Some Things, Vol. 2

Some things I missed in the last update with a few new things since a month has passed

Welcome to Some Things—a feature I’ve introduced to satisfy my urge to share little tidbits of what has happened and is happening in my world.

I publish these whenever inspiration strikes. Sometimes they’ll recap a specific period of time or event(s) in my life, and other times they’ll just be a collection of things I’ve been enjoying, doing, listening to, eating, watching, or thinking about—no particular timeframe, just whatever feels worth sharing.

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Happy end of February! It’s funny, I started Some Things so that I could do some sort of round-up without being beholden to a monthly cadence but once I took that pressure off, so far, they’ve come out monthly. We’re only two months in so that could change, but there is something about that time frame that feels…right? Not a promise or commitment going forward, but rather an observation. I will also say, a few of these things started/happened back in January, and they just slipped through the cracks of my last update, but they still feel relevant and shareable. And hey, this isn’t really a monthly feature anyway. 😉

Let’s get into the most recent things.

• You may have noticed that some things look a little bit different around here! I’m very excited to introduce the new visual identity for This Might Be Cringe, designed by the very talented (and hunky¹) Petal. As always, Devlin (yes, my husband) nailed everything when I gave him absolutely nothing². I think it looks fantastic and love it all. ❤️‍🔥

• You also may have noticed, alllll the way up there in your address bar, that I’ve got my very own custom domain/URL, which is another little way I am trying to take all of this more seriously and put my mark on everything. It’s amazing how once I saw that go up, everything just felt more official. Big shoutout again to my husband, for securing it as part of my Christmas gift, and to Substack, for having an incredibly simple³ process to getting things switched over.

  

• This winter has been COLD. Cold enough that we could’ve had record-breaking snow. But we really didn’t. We got a few little snows here and there, but nothing compared to what some folks to both the north and south of NYC seemed to get…BUT we still got enough snow to take our son to the park for his first ‘sledding’ experience. Our sled was a closet storage bin, and thankfully he’s young enough to find that incredibly fun and isn’t a huge speed demon yet.

• I’ve done a fairly decent job of keeping up with my morning pages this month, with a few missed days on particularly busy workdays, the weekends (especially tricky because I’m in mom mode all day, and by the time noon/nap time hits, I don’t always want to do my pages), and when I was horrendously sick with a stomach bug. I largely want to thank 750 Words for that, a website I found while feverishly Googling whether my morning pages still ‘counted’ if I typed them, and if anyone knew the equivalent of three pages in word count (spoiler: it’s about 750 words).

  

  The mission: helping people get into—and stick with—a daily journaling habit. It’s simple — a blank page appears every day, counting the number of words typed. At the end, a little confetti celebration appears, and with that a habit is born. Before this, I was writing for about 10 minutes a day, and that totally works too. But there is something about having a dedicated space to focus on writing that I find really helpful. After a generous 30-day trial, I tried to continue on my own in my own word processor and just found it wasn’t sticking the same way. So, I've been shelling out $5/month and so far, so good.

On writing about writing

• I talked about this in my Coffee Shop Sociology essay, but I have really been loving my coffee shop working mornings recently. My favorite ‘habit’ I’m building here is dropping my son off at daycare, going to a coffee shop to write for about an hour, and then transitioning to my workday, still at said coffeeshop. Then, I’ll head home for the rest of the day. It’s been fantastic. I think this thing (and the lattes I’ve been enjoying) will be around for a while.
  

• As a part of my digital detox, I have been trying to discover analog hobbies. It has been fun, and funnily enough I don’t have as much free time as I thought. Seriously—I thought I’d wake up, do a long workout, take a walk, read 7 full books, knit a scarf, relearn guitar, and handwrite a novel all before the end of my first week. Hyperbolic? Maybe. But so far, I’ve read about 25% of the book Less by Andrew Sean Greer, listened to two True Crime Podcasts (Scamanda and Finding Samantha, yes, I am behind, I stopped listening to podcasts when I stopped commuting), have done a lot of writing (but no novel), and bought a crossword book. That last one is my greatest feat—I’m already 33% of the way done with the puzzles in that book!

My Ongoing Battle with Screen Time

• I have also recommitted to my almost-daily Tarot card pulls, which has been a really nice practice for me. And since embarking on my digital detox, I’m challenging myself to just use my tarot book, my intuition, and journaling (this is the one thing I need to use pen and paper for, I can’t explain it) instead of looking things up on the internet (though I do love

  Carrie Mallon's Substack
  and her Wild Unknown interpretations). Forcing myself to actually interpret these cards on my own has been a little annoying but overwhelmingly positive.
  

• I have been stuck in a winter rut⁴ for a few months now, and found myself feeling really lonely and disconnected from the people around me. I felt my feelings about this, and then started to reach out. For the past few weeks, I’ve gone on a few friend dates—dinners, drinks, a pizza/game night at one friend’s house, and a three-hour FaceTime with a friend on the West Coast.

  Being intentional about these connections has been really important. For the past 19 months, we typically host at our house if we’re doing something after work, so friends can come over while our kid is sleeping. It’s nice, but it’s also been nice to take one night a week and do something myself, mostly one-on-one with another friend. I actually had two outings scheduled this week—a dinner on Monday and seeing the Destroyer/Father John Misty show Tuesday—I unfortunately had to cancel both because of how sick I was (more below). Also, I have absolutely no photos of any of these hang outs, which I think is a really good sign.
  

• I got a ridiculous bug at the beginning of this week, which got me out of Jury Duty and absolutely wrecked the rest of my life. Started with a fever, ended with a day in the toilet. I’m still a little shaky, but the worst is behind me. And I’m the only one in the house that got sick—a miracle⁵.
  

• A fellow mom and I took our July 2023 babies to a cute play space in Clinton Hill⁶. I’ll go back with my husband, because I think he’d have fun. It’s not the cheapest experience, but if you’re in Brooklyn, I say it’s worth going once or twice. And the pictures are too cute to pass up!

  

  

  

  I mean come on! Look how photographable this place is!

• Got my tri-annual haircut. I used to be a quarterly gal, religiously, and then motherhood happened. It’s a miracle I make it out three times a year, honestly. Again, if you’re in Brooklyn, go to Jedd!!! He’s been cutting my hair since I moved back to New York in 2019 and I do a ridiculous commute to see him in Greenpoint because he is just that worth it.

  

  If you don’t take a selfie from the bathroom at the hair salon, did you get a haircut??

Thanks for making it through the most recent batch of Some Things! As always, feel free to share what things have been in your world recently, and maybe they’ll cross over into mine.

1. ok fine, the team is one person and that person is my husband. Bias aside — very talented (and hunky! if I do say so myself!)

2. The number of times I said “so I don’t really like this but I like the vibes of this” should have been enough to drive him mad, but somehow he got the vision from my brain

3. a few notes on my use of ‘simple’:

1. I had to pay Substack $50 to do most of the domain transfer blah blah blah. WORTH IT. But likely why it was simple. BUT WORTH IT! My old URL still works (for everything, even new posts) so I had to no absolutely no reconciliation for my links (nor will I need to in the future, if I change URLs or something).

2. I AM tech literate, and I know that, and so it all made sense to me.

3. My domain is on my husband’s server and so he did the small amount of configuring it needed (but I could’ve figured it out, he just went and did it for me bc I am a princess).

4. Yeah…that’s a friendly way of saying “I’ve been depressed”.

5. Everyone knock on wood now.

6. they call it Fort Greene…but Maps doesn’t lie…