Well hello! How are you doing during this dystopian nightmare? I’m…you know. Fine.
I’ve been furloughed from my job. Well, all my jobs, actually. This is the first time I’ve been this idle in I don’t know how long. Actually I do. I was unemployed for 6 months or so after the dotcom bust in 2001. It feels eerily similar to that time. The world was grim in the aftermath of 9/11. I took baths in the middle of the day and felt anxious about my future. The biggest difference between now and then is that I have children and the world is about six million times grimmer. Also: murder hornets!
People still say, “How are you?” when they see you on zoom or call you, and it’s an awkward silence as we ponder what that question even means right now. Everything is weird. Good weird, like you can sleep until literally whenever. And bad weird because, you know. Human misery and existential dread, but also (and more practically) because I feel like I haven’t done anything. Like all those things I’ve been meaning to do, I still haven’t done them. This, of course, makes me feel anxious and guilty, like I’m frittering away an opportunity.
Maybe you feel the same. Or maybe you’ve knit ten sweaters and digitized your photographs and painted your garden gnomes. But, if you’re like me and feeling sidelined and slightly bored despite a long list of things you could be doing that don’t interest you, I would like to offer up one of my favorite things, a list of links!
Here are five things that are sustaining me this week. Enjoy.
1.) FabFitFun. This surprise beauty product subscription box is absolutely as silly and frivolous as you think it’s going to be, yet it was exactly what I needed this week. I’m not really a product whore. I tend to find one thing that works and stick with it. It’s probably why I’ve been in exactly three serious relationships and married two of them (though not at the same time).
Anyhoo, I was in the mood to buy things but I had no idea what to buy. I'm not going anywhere or doing anything. So I signed up for the spring box, which arrived this week. It was in a pretty floral cardboard container, wrapped in tissue and floating on some festive bits of paper strips. It included a hair mask, a foot mask, a collagen infused moisturizer, a rose-gold brush, a weird rainbow lip gloss, hand cream and a robe.
I used the hair mask yesterday. It’s just some Moroccan oil that you spritz into wet hair. Later, as I was sitting on the couch bingeing Mad Men, I turned my head and caught a whiff of my hair. You guys, it smells amazing! I couldn’t stop smelling it. I made Scott smell it, too, and he agreed with me. Later, before bed, I applied the foot mask, which also smells heavenly. Plus I woke up with softer feet!
In a world where I have endless time to apply lotions and lounge in robes, yet eschew make-up and pants with buttons, this is the perfect little indulgence. I felt elevated, like I’d done a few things to pamper myself that I wouldn’t normally bother do, and it was only $39.
2.) Hey, hookers! Introducing Dixie Longate, y’all. My boss at the gym shared Dixie's Cinco de Mayo Facebook Live and I was dying. I did a little digging and she does a live show Tupperware party. Apparently it started on a dare in 2004 for drag performer Kris Anderson, who has since become the number 1 Tupperware sales representative in the US and Canada. This makes me love both Dixie and Tupperware even more, and will definitely end with me 1.) buying tickets to her show if we ever get to do such things again and 2.) buying Tupperware. Who knew the way to make Tupperware great again was drag? And what took us so long to realize it?
Follow her on Facebook and catch her live-streamed happy hours. Just like all the best things in life, they are both wholesome and dirty. “It’s like Jesus woke up and came in my mouth,” she says after taking a sip of her limoncello margarita, and I was dead right then and there.
3.) J Crew, you guys. I work in retail, so this is relevant to me, but it’s probably relevant to you, too, if you ever wanted to dress like you might go sailing in the boat you didn't own with the rich-ass friends you didn't have.
I don’t know what the retail landscape will look like in a month or two months or a year, but it’s interesting to take a deep dive into some iconic brands and the fickle tastes of the American buying public. This article is one of my favorite kind—a warren of links and directions you can take from here, including old J Crew catalog covers, provenance of classics they invented that you probably have in your closet right this second, and the triumph-to-tragedy career arc of creative director Jenna Lions, with a little Michelle Obama mixed in to keep it real.
4.) Pandemic needlepoint! I can’t decide which one I want. This one is making a great case for itself:
I will probably never actually do this project, but it will be there for the next pandemic. In today’s climate, you can probably put any year on it and be like, “well, yep.”
5.) Lastly, I was struggling mightily with one very serious problem at the beginning of this whole shelter-in-place thing: the quarantine bra. So here’s the thing. I usually wear lace bralettes, but of late my outfits are more of a long-term, 36-hour strategy than a daily switcheroo, and the lace bralettes are kind of itchy to sleep in, yet I don’t always feel like making the effort to take them off. I actually tried a regular bra (like the kind with hooks in the back), but when I put it on it felt like a horrible idea—constricting and inflexible. I had to give that a hard pass.
So I did some internet sleuthing to find something that felt like nothing but would help me retain my dignity should the UPS guy show up with something I bought after drinking too much wine, and came up with this:
It’s soft and stretchy, absolutely comfortable to sleep in if you're too lazy to take it off. In fact, I bought a few more and would have bought even more but they only have two colors and I have too much need for variety.
I will tell you that the last thing in the world I’d be doing during the apocalypse is trying to figure out the right bra, but I think a lot of us are surprised by what has become important to us in the last few weeks. (If anyone has any other quarantine bra suggestions, please post them in the comments!)
Wow, you guys! Look at that! I did something!
And right in time for Dixie’s happy hour.
Megan, thanks for the laughs. shades of Craig, and even funnier after my lemon drop martini ( working my way through the liquor cabinet. can’t find flour for the bread recipe.)
Posted by: Beth Harmon | 05/08/2020 at 06:28 PM