Cheesecake 🍰 & cigarettes [Like You Know Whatever]

Hi friends!

How are you? I’m doing pretty good. My husband Ross is currently away on the east coast, visiting family, so I’ve had the apartment to myself all week. While the cat’s away, the mice will play… mostly by mainlining episodes of The Real Housewives of Orange County and cooking and baking only for myself (more on all that later).

Based on that reader poll I took earlier this year, many of you are married or live with partners. Do you love it or hate it when your partner goes away and you have the place to yourself? Six months ago, Ross went out of town for a week and I wrote a whole thing about how sad and lonely and anxious I was without him around. This time? I’m actually kind of loving it. I miss him, of course, but I think it’s been good for me to have to figure out my own daily schedule without him and have some quiet time alone to write.

I’ve been working on writing some stories for my memoir this week, and despite the fact that I write about myself all the time in this email newsletter, I’ve found it very challenging at times to tell these stories from my life. I was working on this story about being dumped while on a family vacation as a teenager that I thought going into it would be hilarious. I swear, I can tell it as a funny anecdote in under three minutes. But the deeper I got and the more I included the truth of the situation, the sadder it got. I kept wondering, should I exclude certain details to make this funnier? Minimize the emotional stakes? I had to fight my way through to the other side of it, where the light came back in, and I actually found a really beautiful (and funny!) ending to it. There’s something in there about trusting the process, I think.

But also, it’s fucking hard to re-live some of these moments where I was so unhappy, even if I can laugh at them now! I think that in order to be a good writer, you have to put yourself in your characters’ heads. Well, what if younger me is the character? Ugh, do I really have to jump back into that dizzy bitch’s brain? I suppose so! And maybe it’s a good exercise, to develop that empathy for our younger selves, and for all the younger versions of the people who were around us at the time.

Speaking of developing empathy for our younger selves: if you stick around ~beyond the paywall~, this week, I tell a story that answers the prompt: “What's something that most people don't know about you (and would be surprised to learn)?” But first, let’s get into some things:

- Do you all want to hear a stand-up bit from a set I didn’t end up doing in 2015? I had just moved to L.A. and felt like I should be doing stand-up comedy to “get my writing out there,” even though the only other time I’d tried stand-up, back in New York, I’d found it totally depressing. Let this be a lesson: only do stand-up if it invigorates you, and if you love writing jokes and performing by yourself. I do not.

Anyway, I prepped some jokes and went down to an open mic at the UCB, where they picked people’s names out of a bucket before the show started. My name was not chosen, so I went home. And I never came back. Thank goodness. Most of the set that I never performed was terrible, but I still like this bit:

“It’s hard to get used to L.A., though. You guys have chains out here that I’m not familiar with, like Souplantation. Oof. I just want a bowl of creamy tomato bisque, why do we have to bring slavery into this? Do you think they get offended at Souplantation if you ask for crackers? Are they like, “that is a hate word?” Ugh, nevermind, I’m going next door to Sandwich Death Camp.”

So edgy! So brave! I really coulda been somethin’! (Note: Yes, Souplantation permanently closed all of their locations in 2020.)

- The Real Housewives of Orange County, season 17 (Bravo, or for purchase on Prime – do NOT watch the episodes on Peacock, those are different cuts). I dip in and out of this series, but this season is a good one. To me, the best Housewives seasons have a healthy mix of conflicts with deep, layered history behind them and petty squabbles about almost nothing. If the show leans too far to one side or the other, it breaks down, but when it gets the balance right, mama mia! *chefs kiss* That’s amore! Tamra Judge is “back,” which, I didn’t realize she went anywhere, so, cool. She is doing a lot of work this season to stir the pot, which I can appreciate. Someone needs to, otherwise you end up with a snoozefest like this season of RHONY. If it’s been a while since you’ve checked in on OC, I recommend dipping back in. You don’t have to watch all 90 seasons first, you can just start with the current season.

- Cooking and baking and not-baking! Since my husband, the olive-hater, is out of town, I took the opportunity to make that insanely easy & delicious green olive pasta again. So good!! So simple!! So perfectly balanced!! And then, as part of my on-going effort to eat breakfast more often, I baked these ham and cheese scones, which I added scallions to instead of the chives recommended. I’ll be honest, they were kind of a pain in the ass to make. I did NOT enjoy the part where you have to grate frozen butter into the dry ingredients, and somehow I ended up with a big mess in my kitchen and bits of dough on the front of my dress, the handle to my refrigerator, etc. That said… they are really hearty and tasty, and kind of perfect for my savory handheld breakfast needs? I think I might experiment with savory muffins next, which should be a little easier to make.

Finally, I was inspired by the Pancake Princess’ no-bake cheesecake “bake-off” to make a no-bake cheesecake. I love regular cheesecake, but it seems ridiculous to make, involving things like water baths and springform pans I don’t have. A creamy, no-bake dessert sounded perfect in this heat, so I made the winner of the “bake-off,” the one from Bravetart/Serious Eats. The secret to that recipe is the crust made out of Biscoff crumbs. My Ralphs didn’t have Biscoff, so I made a special trip to Trader Joe’s to get speculoos cookies, which I’m pretty sure are the same thing. I also did as the Pancake Princess suggested and whipped the cream separate from the rest of the filling ingredients, then folded it in. I always feel like such an idiot for the first few minutes of making fresh whipped cream. You just stick a mixer into a bowl full of cream and watch it do nothing but bubble. I always wonder, is this even going to work? But then, suddenly, it does, like magic. 

Anywayyy, the no-bake cheesecake was just okay. I let it chill overnight, even, and it was still much softer and less cakey than a regular cheesecake. Definitely a spoon food rather than a fork one. The flavors were good. But let me ask you a question: why did I feel the need to make an entire cheesecake when I was the only one home to eat it? Riddle me that. I barely ate a quarter of it before I had to toss it. Oh well.

- Red, White & Royal Blue (Prime). I, like everyone and their mother, loved this new adult romance book by Casey McQuiston so much when I first read it, way back in May of 2019. It’s a M/M romance about the “First Son” of the American president falling for the (fictional) prince of England (a decidedly un-Harry-like “spare”). The high-concept enemies-to-lovers plot works so well that it was almost surprising no one had thought of it before? Some stories just feel like they’ve existed in the ether forever before someone plucked them out and wrote them down, they’re such instant classics.

I had a lovely Sunday night in with my cat where I sat down with a plate of the aforementioned green olive pasta, a glass of wine, and the recent movie adaptation of Red, White & Royal Blue. I thought it was great! Not bad-good, or campy-good, or good-for-a-free-movie-on-Prime, just a good, solid modern rom-com. Also, why does every gay romance movie get hit with accusations of “camp?” It’s like we can’t see a Hollywood depiction of a same-sex romance as sincere, we all have to roll our eyes or be ironic about it. This is not just coming from straight people, either. Evan Ross Katz wrote a fantastic, in-depth review of the movie for his Substack this week, if you want to read a gay writer’s opinion on other gay writers’ opinions on (and dismissals of) the movie.

I still hope you will read the book, because it’s great, but I thought the movie was a very solid adaptation. There were only a few small changes made in this retelling, and I actually thought they were all very smart. They simplified and smoothed out a few things that worked for the book but would have been a bit rickety or unwieldy in the movie. I just wish that this film could have had a theatrical release, although I guess R-rated rom-coms are a bit tricky to market, hm? (Hint: do not watch this with your parents, unless you are cool with watching sex scenes with your parents? It’s no chaste Love, Simon.)

Alright, shall we get into this week’s story? This is all about a long-term relationship I had that most people in my life today don’t know about:

Philip Morris & Me

I used to be a smoker, and I loved it. I loved the ritual of it, of peeling the plastic off a fresh pack of cigarettes with that sweet tobacco smell, tapping the end of it against my palm. Pulling a cigarette from the pack, placing it between my lips, lighting it. And then—that first inhale and exhale of smoke, that rush of nicotine and caffeine and dopamine. It was the best! I enjoyed it immensely, and then, it was over. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

I was a smoker all through college, and only through college. The day I went back to New Jersey after graduation, I immediately got a nasty summer cold that lasted until the nicotine was out of my system. Since I was broke and unemployed and living at my parents’ house, I thought that spending the few dollars I had on cigarettes would be pushing it a little. And that was the end of that. Since then, I’ll only ever smoke on rare, one-off occasions, such as while drinking with friends or on vacation. I know that I’m incredibly lucky that my time with tobacco was short-lived, as it can be an especially hard addiction to kick. Maybe the fleetingness of it is why I don’t regret my years as a smoker. In fact, I kind of look back on them fondly. I was young, I did something stupid, I loved the hell out of it, and then, I was done. Can’t we all say that about something?

Today, my alma mater, Vassar College, is a smoke-free campus, but it certainly wasn’t when I was there. About half of my friends smoked, and a quarter of the ones who didn’t, did when they were drinking. As an awkward young woman with an oral fixation who never knew what to do with her hands, I took to smoking like a duck to the water. You have to remember, this was back in the Dark Ages, before smartphones were ubiquitous. Lighting up a cigarette was the perfect thing to kill time between classes, when waiting to meet up with friends, or, unfortunately, while watching black and white French New Wave movies in my dorm room, with all the windows open and a towel under the door (look, I was a film major, it was part of the territory, okay?).

My preferred poison were Camel Lights, although I would sometimes smoke American Spirits if I felt like being “healthy” and leisurely (those things take a goddamn hour to finish). I would also occasionally smoke Parliament Lights or Marlboro Lights (“Slut Butts”) if I wanted to pretend to be a hot girl. I did NOT fuck with menthols, although there was a year in there when Camel Crushes got popular and I dabbled. Camel Crushes, if you’re not aware, are regular cigarettes, but you can “crush” the filters and they’ll turn into menthol cigarettes. I’m sure they’re absolutely terrible for you, like, more so even than regular cigarettes. Nevertheless, squishing the filter and crushing the menthol into the cigarette was just so fun, what can I say?

Even though I was legally an adult in college, I never had the balls to openly smoke in front of my parents, or even to go outside to do it at their house. They figured it out, though. One time, when I was back in New Jersey over a break, they sat me down and told me that they knew I was smoking. They said they were worried that this meant I was “doing other things,” too, and asked me if I needed to take a semester off. I’m sorry, that was the sound of me cackling. I’ve heard of pot being a gateway drug, but cigarettes? I managed to assure them that I was fine, that it was just cigarettes, and they let me go back to school. (It wasn’t just cigarettes, but I didn’t need a semester off, either.)

For years, I wondered how they’d figured it out. And then, I became a non-smoker, and realized that it was a miracle they hadn’t called me out sooner. Cigarette smoke clings to every pore, every molecule of your body. I would smoke inside my car with the windows down and assume that that was enough to wash the smoke away. It wasn’t. One hug and they would’ve known. Two minutes in the same room and they would’ve known. You can always tell a smoker.

The best time I ever had smoking was when I studied abroad in Prague in the fall of 2007. Packs of blue Gauloises were about two American dollars apiece, and you could smoke them EVERYWHERE. Indoors, outdoors, it was all good. Since much of the northeastern U.S. had designated smoking to outdoor areas only by then, even my beloved New Jersey diners, this was a true novelty. I have very fond memories of stopping by a cafe near my student apartment before class, ordering a cappuccino and two petite croissants, and enjoying them with a Gauloise, then clopping across the cobblestones to school. Or later, melting a sugar cube over a glass of absinthe with a lighter, and chasing it with a glass of beer, then a cigarette. What is pleasure, if not that? Should I sit here and be ashamed for being 20 years old and living life? No! Fuck that! I won’t have it!

Now, there is always the irony, of course, that I was a very anti-establishment, anti-corporation person, and I had zero love for the tobacco industry, and understood that they were evil… and still, I smoked half a pack a day for years, and probably more when I was in Prague. The problem is that cigarettes have always been, and probably always will be, cool. They’re gross, too, and I can’t believe that people even kissed me while I was a smoker. And of course, there are all the horrible dangers to your health that they pose, although that is more long-term, and Americans are not very good at long-term thinking. But still, show me a good-looking person with a cigarette dangling from their lips and tell me that that’s not a turn-on. Kids these days are vaping, I hear, but what’s sexy and dangerous about that? It’s no lighting-something-on-fire-three-inches-from-your-face, that’s for sure.

Nowadays, I smoke maybe two or three cigarettes per year, bummed off of friends, almost always while having a few drinks. Sometimes I’ll buy a pack on vacation, but I’ll only end up smoking a couple. I usually take too long to smoke them, and they feel anti-climactic at the end. Like, really, that was all that was? It probably doesn’t help that I happen to be on an antidepressant that has also been used to get people to stop smoking. Wellbutrin is supposed to block the dopamine rush you get from nicotine, which is probably for the best. I’ll take regulated serotonin over getting buzzed off of cigarettes any day.

Last Saturday, I was waiting for my friends outside of a restaurant, and a guy asked me if I had a light. I did not. I haven’t for almost 15 years. “Sorry,” I said, to be polite, but I wasn’t, really. Just like I’m not sorry I smoked, I’m not sorry I stopped, either. The people we are at different times in our lives are fleeting, and we have to honor them, but we also have to let them go. I’ll never be that 20 year-old film student smoking her Gauloises in Prague again. But I’m so happy that, for a little while, she got to live.

* * *

That’s about it for this week! I hope you enjoyed this smoke-filled trip down memory lane.

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Until next time—don’t vape.

Love,LizXOXO