Every Thursday, I'm setting the table for your weekend…a little collection of reads, recipes, fun things, and whatever else caught my eye this week. It's the moment before the chaos when you get to decide what kind of experience you want. NOT a to-do list…just really sweet possibilities.
Summer is FLYING by. Here in New York City, August is SUPER quiet as everyone has left for some far-away place, and honestly, I’ve never been able to be one of those people. Oh, I’d love to be…but I just can’t.
I can count on one hand the times I’ve taken a trip just to explore somewhere new that wasn’t for work or for visiting family: London and Paris for spring break in college back in 2004, Oaxaca for a life-giving yoga retreat in 2024, and then London and Paris again last spring for Millie’s 10th birthday. And…that’s it.
I can’t speak for what August feels like for the lucky ones who get to vacate the city for weeks on end, because I’m in the other camp…the one where if you don’t work, you don’t get paid, and you're doing the kind of work that doesn’t stop and doesn’t quite translate remotely. (Though I’m manifesting this: life-giving locations abroad that need a chef for retreats, vacations, trips, all of it. You’re seeing it here first. I want to do 2-3 of those a year if the stars align.) That and just MAYBE I’ll get to at least take a vacation…a REAL one…at the very least, once a year…maybe:)
Consequently, August is my favorite month to go out to eat. Reservations are MUCH easier to come by, and walking in to immediately snag a seat at the bar is one of my favorite New York pastimes. Last week I was meeting my friend Massie to catch the Whitney Biennial before it closes this month (don’t worry, you’re not missing anything) and had some time to kill beforehand, so I found myself at one of my longtime favorites: Jeffrey’s Grocery, lovingly nestled on the corner of Christopher Street and Waverly Place in the West Village.
When I was a chef in the village back in 2024, I’d stop by Jeffrey’s almost every week, sit at the bar, take FULL advantage of the oyster happy hour (3:30 to 5:30pm), and I’d work my way through the NY Times game roster. I started doing the crossword because social media was making me feel like a goddamn idiot drone with the same algorithmic content on loop. I could literally feel my brain dying a little with every scroll. The first time I tried the crossword, I felt like a MORON. I didn’t know any of the answers. But day after day I’d post up there for an hour, catch up with the servers, bartenders, and the chefs, and over time two things happened…I fully leaned into my regular status AND I was finally able to complete the crossword.
I can’t believe that was 2 years ago, and when I walked in to take my familiar seat at the bar, a sea of recognizable faces lit up: “hey chef!” “hey jess!” “hey you.” Each one lands so special to me, but that last is the one that ignites my bones from the inside. Hey you. Such an intimate term of belonging that can heal any feelings of loneliness, doubt, blah blah blah that I’ve ever had.
I don’t know much, but I do know there are healing powers in a tray of oysters, a glass of chilled red…the moment you’re recognized, known and loved.
Let’s set the mutha-truckin’ table for the weekend, friends. Here’s what I’m reading this week…pull up a chair ♥
THE GRAZING PLATE
(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)
you escape competition by figuring out who you are
What actually happens when you stop looking sideways at everyone else and come back to yourself. She spent years studying other people’s success, trying to reverse-engineer the formula, giving popular formats her own spin, getting nothing but drained for it. Then the essay she almost didn’t post went viral at 800,000 reads. The work that landed with people was always the work she made from the most herself she could be. “There is no real competition when your main goal is to find and bring to life your own personal most creative expression.”31 Prompts to Find Your Authentic Writing Voice in 10 Minutes a Day
I know August is almost halfway gone, but you can start where you are…there are no rules, friends. One prompt a morning, ten minutes, aimed at “the plain unguarded way you sound before you’ve decided who is reading.” I’ve seen so many Substack notes and posts this week about people being fatigued, having writer’s block, etc. This is a great place to start…week one is meeting yourself on the page…then shedding the borrowed self…telling the truth out loud…and finally coming home. I’m doing the August 1 prompt today and not giving two shits about it being August 13th. Just write:)
THE UTENSILS
(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)
The Cure for Your Thinking Addiction
Alex Olshonsky has been a decade out of multi-substance addiction and says that when he got sober, he was confronted with what he had been medicating all along: the thinking. The voice that never stops, the spiraling at 3am, auditing every conversation on the drive home. He calls compulsive thinking the subtlest addiction of our time, and he gives real tools for unhooking from it: catching the spiral and celebrating it instead of cursing it, somatic tracking, relaxing the actual brain instead of fighting the thoughts. It’s long, but oh my gosh is it worth it. Save it, read and then read again in a few months.Substack Won’t Heal Your Instagram
She posted a café photo on Substack…literally just a shot of her journal, book, coffee…and it went to 2,000 likes overnight. For a few weeks she had it: the algorithm fairy smiled upon her, the subscribers rolling in, the sense she'd finally cracked something. Then it disappeared…she posted the same kind of photo over and over…and nothing, and she had to wrestle with why it mattered. Because Substack is still social media, just a different performance: "Rather than beauty or luxury, Substack demands intellectualism, being well-read, disciplined, and effortless aesthetic." I've felt this as I've pulled away from Instagram and spent more time on Substack...at first it felt SO different, so enlightening...and then...the same anxiety shows up, the comparison follows, and so does the need to perform for an audience that doesn't quite feel like yours. Moving your work somewhere new doesn't fix how you were relating to it in the first place.What the Fire Left
Bella, my first dog, used to crawl back into her open crate and tuck herself in the corner, door wide open, no one guarding it. I am her. The cage I thought the prescribed burn took years ago: I found the bars still standing and my own hands on them, reinforcing from the inside. No one asked me to go back in, and no one put me there…and then, I started climbing again. Give it a read, if you want :)
THE VESSELS
(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)
Partner as a State of Being
On the difference between having a partner and actually being in partnership, which she writes about as a practice, a verb, a moment-to-moment commitment to being moved by the other person rather than just extracting from them. She grounds it in the five elements cycle and her own story of realizing she had been treating her cat like a pet instead of a partner, and how apologizing for it changed things. The question she’s asking, the one that hit me so very hard was not who we’re in relationship with, but how we’re showing up to the act of relating at all. “I want to partner with so much of life.”No One Will Ever Get You. Love Anyway.
Why the desire to be fully understood might not be about connection at all. Tamara argues it’s closer to wanting absolution: to hand over the unedited version of yourself and have someone say, I see it, I accept it, you can put it down now. Which is a religious experience, not a human one. She writes about a relationship where she felt fully understood and then realized she had been “monologuing inside the echo of her own voice.” What she’s asking for instead: someone curious enough to keep being wrong about you. “Not I see you completely, but I see you enough to want to keep looking.” Shit. This one…on repeat.The Examined Life in the Age of Optimisation
On the woman doing everything right…the sleep tracker, the supplement stack, the reading log with a target she set in January. By all measures, winning. Late at night though, it all feels oddly thin, like she got “very good at something she had never actually chosen.” Dr. Rodney King draws on Socrates, Hadot, and Byung-Chul Han to argue that we’ve confused optimizing a life with actually examining one. The optimized life asks how to perform better against goals it never questioned. The examined life turns around and questions the goals. I keep asking myself this very same question…what I’ve been sprinting toward, and whether I ever actually chose it.
THE GLASSWARE
(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)
Marchesa Casati Was Never Just a Muse.
Loved this one as I’m trying to expand and break free from even the Substack algorithm that’s feeding me the same kind of self-help/mid-life pivot content. Marchesa Casati walked greyhounds painted blue, she kept cheetahs on jeweled leads, wore live snakes as jewelry, and went broke doing it magnificently. Sofia writes about the 1998 Galliano Dior collection Casati inspired and the question at the center of both: what if artifice doesn’t conceal identity, what if sometimes it creates it? Galliano built a dress that extended nine feet and could not enter a room normally. The room had to negotiate with the dress. “Perhaps you do not always dress like the person you already are. Sometimes you dress with such conviction that eventually the person catches up.”Be Careful What You Heal For
Andrea was in a small town in the Himalayas, walking after an afternoon meditation, still checking her phone to get ahead of her boyfriend's feelings. A cow looked at her with "spiritual concern." She writes about the gap between knowing what peace feels like and actually choosing it...how for years she overrode the quiet voice inside for intensity, chemistry, the hope that this time it would be different. "I wasn't outsourcing my worth. I was outsourcing my knowing." She asked for a life that matched her inner world, and everything that wasn't that fell away…not peacefully, not particularly enlightened, and completely worth it. "Awareness has a terrible return policy."
THE NAPKIN
(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)
everything you thought was drowning you was teaching you how to swim
She writes about summer as not a season but a grief. She talks about nostalgia as love with nowhere to go, about childhood summers and friendship endings and the slow way things leave us in fractions, and not all at once. "You do not wake up one morning and discover your childhood is gone. You wake up and realize you haven't spoken to your best friend from eighth grade in three years." She writes about resilience that looks nothing like heroism. "Most resilience looks like brushing your teeth after your heart is broken. Answering texts when you're sad. Doing the dishes while grieving. Continuing. Continuing. Continuing."
THE DESSERT PLATE
(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)
the sweetness of doing nothing
A perfect one to end on. This concept of dolce far niente has literally been following me around for the last week; I’ve literally seen it or heard it now from like 4 different, completely unrelated sources. The Italian idea of the sweetness of doing nothing, and John William Godward's resting girls who sprawl on marble benches not because they've earned it or because they're recovering for the next thing, but because rest is their birthright. Kourtney writes: "I think that rest is what trust feels like entering the body." The flowers in the painting don't need anyone watching them to grow…water them and go take a nap. Okay, universe…I get it…I’m listening…and yes, I’d love a nap.
Join Tina Lance (& yours truly)
for a NYC author gathering & reading
August 25th, 7pm
at the Lower East Side Printshop
Writers and readers, come! Let’s meet!
RSVP here →
Happy Thursday, turkeys!
More of this next week <3
xo, Jess
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I spent 8 years in NYC and only got parts of two summers away for work and family visits. Other than that it was me and the empty, hot as hell, sweaty city. Or serving Sunday brunches to rich people on their way to sit by the water somewhere. Loved the post!