Nepo daddies 😅 & stories from my Baycation

Hello my darlings!

How ARE you?? If you’re in the U.S., I hope you had a great holiday weekend! I had a super lazy four-day weekend that was exactly what I needed. I can’t believe it’s September already. And yet, I’m also already kind of excited for the holidays and writing my year-end wrap up lists?? What kind of freak am I?

I know it’s been forever. Things have been a little nuts for me. First, I took a week off from writing this newsletter for vacation, and then, I took a week off because I started a new job (!!) and wanted to focus solely on that. As if that wasn’t enough, this new job was the second of TWO job offers I received within about two weeks of each other (when it rains it pours, eh?), sooo there were some stressful times where I was at different points in the interview/offer process for each role and unclear on which way it was going to go. I am happy to say that ultimately, I got the outcome I wanted, and I think this job is going to be a great fit for me.

I’m very excited to get up to speed and be able to contribute more and more to the project that I’m on. I don’t want to go into too much detail there because 1) I’m under an NDA and 2) I know the company has very specific messaging around what they are and are not. What I CAN say is this: 1) I’m helping to make cool video content for the internet, 2) I think the project I’m working on is super rad, 3) it’s 100% remote, and 4) it’s a job with a lot of meetings. Meetings can be great! Collaboration, yay! But it is safe to say that I am not used to being in this many meetings yet, and it’s taking me a minute to get used to it.

I’ve never had a “meetings job” before. A few months ago, when I was in New York and crashing with my buddy there, he had to work while I mostly napped, jet-lagged, on his couch, or played with his dog. He definitely had a meetings job, and it was really interesting to see what his day looked like from an outsider’s perspective. It all seemed to me like he was very important and making high-level decisions on things like “messaging” and “objectives” and “timelines” and whatnot, but like, also… when do you actually sit down and write emails or edit documents?

Do you have a meetings job? Do you like it, or no?

Let’s get into some things:

- Since I can’t tell you much about work, I’ll tell you all about my vacation! My husband Ross had a work trip to San Francisco, so I tagged along, and we extended our hotel stay through the weekend. All in all, we were up there from Tuesday to Sunday. It was fabulous! Longtime readers may recall that we were actually up in the Bay Area one year ago at the same time, when I went to see Weezer at The Greek there. It’s funny, we took the ferry one day to meet up with some of our friends who live in Alameda, and when I looked at my tickets, I realized that I’d actually taken that same ferry to Alameda to see those same friends exactly one year prior, to the day. Weird, huh?

Here are some things I did:

• Went wine tasting in the Napa Valley with said friends from Alameda! My favorite stop was Tres Sabores, a small, woman-owned, family winery. As a rule, I do NOT check my luggage when I fly, but Ross and I decided we couldn’t leave without a bottle of their ¿Por qué no? red wine blend. It was so delicious and spicy and dynamic, it truly was, as described, “a salsa party” in my mouth. Plus, we got to meet Julie, the winemaker, and she was so cool and kind and generous. We also got to meet some friendly goats and cute chickens. I highly recommend making a stop there if you’re ever in the area.

• Went to Tartine for pastries and an almond latte and then enjoyed said latte and a ham and cheese croissant on a bench in sunny Dolores Park. There’s nothing like sitting on a bench in a park on a sunny day, is there? Almost makes me feel chemically balanced. Almost.
  

• Had prosecco two different times: 1) with dinner at the bar at Tony’s Pizza Napoletana (sooo good!!!), and 2) at Top of the Mark, an old-timey bar on the top floor of the InterContinental Mark Hopkins Hotel, where we were staying, so why not? That hotel was very old, and honestly? A little creepy. The wind constantly whistled through the window in our bathroom and sounded like a howling ghost. I could definitely see that place being haunted.
  

  

  Pizza & prosecco at Tony’s

  
  

• Bought some high-quality Ghirardelli chocolate powder to bake with! Send me all your best chocolate dessert recipes, please! I’m thinking brownies, maybe??

• Had a truly miserable Lyft ride with this weird driver who found out we were from out of town and wouldn’t stop pointing out all the people without housing on the street and talking about crime and such. He was just Bad News Bears. He even pointed to one area and said it was the Red Light District. Like, if he thought we were tourists, why would he point out everything he thought was wrong with the city?! We were on our way to get burritos at La Taqueria in the Mission, one of my favorite food spots in the city, and it really put a damper on my mood.

  
  It really grinds on my nerves when people talk about people living in tents or on the street with a total lack of compassion, as though they are not human beings, but unsightly objects, like litter or something, an annoyance. The vast majority of us are far closer to being in that position than being millionaires. But I guess no one wants to think about that. Anyway, fuck that dude. He kept pointing out the Twitter building and trying to talk to us about Elon Musk until Ross finally said, “I don’t like that guy,” and it shut him up. (Ross is the best, have I mentioned that lately?)
  

• Visited the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) and SF MOMA, neither of which I had been to before! MoAD is a small museum dedicated to contemporary Black art, but there’s something about a smaller museum that makes me more likely to take my time with each piece. It was nice. There were some really cool pieces there exploring Black identity from many different points of view. I went by myself, so I could linger as long as I wanted. In general, I’d say that going to art museums is something I usually prefer to do alone, OR with someone who doesn’t mind if we get separated a bunch. I like to go at my own pace, is what I mean.
  

  

  Yayoi Kusama

  Ross came with me to the SF MOMA, where I learned for the first time just how much he hates abstract art! I knew that “colorful squares,” as he would put it, were not exactly his jam, but the man really has it out for Mark Rothko, I’ll tell ya. He loved Yayoi Kusama’s work there, though, which is funny, because now that I think about it, her infinity cube installation thing could definitely be seen as a form of 3D abstract art.

  
  I wanted to try to see some of Kusama’s work when we were in Japan last December, but in doing my research, I found out that her work is actually pretty dispersed around the world. I remember when we were in Nice in 2018, we went to the Henri Matisse museum and were pretty disappointed to realize that they didn’t actually have much of his work there, so I’ve since learned that where an artist is from is not always the best place to see their work.

  
  But I digress. I wanted to go to SF MOMA to see Kara Walker’s new automatons, and they were great and creepy and uncomfortable, as much of her work is for me, but I have to say, my favorite piece at the museum was Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors. It’s a video installation that takes up a huge, entire room. Kjartansson is an Icelandic artist who invited his musician and artist friends to a crumbling family mansion in upstate New York to perform a piece together, except with each of them playing a different instrument in a separate room. The whole presentation is an hour long, with nine different simultaneous projections. Kjartansson plays guitar in a bath, there’s a piano player puffing on a pipe, a barefoot cellist, and a choir of friends on the front porch, along with an old-fashioned cannon. Ross and I ended up sitting on the floor and watching the whole thing.

  
  I became obsessed with the middle-aged tradesman they’d clearly hired to man the cannon, who was the one outlier in this artsy, bohemian crew. SPOILERS AHEAD, if it is possible to spoil an art piece? At the end of the film, everyone abandons their separate rooms and comes together on the lawn, singing. It made me tear up when two of the women took the cannon guy arm-in-arm and led him down the hill with everyone else. He probably thinks all these kids are hippies and their project is stupid, but goddamnit, he’s still included! I loved it!!!

- Trap (in theaters, rent or buy on Prime Video). I found this movie, M. Night Shyamalan’s latest, to be a triumphant return to leading man status for Josh Hartnett, who I thought was fantastic! It’s probably best not to read anything about this movie before going into it. I’ll just say that it’s about a dad (Hartnett) taking his daughter to a pop concert, and then something happens that makes that scenario suspenseful. (The thing that happens is not a terrorist attack or anything that would be triggering for like, 99% of people.)

Shyamalan’s daughter plays the pop star at the center of the concert, and she’s a decent singer but unfortunately not a strong enough actor to really nail that role. I find Shyamalan’s shameless nepo daddy-ing fascinating. In a way, I kind of admire it. So many directors with kids in show business pretend that their children have never had any advantages, but here’s M. Night over here being like, “Yeah, I produced my kid’s first movie, so what?” As Lisa Rinna would say, own it, baby!

- Lately, I’ve been watching two dating shows, Love Is Blind UK and Love Island USA (not fully caught up on either of them), and I want to talk about a frankly disgusting trend I’ve noticed amongst the women on these shows: height supremacy. When they find out a man is 6’3” or taller, they lose their ever-loving minds! 

Let me say something obvious yet brave: short guys are hot.

I’m 5’8”, which is considered tall for a woman, but not so tall that people are recruiting me to play professional basketball, you know what I mean? (If they did, they’d be sorely disappointed, since I am a horrible athlete!) If I wear a decent heel, I can easily reach six feet. Before I was with my husband, I was attracted to guys of all different shapes, sizes, and yes, heights. Because why? Say it with me: short guys are hot! And then I ended up with a man who is 5’9”, which is not tall, not short, but in my very biased opinion, just right. If we’re standing, I don’t have to reach up to kiss him, he’s right there, which I LOVE. This might sound weird, but the fact that we’re physically on similar footing feeds into my positive feelings about us being in a partnership of equals.

On this most recent season of Love Island USA, there was a man named Coye who was 6’8”, and that was his whole entire personality. The women on the show lost their fucking minds over him! During the first “coupling,” three out of the six women wanted to be with him, knowing virtually nothing about him except that he was tall!

One woman, JaNa, coupled up with him, and later on, when she was introducing herself to a new cast member (a “bombshell”), she said, dripping with self-satisfaction, “I’m with Coye. He’s 6’8”.” That was all she had to say about him! I’m sorry, I find that absolutely disgusting. It’s like feeling smug because you’re dating a guy with a rich family. Sure, that’s an advantage in life, but he didn’t do shit to get it! And it has even less to do with you. People are so weird, man.

 ***

Welp, that’s all I have to rant about for this week!

If you have a second, I’d love it if you’d like or comment on this post–just click this link to go to the post page. This post is public, so feel free to share it on social media, or forward it to a friend.

Until next time—happy September!

Love,

Liz

XOXO