Culture

A List of Purchases That Changed My Life Exactly How I Imagined They Would


Slow cooker

$54

Now that I’ve bought a slow cooker, every night I come home from work to a new and exciting dish that I prepared for myself the night before and prudently made in bulk. Chicken enchiladas, vegetarian chili, stuffed peppers—each is easier and more wholesome than the last. I’m svelte and strong from my home cooking and from the daily 5Ks I run. The cost-efficiency of meal prepping means that I’ve saved up enough to buy a house. “It’s just being fully aware and in control of your own finances,” I tell people when they ask what my secret is. My life involves hosting an annual Super Bowl party that calls for slow-cooked queso.

Calligraphy pen

$8.99

A self-taught master of penmanship, I now have a hundred thousand Instagram followers who drool over the near-pornographic smoothness of my exquisite, looping cursive. (My Stories are all short, self-aware videos of me writing swear words and quotes from “Clueless” in beautiful script.) I’m the type of person who writes long letters by hand to acquaintances all over the world. I am getting married to someone—a graphic designer, I think?—on the beach, with my hair in naturally beachy waves, laced with flowers in a way that looks not at all contrived. Obviously, I hand-lettered every single wedding invitation/envelope/R.S.V.P. card with my prized calligraphy pen.

Knitting needles and yarn

$24

I am the queen of coziness and the baroness of Tumblr. Now when I wear knee socks and giant sweaters, I look like Ariana Grande and the socks never roll down. My entire apartment is draped in soft, oversized blankets I knit myself, and I give a personalized cardigan to each one of my friends on their birthdays, along with a homemade box of cookies (a family recipe that I write out and include in the box). I have never been anxious once in my life, and Mary Berry from “The Great British Bake Off” calls once a week just to say hello.

Moisturizing facial serum

$60

My face has the sort of dewy glow that makes strangers on the street stop and compliment me. Snapchat filters actually make my skin look worse. The last time I got a pimple was in 2004, and my last pore shrank out of existence six months later. My makeup is all by Glossier, and it’s beautifully displayed in my bathroom on a mirrored dish. I don’t own any more makeup than I actually need, and I always throw it away before its use-by date. (Did you know makeup and skin care have use-by dates? I did.) I smell like Chanel, but I would never use a perfume as common as one made by Chanel.

Silk pajama set

$89

Somehow it is 1920 and I am a wealthy heiress who sasses businessmen by day and collapses in a heap on a velvet chaise by night. I take long, personal phone calls in the bath and my lipstick always looks impeccable, even though visitors are constantly catching me by surprise. I have solved a dozen murders in between my duties as the city opera’s most celebrated soprano. I never miss a spot when I shave my legs, which I do with rose water and a gilded straight razor. My cat, Beetlejuice, has somehow doubled in size, and, even though he was born a brown street cat, is now lily white and softer than cashmere. His name is not Beetlejuice anymore; it is Giacomo.

Record player

$99

Concerts are never too loud now. Me and my boyfriend (Kai, probably) both have several tattoos we don’t regret and wear enamel pins on our vintage jean jackets. He and I commute to our jobs at the Marxist bookstore-slash-coffee shop on his Vespa and then, after a long day at the Marxist bookstore-slash-coffee shop, there’s nothing we enjoy more than coming home to our loft and lying in bed, listening to records that are both incredibly cool and iconic but also completely underground.

New notebook

$16.95

Every morning, I wake up before dawn to take a walk with my dog around the countryside, before I return to my home (still before dawn) to bake a loaf of bread and write for four hours in my notebook. My handwriting is fluid and legible and perfectly even. If I make a mistake, I cross it out neatly with a single line and not a frantic back-and-forth scratching that externalizes my own self-loathing. As a new notebook owner, I have no self-loathing. For lunch, I have a thick slice of my homemade bread with good French butter and a fresh vegetable salad I whipped up with produce from my garden. I then return to my writing, but stop at 6 P.M. on the dot every evening. That’s when I listen to classical music on the radio and read novels in a comfy chair by the fireplace. The novels I read are wonderful, but I’m not threatened, because they’re not as wonderful as the insightful, luminous, heart-wrenching, and deeply intelligent novels that I will inevitably compose in my new notebook.



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