Cappuccino Thoughts 121: On A Week in the Life — How I Spent 7 Days Living in New York
feat. my honest Othello review, a trip upstate to Wildflower Farms, and an adventure around Park Slope
Cappuccino Thoughts is a weekly newsletter about culture and creativity in New York.
I am a capital “n” Nosy Person. I love reading Refinery29’s Money Diaries, which details a week of someone’s spending. My favorite Substack is A Week in Paris which chronicles, simply, a week in the life of a Parisian woman. And I enjoy following
through her weekly food adventures. So, following this trend, here is what a week in my life looks like:Monday: On Memorial Day, F. and I spent the day upstate at Wildflower Farms with his cousin and his aunt visiting from Turkey. We took the Amtrak for ~2 hours to Poughkeepsie, then a short car ride over to the farm. On the train, I finished reading The God of the Woods. I fretted about what I would read on the way back until F.’s cousin handed me her FT Weekend, which she had just finished.
We had a wonderfully leisurely day with a 3-hour lunch, lengthened by it being our waiter’s first day and his running back and forth to the kitchen to confirm every single menu item. What might have been annoying on another day was made charming because, well, we had nowhere to be. We wandered around to the farm to try to entice the donkeys to say hello (no dice, even when I proffered fistfuls of grass), nipped into the spa store and checked out the soap competition (F.’s cousin has a small soap brand), and hunted for four leaf clovers in the grass (F.’s aunt found one, which marked the first time I’d ever seen one in real life). Satisfied with our dose of nature, we raced back to the train station, giving it our best Formula 1 effort, to make the last train.
Tuesday: The first part of my weekdays are invariably the same. I drink my first cup of coffee, go to pilates half-asleep, do my penance on the reformer, return home, eat a bowl of yogurt and fruit, and tackle my emails. Not the most scintillating part of my day, but it keeps me grounded.
After an uneventful workday, I headed to the Yale Club for our monthly Young Members meeting. The Yale Club will be a bit of a theme this week because it’s where I spend a lot of free time, especially because I volunteer on a lot of committees. After dinner there, I hauled out to, you guessed it, Brooklyn, to join my friend A. at trivia night at The Sackett. Devastatingly, we LOST. Truly humbling, but I’ll be back with a vengeance next time. On the subway back, I tore through The Art Thief (full book review next week).
Wednesday: F. and I have been taking “matcha walks” to break up our work-from-home days. In the afternoon, we got matchas at Tokuyamatcha and walked over to Madison Square Park to watch the little dogs run around. We daydreamed about life with our own dog, which we’re hoping to get in the fall (!). When work was done, I snuck in some writing for the manuscript I’ve been working on (soft launch) with my co-author. We just hit 70,000 words and the story has really taken shape.
In the evening, I had a solo ticket to Othello. The Broadway production with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal has received really mixed reviews—thankfully, I did not pay $900. I thought the production was pretty mediocre. It was set in the “near future” and I thought the blend of modern elements with Shakespeare’s original language was thoughtlessly done. Also, hot take: it’s basically a workplace drama about a guy who’s mad he didn’t get a promotion and loses his mind.
Thursday: Thursday evening I headed back to the good old Yale club for a double-header. First, I attended a talk with Alexandra Machinist, a prominent book agent. She had a number of interesting insights. For example, she thinks romance and romantasy are such popular genres right now because 1) the world feels especially scary and people want comfort, and 2) only about half of Americans can read above an 8th grade level, and it’s easier to read about, in her words, dragon sex, than to pick up Dickens. She also talked about the aestheticization of books and how blockbuster books now have multiple different covers and special designs painted on the edges of the pages, so that some bibliophiles now display their books with the spine in to show off the pages. While walking around on Sunday, I happened to visit four different bookstores and couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed how big this phenomenon has become.
Afterwards, I hosted a figure drawing class taught by my artist friend R. The management at the club was initially a bit apprehensive about having a nude model, and there were definitely some nervous giggles at the start, but it was sold out and people were asking when we were going to do it again.
Friday: I try as much as possible to keep my Friday evenings more chill, and often F. and I will just eat Thai takeout and watch an old movie. This Friday, though, we had a lovely dinner at Din Tai Fung with friends C. and Y. I had visited this very popular restaurant in Singapore in 2023, so I was really excited when it opened a location in New York last year. The food was excellent and we feasted on soup dumplings, bok choy, and sesame noodles.
Saturday: I organized a tour via the Yale Club at the Noguchi Museum in Astoria, Queens. Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi made a few sculptures for the Beinecke Library at Yale. I visited the museum last summer and found it a little unapproachable. There’s no wall text or placards to explain the pieces, or even show their titles, so you can feel a bit like you’re just walking around piles of rocks. Going on a tour provided so much useful context. I learned, for instance, that Noguchi actually volunteered to be interned in a camp during World War II, and what a horrible experience that was for him. Also, he had an affair with Frida Kahlo, and apparently the foundation has some very juicy love letters between the two of them. M. and I also had a good time in the museum store, which has his famous Akari lamps, and I found the same incense I had bought in Kyoto from the oldest incense maker. I happily picked up a box we’ve since been burning all weekend.
I took the ferry from Astoria to Roosevelt Island to see the public library on the island. I am still trying to see every public library in Manhattan, and this was #18/40. Yes, Roosevelt Island is apparently considered part of the Manhattan public library system. (For my full rundown of what to do on this funky island, read here). I continue to harbor a fantasy of living on Roosevelt Island, though I’m quite sure it would not make any sense for my life. Still, I took the opportunity to pull out my oil pastels and do some leisurely drawing before the rain came.
In the evening, we went uptown to Smoke Jazz Club for Miles Davis night. It was a beautiful evening of live jazz.
Sunday: We woke up bright and early to watch the Barcelona Grand Prix and it did not disappoint. Maybe I need to create a separate Formula 1 newsletter at some point, I have lots of thoughts!
F. and I have been doing random exploration days and I told him to just pick a subway stop and we would walk around. He happily picked one close to one of my stores, so I did a restock of bags at The Analog Stationer. We then tromped around Park Slope, stopping at Troubled Sleep Bookstore, The Ripped Bodice, the Community Bookstore, and even Barnes & Noble. We also enjoyed some birria tacos at Nene’s Taqueria, where we bizarrely saw the same family who sat next to us at jazz the night prior, a full borough and a solid 300 blocks away. New York is so large, yet so small. We stopped for a scoop of ice cream at Heap’s and got its mango sticky rice flavor, which we learned is its most popular flavor. Then we headed back to the ‘hattan, exhausted from 15k steps, but happy to have had a little adventure.
For the finale of the week, I headed over to the East Village to celebrate R.’s birthday on his terrace. We enjoyed frozen margaritas and homemade guacamole while toasting to his new year. Someone asked me, “what are you passionate about” and I was so struck by how delightful the question was, and so much more interesting than “what do you do” that I panicked and couldn’t think of any of my own interests and said “I’m passionate about New York.” Which, dear readers, I suppose is the truth!
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I am really trying to get my pencil cases into a national wholesale account because they’re my bestseller, which is fab! But I only make a few dollars on each one, so it’s definitely a question of scale. I finally got approved for Faire, a site that connects independent brands with stores around the country. My dream is to get them into Anthropologie/Urban Outfitters!
I’m pretty sure this was just a normal day at the office for this lady! Loved the bloomers in a coordinating color palette with the statement socks. I am also nearly certain the jean jacket is from the Japanese brand Kapital, which LVMH just bought.
Three things I love, covet, or think are worth covering.
👗Hill House Ellie Dress: I went a little nuts during the pandemic and built up quite a collection of these dresses in different prints. It really is a great dress for New York summers when the heat gets to crawl-out-of-your-skin levels. If I were buying one today, I love the Navy Belgravia Floral Ikat print to wear to work with a cardigan or on the weekend with flats or sneakers.
wrote a while ago about treating your shower like a room in your house. I thought it was such a lovely idea to transform a very functional area into something luxurious. A few spritzes of this affordable shower spray makes me feel like I’m in a spa.🫖Vanilla Rooibos Tea: With the amount of coffee I drink each day, I try to wind down with a nightly mug of herbal tea. I have been loving this tea, which tastes full-bodied enough to feel like black tea, while being caffeine-free.
I devoured The God of the Woods by Liz Moore. This was a bestseller last year, but it was marketed as a thriller, which I never read, so I had avoided it. I finally saw it on a lending bookshelf in a hotel and the biggest reader I know encouraged me to pick it up. I ended up reading the entire 450 page tome in a weekend. It is an enthralling family drama set at a summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains. The setting feels reminiscent of every summer camp, and I was transported to the Point Reyes, California summer camp I used to go to as a kid (before I finally put a kabosh on the outdoorsy camps and happily spent my summers in the city instead). The plot centers on the disappearance of a thirteen-year old girl, with flashbacks to her brother, who went missing two decades earlier. I don’t want to give too much away, so I’ll just say it is a brilliant exploration of class, family dynamics, small town politics, and the power of nature. The woods are truly another character in the book and the descriptions are so vivid. Five stars.
This week I am headed to Massachusetts for my cousin’s wedding, which will also double as a lovely family reunion.
All my best,
I also love reading Money Diaries and A Week in Paris! You're inspiring me to track my days as well, maybe for a future post. Glad you enjoyed "God of the Woods"!
Soo curious about your manuscript 😍