Thing of the Week: Drunk-Listening to "Don't Worry Baby," Cake with Coffee Poured All Over It, Regina

LJ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Walking Home Drunk & Listening to "Don't Worry Baby" on Headphones

This week it was summer. It was that week when you remember what summer feels like, and it stops being a dream. Every wonderful thing you remembered summer as being is better than you remembered but then there is also some annoying shit about it that you repressed all winter, such as how crappy your hair will look/ all sweating-related aspects of summer in general- but it's a small price to pay, really, for how good the air feels. The air just feels so fucking great. 

On Wednesday night I met my dad for dinner at the Whippoorwill; I ate the vanilla cheesecake with wild ginger syrup and marcona almonds, it looked like this:

and it was really just, something else. It was so light and herby and green. It tasted like if the concept of "a novel about an eccentric Baroness set in the English countryside" exploded into the most beautiful dessert you've ever eaten. After din I went out for drinks with my ex-sous-chef and her girlfriend and we had the loudest blast ever. Cooks are my favorite people in the world. Front of house, we're comparatively dorky. 

We said goodbye and I decided to walk home, all the way across the city, because it's summer, and nothing- nothing- is better than walking home drunk and listening to headphones in the summertime. It is literally my ideal state of existence. Usually during the winter I remember that, spend a lot of time mooning about how bad I wish I was doing it, but this winter I forgot, so I was beautifully surprised by finding myself doing it and then realizing how happy it was making me only after becoming that happy organically! Those summer-specific walks are when I figure it all out, when songs sound the best, when the truth is so easy and I'm having so much fun, a heavy kind of fun. It's definitely when I feel most me to myself, when the words my head is saying make the most sense. 

I listened to the Rolling Stones and took pictures of the moon and tweeted a bunch of weird shit about the Rolling Stones and kept thinking about my Free Will Astrology this week, which was all about opening doors you didn't know weren't locked. So I was just Tweeting and Snapchatting all this wildness and thinking "It's a door! I'm opening a door!"- I felt very free. I played myself Don't Worry Baby, and it was perfect, and I told myself that I had to make Don't Worry Baby be my Thing of the Week this week, even though I already had this very clever other little thing already written in my head- but it wasn't true. I think if my Thing of the Week was ever a lie I'd die on instinct. 

I don't know if I've ever written about how much I love Don't Worry Baby- I've always thought of it as a given, kind of, that every human loves Don't Worry Baby, and that I am merely one of them. But nope. I think I love Don't Worry Baby more than the average person. I think it's the second-best song ever written, after You Can't Always Get What You Want; I'm even tempted to say that it's better than You Can't Always Get What You Want, but You Can't Always Get What You Want is longer and way more complicated, and I think that long and complicated things should be rewarded for being long and complicated. 

I'm thinking of a bunch of thoughts about Don't Worry Baby right now, staring at the computer and thinking them, but I don't want to write them down. They're personal. The only thing I really want to say about Don't Worry Baby is that "I guess I shoulda kept my mouth shut when I start to brag about my car" is my favorite part of- well, I was going to say it was my favorite part of Don't Worry Baby, but then the bourbon kicked in, and now I've decided that I'd like to say that it's my favorite part of life. Which is not true, but it's closer to being true than it is to being a lie. And I also wanted to mention how much I love: "And if you knew how much I love you, baby, nothing could go wrong with you"- I like the idea of having that much confidence in the power of your own love. I think, in addition to a lot more door-opening, I'd like to spend this summer acquiring that particular confidence. 

LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Cake with Coffee Poured All Over It

On Saturday I went to Canele for the first time in my life. It was so nice! I had lamb hash and a thousand cups of coffee, and for "breakfast appetizer" my friends and I shared a piece of the ricotta coffee cake. The waitress came by with the cake and set it down on the table; in her hand was a little silver pitcher. "May I pour the coffee?" she asked. "Please!" we all said -- AND THEN SHE POURED HOT COFFEE ALL OVER OUR CAKE. Oh my god it was breathtaking. The cake was this gorgeous spongy pound cake stuff, and it soaked up the coffee and there was a gigantic dollop of ricotta whipped cream on top. The coffee was really rich and the cake was really rich and the ricotta whipped cream was really rich; I'm really into things being "rich" right now. Not just foods but, like, life experiences - you know what I'm sayin? I'm also really into the idea of taking a perfectly pretty little piece of cake and drowning it in superstrong hot coffee and then eating the shit out of it. There's a metaphor there but I'm still working it out, and will be sure to keep you posted on whatever I come up with.

My other, lesser thing of the week is Nico's version of the song "I'm Not Sayin'" by Gordon Lightfoot. I heard it for the first time on Saturday night, at a screening of The Party at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. The song was playing and I tried to Shazam it but Shazam wasn't working. I asked Shane, "Shane, is this Nico?" and Shane was all, "No, I don't think so," and then I was like "WHATEVER SHANE IT'S SO OBVIOUSLY NICO WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?" - which would be funnier if you knew Shane and how he's like the sweetest and most mild-mannered dude on the planet.

Anyway, I mostly appreciate "I'm Not Sayin'" for its jauntiness, how it's so uncharacteristic of Nico to happen on a jaunty kind of level. I'm all for everybody breaking out of his comfort zone these days.

JEN'S THING OF THE WEEK: Regina

Regina is one of my most favorite people on the planet. Actually, in the universe. She's moving to France for the summer (I know, right?) so this week was our last week to hang for a few months. We got some really good hang time in. I'm going to miss her IRL presence dearly but we will snapchat pictures of cats and coffees and we'll send each other mail. Lots of mail. Regina is the best person you could possibly have sending you anything in the mail. Nothing but treasures. This week we went to my two favorite places: Cobble Hill Cinemas and Champs. We saw Frances Ha. We ate sandwiches and fries and drank lemonade with muddled berries and coffee with a cookie and a peanut butter rice krispy with chocolate on top thing. I liked Frances Ha a lot. Greta saved Noah from being an eternal snoozefest. I'm going to google image search pictures of her now. Anyway Regina is the best and she's going to spend the summer in lavender fields (really) and I'm going to spend the summer drawing pictures of bats & witch hats and mailing them to her in a lavender field. In the fall we'll go to Salem.