate permission slip.