Here’s another one

I had such a pleasant response to last week’s newsletter that I’ve decided to write another. It turns out I am not immune to positive reinforcement. Here are some musings, some things I’m enjoying, and more.

A Google shortcut surprise

I got a new laptop earlier this year and I don’t use it that often because I just default to using my work laptop a lot of the time. On my work laptop when I type “drive” in the browser and hit enter it takes me to my Google Drive (duh). However when I do that on my personal laptop it takes me to one of my favorite Google bookmarks, the Lorde and Jack Antonoff Google Slides Presentation. It makes me laugh whenever I accidentally open it (this just happened. I draft my newsletters in a Google Doc and then copy-paste it into the Substack CMS and then I edit it there).

Coffee table herbs

Chase went to the farmer’s market on Saturday and brought home bunches of fresh herbs that are now sitting on the coffee table in the Moka pot he hand-built in ceramics (shoutout Studio Shipley) like a bouquet of flowers, and it’s just really nice to live with someone who thinks to do something like that, you know? He also bought a bunch of dried lavender to put in the wooden bud vases he carves and it smells so good.

The apple fritter at Barker

I’d heard rumblings about the new-ish cafe/restaurant on Nostrand and Putnam that opened a few months ago, Barker, which would have been super convenient when I lived in Crown Heights and is now a less convenient 30 minute walk away. On Sunday, during my great weekend of letting the soft animal of my body love what it loves (more on this in the next section), I woke up and decided to saunter into Bed Stuy to a) finally get an apple fritter from Barker and b) get a breakfast burrito from Ursula, conveniently on the same block. I’m a sucker for all apple desserts, but when the cashier handed me the still-warm fritter I think I ascended. Large, soft caramelly chunks of apple, a generous amount of glaze, the at turns pillowy soft and crispy edged pastry make a perfect breakfast/dessert for me. I will be back for another, and maybe for like, actual food too.

The corn group chat

Last year, my friend Shelby started a group iMessage chat with us and her friend Jess, who is now also my friend. I think we must have made the group chat in summer 2025 because it’s called Corn Club and we initially started sharing corn-heavy recipes, desserts, meals we made, etc (we also have an Instagram group DM of the same name). We’re only human women and we love what we love: corn, tomatoes, shrimp, clothes and accessories with little tiny fish printed on them, etc. The group chat is really popping off right now in peak summer produce season; on any given day 6-15 Instagram reels pass through the group Instagram DM. Today alone we shared: a reel of a woman who hosted a corn-themed dinner party, including corn candles; a recipe for corn and zucchini fritters; another woman’s tomato sorbet recipe; a recipe for mac & cheese Shelby is making this weekend so she can easily refer to it while cooking it; and a corn carbonara pizza from a place in Alexandria, Virginia that none of us have been to and may never go to. We also do normal things in the group chat, like complain about work and share pictures of our pets and Shelby’s niece, and last month the three of us went to the Specialty Food Association’s Summer Fancy Food Show together (well, Jess and I went; Shelby was working it for Zesty Z). I started seeing Zoe, my amazing therapist, from a recommendation from Jess; Jess and I have the same taste in music and go to concerts together fairly often (this week, Broken Social Scene/Metric/Stars; last September we hugged and cried when Rilo Kiley played A Better Son/Daughter in Central Park). I don’t take for granted the way my friendships continue to evolve into my 30s and I love having people I’m on the same wavelength with even when our lives look a little different.

This weekend, I finally accomplished a corn club group chat white whale: I got us sweet corn desserts from Red Gate Bakery in the East Village. Every week, this bakery, which I follow on Instagram but had never been to before, bakes incredibly creative and delicious-looking cakes and sweet buns. I don’t want to call them cinnamon buns because I think it kind of undersells it. But this were this week’s SWEET CORN buns:

I made a plan of attack: the buns and cakes are only available on Fridays and Saturdays. I am employed during normal daytime hours and therefore not fully able to skate away in the middle of the work day to go get a sweet treat in another borough, so instead I decided I would go on Saturday when the shop opened at 11 am. I go to Pilates at 10 am down the street, so I’d get out of class and head over, circling the shop like a vulture and waiting to swoop in when they opened the door. I told my instructor and the entire class about these desserts and about my plan, and another girl in the class told me about HER favorite corn dessert at a restaurant in Koreatown. This is my favorite Pilates class because it’s just hard enough that it feels challenging without making me feel like a little baby with no core muscles, and the instructor, Ashley, yaps throughout the hard parts which make it go by faster. Usually the entire class aligns on a food-related topic to discuss, so this was very much within the bounds of acceptable discussion during class. At the end of class everyone wished me well on my journey and I shuffled over to 1st Street. Apparently it was my first day on planet earth so I didn’t realize there would already be 40 people ahead of me in line when I got there. I was dismayed but I was resilient. There is something about being a person waiting in a line for something in New York that makes a certain other kind of person walk by you and lightly sneer, or mockingly ask what you’re waiting for. It is not curious and it is not polite. And I kind of get it, I bet I looked annoying just standing there minding my business, but I don’t think that’s an invitation to be a jerk! An annoying guy in a linen suit came out of his apartment next to the bakery when I was at the front of the line and was like “this is just for the bakery? Not a pop up or anything? IMO guys (yeah, he said “IMO,” ok Reddit loser!) it’s not THAT GOOD!” Nobody paid attention to him so he walked away. I was undeterred. I got myself a cake slice and I got corn buns for Jess and Shelby and then met up with them back in Brooklyn outside an antique store on Atlantic for our handoff. The cake was heavenly. There were actual sweet corn kernels in it, yes, and maybe some sort of corn pudding-type filling between the layers of a cornbread-y corn cake. I was victorious eating this cake on the couch in my living room, and thinking about Linen Suit having a bad time at brunch at Westville or whatever.

Being confident that I’m good at what I do

Any time that I have ever projected confidence in the work I do, know that it was fully a front and that I was faking it. When I left journalism to work at an agency, my job on any given day was: managing time-sensitive internal comms for a FAANG company/ghostwriting an op-ed for a founder/consulting founders on public relations strategy/writing TikTok scripts. I thought I did not know how to do any of that because I had never done it before, and I assumed everyone else was innately more talented than I was and that they were probably like “this girl is DUMB and a BAD WRITER AND WORKER.” In retrospect I was probably a perfectly fine employee, but I think I was so insecure about it that I made it everyone else’s problem by constantly asking if I was doing things right (I was, essentially, Sweet Dee in the therapist’s office). In my next jobs — B2B startup, VC firm, running my own business — I did more kinds of things, but still didn’t gain the confidence to truly feel like I knew what I was doing. Working at a startup let me manage a team, which was truly rewarding and amazing, and I was forced to think in new problem-solving ways that I hadn’t had to before. In VC I was consulting our portcos on PR strategy and managing live events. Running your own business is its own thing entirely. My job today is still “doing a bunch of things” — I think this is actually just what jobs are, not one thing but a lot of them, and when I was a reporter I was spoiled by thinking I was a Richard Scarry Busy Town creature with a single mandate on earth — and today I do a mix of tangential investor relations work, being a one-person social team, content strategy, data storytelling, media relations, crisis comms and exec comms. I wouldn’t say I’m ever going to feel fully confident in my work, but increasingly I feel very “what, like it’s hard?” about the whole thing. Of course some elements of the job are challenging, but I genuinely find a lot of pleasure in the work, and something about being able to do your thing from a place of slight confidence vs. from a place of fear and insecurity makes the whole thing better, which in turn I think makes ME better at doing it.

This customer service agent’s script

Jackie and I were supposed to go to see Dave Matthews Band — her favorite band in the world, not mine, but I respect other cultures — at Jones Beach last week but they rescheduled it due to a tornado warning (sure). No tornado but due to a series of avoidable events I now have an extra ticket that I need to offload, and Ticketmaster offered refunds since they had to reschedule the show to this week. I tried to secure my Ticketmaster-guaranteed refund through their chat bot, which was a disaster and didn’t work (AI, you are still not that good). Then I got this message from a customer service agent named Hanz and even though this isn’t that serious I was just really tickled by the absolute dire tone with which Hanz met the moment:

More to come next week, maybe! I hope Hanz is having a good night.