Cancer season 🧜‍♀️ & feeling all the feels [Like You Know Whatever]

Hi friends!

Welcome to Cancer season! Cancers are sensitive, big-hearted, self-protective, nurturing, homebody, deep feelers. They are creative, moody, loyal to a fault, and deeply driven by the bonds of family, both chosen and by birth. Sometimes they overextend themselves to others and don’t make enough time for self-care, and then they get crabby and retreat into their shells for a while. They’re great listeners, wonderful friends, and have been known to express love with a homemade meal.

I’m a Cancer rising (you can figure out if you have any Cancer in your chart here), but I often think of my dear friend Cristina when I think of Cancer, as she’s a perfect example of a Cancer/Leo cusp. While she definitely has the charismatic performer Leo side, she’s very Cancerian as well. She lives by the beach and has a special relationship with water and the ocean (she named her band Siren and the Sea, for god’s sake!), but she’s also a self-care queen (she wrote a whole, lovely album called For Bathing. I mean, can you get more Cancer than that?).

Famous Cancers include Busy Philipps, Kristen Bell, Solange, Selena Gomez, and Lana Del Rey, who, if I know anything about them, it’s that they’re big feelers. Remember how Kristen Bell sobbed when her husband rented a sloth for her? And who else but a Cancer could write “Summertime Sadness?”

So, how best to celebrate Cancer season? Watch your favorite sad movie and let the tears flow! Make a summer bummer playlist! Or make room in your life for unimaginable joy! Stay in and recharge with a sheet mask and a bubble bath! Go to the beach and become one with the ocean! Have a dinner party and make way too much food! Take up painting or poetry! Call your family! Or set a boundary instead! But most of all, feel your feelings!

So. How are you? I’m doing pretty well… mostly. Honestly, I’m having some Real Estate Blues™ lately. My husband Ross and I have a pretty cost-effective living situation, in that we’re paying for a three-bedroom apartment with two full baths what some one-bedrooms are currently going for in our neighborhood (got in on a 2021 pre-vaccine rate). While our neighbors in this building have always had their moments of noisiness, a new family moved in a few months ago that is just the WORST. It’s a woman who is always screaming at her male partner in the hallway and front entryway, three young kids who run around shrieking and stomping and playing in the halls and parking garage (unsafe!!), and they just had a new baby on top of that, because of course, why not throw even more people into that mix? They also blast bad hip-hop music and don’t even pay for Spotify Premium, so we hear ads in between the songs (CRINGE). It’s all just pretty appalling. And we don’t want to be Karens, so we don’t complain (and our building management is fairly useless anyway), but it’s pretty rough when we’re just trying to watch a movie and there’s all this noise happening just outside our door.

The problem is that now that we’re used to living in a 3BD/2BR, we don’t want to downsize, but most other apartments this size in the city are going for $4-5k per month, which is out of our budget. So we’re sort of stuck in this place, at least until rents come down or our budget goes up. Honestly, we were hoping to stay here a while to save up some money to perhaps eventually buy a place in Los Angeles, as hilarious an idea as that feels most days. But with these neighbors, I just don’t know how long we can stand it. I guess until our lease runs out next March, at least.

Ugh, I’m sorry for whining! It feels gross to complain when there are so many people who literally do not have homes in my city, let alone one with an office for them and their partner. I am just growing a bit tired of apartment living, shall we say.

Something lovely that happened recently is that my company’s exec team decided to give everyone the entire week off for the Fourth of July, so I scrambled and booked myself a couple days at an Airbnb in the desert to get some writing done. Yes, it’s going to be hot as hell down there, but I’ll be inside in the A/C for 95% of the time, so who cares. I am hoping to finish another screenplay while staring out at the desert scenery, then maybe relax in the hot tub underneath the stars at night. The next newsletter I send out will be from the desert, so look forward to that.

Let’s get into Some Things:

- The Titanic-exploring submersible disaster. I found this story so haunting and disturbing this week. As I write this, there are still a lot of questions about what exactly happened, but I feel awful for the people on board and their families at home. Look, I don’t like billionaires or think they should exist, but that doesn’t mean I want them to die. I just want them to be taxed fairly! Some people’s schadenfreude at this disaster is a little bit gross, in my opinion. Let’s not lose our humanity in the competition to make the quickest joke. How can you claim the moral high ground when you’re rooting for people to suffer and die? There was a teenager on board!

Another person of interest in this story is the stepson of one of the billionaires on board, who posted about attending a blink-182 concert while the plight of his stepfather still remained uncertain. I initially thought that he was not necessarily in the wrong for going to the concert, but was stupid to post about it on social. However, then my friend Eliza wrote a very thorough piece about this dude, and it turns out that he’s a huge piece of shit! He’s stalked and threatened women before, and was once arrested for armed robbery! (And was caught for the armed robbery thing when an oncoming train hit his getaway car??? What is this, a Buster Keaton movie?) I also assumed he was young, like teens/early 20s, but dude is a whole 37 year-old man. (Update: and also, racist? Wow.) So, I guess everyone was right for judging him harshly, because he is a terrible person. Ah well, I still like to give people the benefit of the doubt.

By the way, I also think that the recent migrant boat that capsized is an unimaginable tragedy. There’s been a lot of what-about-ism online comparing the two situations and the media attention and money spent on rescue missions. And it’s true, there is definitely a fucked-up imbalance there. But as an individual, caring about one situation doesn’t mean you don’t or can’t care about the other situation. I also think that psychologically, maybe it’s just easier for some of us to imagine being in a submarine with four other people on an exploration trip versus being on a boat with 700+ people fleeing war and poverty in our homeland. The scale of the latter tragedy is so enormous, it’s hard to comprehend. When in reality, most of us are probably much closer to being refugees than being billionaires. But isn’t that always the problem? Overidentifying with the rich and underidentifying with the poor? Blegh.

- Not to be a Debbie Downer, but has anyone else noticed that the comments on Instagram have become an absolute cesspit of hell lately? I don’t know what compels people to post “Not funny” under every live comedy video ever, but it’s definitely a thing. It feels like a dog peeing on a wall to me. Some people get so threatened by stand-up comedians, they feel this need to “take them down a peg,” even though nobody hates themselves more than comics.

Even worse, I’ve noticed that when brands have posted Pride-related content this year, the hatred in the comments is overwhelming. I think a lot of the flouncing (people announcing “unfollow”) is from bots, but man, it’s depressing! Meow Wolf posted something about how to be an ally to trans people and the comments got so bad that they had to disable them. Truly, what kind of a moron are you if you think the avant garde art collective is not going to be LGBTQ+-friendly? You’re down for aliens and interdimensional travel, but oh, no, not a trans person, that’s too far! I hate it here. I guess I should just stop reading comments, but then how will I torture myself before bed?

- Cooking. There is a recipe in Smitten Kitchen Keepers that I’ve been meaning to make for months now, to the point that I’ve purchased the ingredients and watched them go bad at least twice (oops!). But last weekend, I finally, FINALLY made the toasted ricotta gnocchi with pistachio pesto (page 131). If you don’t have the book, don’t worry, I found an almost identical recipe for the gnocchi here. There are also a lot of recipes online for pistachio arugula pesto, although I have yet to find one with similar proportions to the one in the book. But really, you can use a jarred pesto or any other sauce, too.

While it was definitely not a weeknight-friendly dinner and it did dirty up my whole kitchen, the process of making ricotta gnocchi was actually very easy. Once, when I was first learning to cook in college, I attempted to make potato gnocchi, but I messed up somewhere with the texture of the potatoes and they ended up all lumpy. It was such a disaster, I have not attempted gnocchi again… until now. Let me tell you, those little toasted ricotta nuggets were so delicious, it was totally worth overcoming my gnocchi trauma. If I made them again, I think I would plop them in a chunky tomato sauce instead of a pesto. I would also probably double the recipe and freeze some, because why go through all that trouble and not have leftovers? I followed the recipe pretty much exactly, except that instead of chilling the gnocchi on a baking tray in the freezer, I put them in a ziplock freezer bag with a handful of flour to try to keep them from sticking to each other. God bless you if you have enough room in your freezer for an entire baking tray, I do not.

Drawing from the same book, I also made the turkey meatloaf “for skeptics” and crushed ranch-y potatoes (page 193). Here’s a dupe for the turkey meatloaf recipe. I am most definitely a meatloaf skeptic, but my husband loves it, so I decided to give this recipe a shot. It was actually quite delicious! I liked the barbecue-esque glaze that went on top of the meatloaf. I was only disappointed by the portions. I suppose it depends on your appetite, but even just being the two of us and having a salad before digging in, we barely had enough left over for a single lunch the next day. Next time, maybe I’ll double the meatloaf recipe and freeze one.

- Going for walks around my neighborhood. I have been wanting to increase my movement for some time now from, well, nothing, to something gentle and reasonable, but it’s been a struggle, since my relationship with exercise has been historically fucked. However, since we bought our tickets to Japan in December, I finally have a non-weight-related fitness goal, which is to be able to walk for miles around Japanese cities every day and hike up to temples. People say they seriously average, like, 20,000 steps a day while sightseeing in Japan, and I want to experience everything to the fullest in my time there.

So, to try to slowly build up my stamina, I’ve been going on walks around my neighborhood. Highland Park is mostly residential, with small craftsman and Spanish-style houses, except for the two main drags of York Boulevard and Figueroa Street, which are lined with little shops and bars and restaurants and, of course, taco trucks and fruit stands. It’s a great place to go walking because there are long streets that are flat, but there are also many different levels of hills if you’d like a challenge. In addition to getting some exercise and some sun, I’ve really been enjoying just getting to soak up my neighborhood, the lovely little houses and the yappy little dogs and the flowering trees and bushes. Sometimes I get stuck in the same routines and when I’m home, I just stay inside my apartment. But if you’re lucky enough to get to choose to live in a neighborhood that you love, you should make time to go outside and enjoy it. Right? Right. So, here’s your reminder to go for a walk.

- Adopting kittens. Okay, so, we’re probably not going to do this. Probably. But kitten season is currently booming, and I’ve been feeling a little depressed lately (fucking Cancer season, man), so I made an appointment for my husband and I to visit our local no-kill cat shelter this weekend. I used to volunteer there, and playing with the cats always gave such a boost to my mental health. We’ve been wanting a second cat for a while, but our 11 year-old kitty Zadie has not historically been friendly to other cats. We sometimes discuss fostering a kitten to see if she would allow it, but I don’t know. I just want her to have a happy life. At any rate, if you’ve been thinking about getting a kitten, Jackson Galaxy says to adopt two.

- I feel like this newsletter has been kind of a bummer, sorry about that!! To end on a happier note, here are three positive things going on in my life lately:

1. June Gloom finally seems to be letting up in my little corner of Los Angeles, and we are back to our sunny and mid-70s days! We have had an extraordinarily cloudy and rainy year so far, so this is a huge relief. It finally feels like summer!

2. And Just Like That… is back, baby!!! This show is a mess and I love it so much and I am so excited to see how they wedge Aidan back into Carrie’s life.

3. I have been putting off getting a physical for yearssss even though my psychiatrist has repeatedly recommended I get blood work done, but next week I finally have an appointment at a clinic that was recommended by my therapist for being feminist and body positive! I’m excited to cross this off my to-do list. Healthcare is self-care.

Okay, I feel a little better about leaving you there.

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Until next time—embrace the feels.

Love,

LizXOXO