inspiring summer

have been having days that i can only describe as, "inspired."

amazing bits of things have been happening in my life and i'm a little bit in awe of just life itself. that sounds crazy. i'm sorry. but it's true.

i had the honor of showing around some friends from home for the past couple days, which is really just an excuse to go to all of my favorite places in a 48 hour time span. they loved my restaurants and my dive bars. we stopped by my ultimate favorite favorite place in the city for a glass of wine and made friends with the bartender, got offered gratis macarons and learned about a super secret supper club from a dude sitting next to us at the bar. 

on the way home i had some drycleaning and my purse and i'd sat down next to a girl and my stuff was kind of all over her and as i apologized she looks at me with a pained expression and asks if she can ask me something personal. "sure," i say. she responds, "can you see any hickies on my boob? how about here on my neck? and on the other side of my neck? oh my god, my mom is gonna kill me." i burst out laughing. i hand her some visine which, maybe it's an old wive's tale, but i've been told it disperses blood vessels so i tell her to put some on her welts. the ones on her neck weren't bad but she had her concealer out. what was bad were the scratches all over her back. "but we were only making out! we like didn't even do anything!" she wails. she's 17, she's gay, has told her mother but so far it's not something they've discussed. so while i'm all, "you're 17, high schoolers date! it's fine!" she's all, "but i was making out with a girl! so that's bad! at least for my mom!" sweet thing. she'd just come back from tanzania, so we talked about africa. i said, "the thing about the people in africa is that they were all so poor, they had nothing but they were so," "happy," she says, finishing my sentence. YES. i did my best to try to convince her that there were bigger problems than a hicky in this life and to not freak out completely. such a random, only in new york, thing.

spent the week in fire island with the boys. lots of good cooking was done. mexican spreads, queso fundido, gazpacho, filet with goat cheese and butter sauce, coca cola fried chicken...endlessly amazing.