I hope this email finds you somewhere you've never been

+ a single-item gift guide

I hope this email finds you somewhere you’d never been, and for unknown reasons.

Opting into distraction this month — not feeling the monthly prompts. I’m more feeling…tactics that consider what it means to stand in the middle of a very very crowded and loud room and not get utterly destroyed. Sometimes you want cake, sometimes you want oysters.

I’ve been playing a new game at dinner. We’re calling it, ‘what are you serving?’ and rather than explaining it I will just provide examples because trial by fire, always:

I am serving, 

• The man ahead of me in line while boarding a flight, wearing jeans that dragged the ground, with an elf on the shelf clipped upside down to his rolling Rimowa suitcase.

• An (improperly made) martini with a razor-thin sheet of ice floating, iceberg-like, atop the surface.

• An assumption you’ve been living as a truth.

• Seeking distance versus separation.

• A soft boiled egg in a skirt-like silver dish.

• Homemade tree ornaments from childhood that still surface every year, alwa…