I love festive consumption. Gift guides are arguably a relic of the golden days of the listicle, and they awaken within me the same thrill of knowing oneself: here is the arrangement of objects with which I shape my world! Here is enrichment for the enclosure! Under the guise of “shopping for others,” products bask in the golden light of altruism. Being an excellent gifter feels similar to the smug high of being a gym rat or nonsmoker, except you also get to smoke.

In celebration of Saturnalia/Yule/whatever, here’s a roundup of things that I cannot or should not buy for myself, but that I think someone would really love. If you do end up getting anything—for yourself or others—let me know! Allow me the gift of compursion. Happy holidays xo

I will never financially recover from this

Fancy gifts.

Lennox cream and sugar set

The Lennox spice village’s moment seems to have lasted years, but I think they’re the definition of timeless. This cream and sugar set is classy without committing to an entire metropolis. Consider also the matching coffee canister, or a whimsical carousel-themed set.

Wedgewood lighter & ashtray set

Soooo classy and under $20??

Hermes cirque scarf

I inherited a few silk scarves from my grandma, and have only worn them as slutty tube tops. But there’s time to change! I would let this one kill me Isadora Duncan-style. I think it would be cute paired with this 1980s guide on how to style one's Hermes scarf—though you could pair the guide with any vintage silk scarf or handkerchief.

French perfume that smells like morning dew

I recently ordered a bunch of samples from this parfumerie because I wanted to try the one that smells like a monastery, but this grassy scent was a sleeper hit. Arguably a homeopathic cure for seasonal depression, it smells like rolling around sun-baked grass—and, because it’s French, also maybe just a tiny bit like cigarettes.

Session with a psychic

I think this is such a fun gift because it falls under the category of “things people enjoy but find hard to justify buying themselves.” It’s also a pretty flexible gift idea in terms of budget and vibe—you could go for tarot reading, astrology, human design, energy work, etc. One of my chicest friends gifts her loved ones pet psychic sessions. If you don’t know where to start, I highly recommend my dear friend Chrissy Tolley, a Tucson-based medium who is both celestially blessed and an earth-plane delight.

A hamburger press

For some reason, this is also something I want but won’t buy for myself. I don’t know why—inexpensive and useful for grilled cheese, diner toast, and evenly seared meat, it’s anything but frivolous. Could be a cute stocking stuffer, or pair with a Kiss the Chef apron.

A trompe l’oeil soup tureen

Imagine putting your soup in this! I die! There’s a variety of veggie shapes on eBay, making this an easy gift to tailor to someone’s personality. I also like this psychedelic one that’s shaped like vegetables shaped like a pig.

A rotund puppy trinket dish

He sparks so much joy 😭😭😭

A butter dish

Who doesn’t like soft butter? This one is cute, or you can hunt around and find one that depicts dogs or bowling or whatever your giftee is into.

A Heath ceramic mug

Being in your thirties is funny because one night you’re sprinting to the uber with your shoes in your hands, and the next morning you’re extremely specific about mugs. This one is the perfect size, shape, and weight.

storms in LA are extra biblical. it only rained for twelve hours, but the sidewalk is riddled with palm fronds and bloated worms; it’ll take twice as long to drive anywhere all day because the city isn’t built for rain and neither are its drivers. petrichor, fecund and sensual, is the smell of mother earth in heat. i’m writing from altadena, under evacuation warning again—at risk of mudslides from the burn zone. we live just south of the danger area and are fine, but it’s hard not to feel like, fuck, it was fire and now it’s floods? what next, locusts?

i’m four episodes into Love is Blind: Denver, and oh my god. it might as well be Love is Blind: People Who Insist on Calling It X Instead of Twitter. everyone is into hustling and bio-hacking and the girlboss-to-tradwife pipeline. i thought denver was, like, backpackers and white dreadlocks culture, but maybe this is white dreadlocks culture now. maybe this season spawned from the mud at a burning man orgy, a plague unto itself. in reducing my screen time, i’ve really penned myself into one little cul-de-sac of the internet; i hear the distant sirens of mormon maha culture, but they rarely turn onto my street. sometimes the narrowing of my field of vision makes me feel old and boring. other times, as when i watch Love is Blind: Denver, i feel the shadow of pestilence has passed over my house. you either age into obscurity or die insufferable, i guess. i will absolutely finish the season.

i finished Love Island Games last week and all i have to say is that of the finale four, i think it’s fucking hilarious that the couple that won pulled it off. (i hated them the least, which is basically the same as rooting for them.) game-based reality shows don’t usually do it for me—aside from the occasional figure skating or dressage clip, i don’t watch the olympics—but i love watching stupid people strategize ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i’m like 1/3 into Chris Kraus’ new book, The Four Spent the Day Together, and very into it so far. like so many women, I Love Dick was the most identity-defining read of my early 20s, and while this book is obviously different, Kraus writes like a streetcar: it’s all linear efficiency on one level, but just underground the whole thing is pulled along by live wires and searing electricity. i feel like she and i are having two conversations at once when i read her work. honestly, i’m in a little bit of a crisis because i used to read all the time and now i just scroll dog advice reddit, reading my dog’s shit like tea leaves to divine potential food intolerances. i’m also writing a novel.

things i have cooked recently: spaghetti al limon, various attempts at grain bowls, air-fried salmon, an entire duck (again, i am writing a novel—i will do anythingggg not to do the thing i want to do most in this world), annie’s stovetop mac with frozen peas and cut-up turkey dogs. next is chicken soup with broth from the duck bones. the best carb in chicken soup, imo, is egg noodle. rice is a close second. spaghetti is upsetting.

happy fall x

aiden

okay so last month i released a book—my book, the book—and the book’s existence is in large part because of this newsletter, and i love the book and i love my readers and i think you would love each other…but i didn’t send anything out about the release until now?

i had this whole ambitious rollout plan—a deep-dive into the cover art, a tie-in video for each essay, an eternal ouroboros of content that creates as it consumes, etc—and then life happened or kept happening, and it all started to feel very overwhelming and a little gauche, and the only thing worse than selling yourself is selling yourself behind schedule, and then… it’s almost september. acorns have started to drop on the sidewalk, even though it’s 90 degrees. this morning i saw a squirrel with a perfect pointy acorn in its mouth like i was in woodland creature central casting. i’m sorry i didn’t write sooner.

in exchange, though, here is something secret, something i have not put anywhere else on the internet. i got a puppy.

it brings me great joy to introduce you and only you to (shrimp) scampi <3

scampina bambina, hyena, appropriately afraid of the cats, perfection.

i’ve been sending matthias lightly traumatic animal rescue instagram posts for years; we take turns being the voice of reason in our relationship, but he’s really held things down in pet corner. and then the other night some friends and i saw freakier friday,* and before that we went to the americana-at-brand cheesecake factory, and outside the cheesecake factory some teenagers were selling doodle puppies out of a wagon. one cheesecake factory martini deep, i sent matthias some very desperate videos. later that night he affirmed that buying a puppy from a wagon outside the cheesecake factory is “sus” and “unethical” (🙄) but he called my bluff, finally, and the next day we went to the humane society. that’s the art of negotiation, baby!

scampi is about two years old, a stray with a mysterious past and an equally mysterious amount of energy for an “adult” dog. we took her home on a foster-to-adopt basis in case she tried to kill the cats; luckily so far it seems like she wants to play with them, but respects their boundaries. (mush impresses me every day with his insistence on jumping over the baby gates to hiss at scampi and assert dominance; puff, like an agèd diva, has taken to the bedroom. also he attacked me in my eyes while i was sleeping the other night, and shit on my little bedside rug. but i believe in growth!)

it’s hard to show in pictures that scampi is kind of tiny; she’s 34 pounds, like a chihuahua-shepherd mix? a miniature horse-pug? more pics:

you’re the first to know: that’s my dog! welcome, shrimp scampi! :,)

oh and book stuff: i’m really, really happy. it’s a USA today bestseller?? what the fuck how 😭 i feel really, really grateful and a little bewildered, and also a little relieved to have release month over because i have a complicated relationship with attention—like i crave it, but sometimes also feel like i’m being hunted. here are some of my fav articles/interviews:

• the washintgon post

• the new york times

• interview mag

• the creative independent

• lullaby machine

you have a new memory literally wouldn’t exist without you. books are different from other media because they require so much imaginative lift from the reader; rather than a passive creative-consumer relationship, it’s like entering a spell, or a collaboration, together. thank you for showing up. if you’ve read the book or plan to read it, i truly hope you love it.

x aiden

*which was exactly what it needed to be, and a delight tbh?? i laughed and i absolutely cried

first things first, a fun little thanks for subscribing to this newsletter: my publisher is offering subscribers 20% off all pre-orders of You Have a New Memory! Use code MEMORY20 at checkout, exclusively on the HBG site. thank you for being here and being you.

i used to write off spring as a fool’s season, too easy to love in any meaningful way. beneath that dismissal was a deep well of sadness: a conviction that i was not someone who deserved simple pleasures. i was too crass to be a bunny or a lamb, dumb in the wrong ways. i looked bad in pastels. and what if i did love spring—what if i submitted myself to something everyone agreed was good, and it was not good to me?

i think that same conviction is why i sometimes perform an act of low-stakes self-harm by denying myself emotional experiences—avoiding whatever movie or book or song because i know it’s going to make me Feel Something. what is that? that creative death drive used to haunt me, like everyone else was a genius artist who was constantly in conversation with everyone else’s genius art, and i was stuck inside at recess. i guess i’m just sharing this to marvel at how shameful and corny and thorny it is to really enjoy anything.

it’s not without horrors, but overall, i’m having a nice spring. jasmine season was short and early, but orange blossom season rages on. i had my first white claw of the year last week and it was better than i remembered. (classic black cherry, though i’ll drink any flavor except lemon, which tastes like hand sanitizer. if i say yes to lemon, call me an uber.) i go out less often than i like, but i think that makes me more interesting when i do see people. i’m recording the You Have a New Memory audiobook in the next few weeks so i’m re-reading the manuscript and circling all the words i don’t know how to pronounce, which is actually quite a few words because i was a weird lonely kid who learned most words by quietly reading them.

here’s what i’ve been into lately:

• pauline anna strom’s trippy celestial melodies

• “the bureaucratic nightmares of being trans under trump” - grace byron for the new yorker, a resonant exploration of a horrific regime

• taking 2 days to respond to emails

• horses with names

• companion (2025) - a fun campy not-too-deep HBO horror flick, “good for her” vibes

• clockwatchers (1997) - in particular the opening monologue, and in even more particular, the timing of the opening monologue

• the assessment (2025) - not to be “no one is talking about this” but i saw the assessment like a month ago and it was really good? and no one is talking about it? so many tropes that should feel overdone (midcentury future aesthetic, dystopian malaise) but managed to stay surprising and haunting. idk if it’s still in theaters

• strawberries + the third-cheapest dry white at the wine store

x aiden

i’m over deadline on a writing thing right now. in the grand tradition of procrastinators, i’ve done the following: washed my delicates, updated my resume, performed candle magick, stretched my calves, washed my makeup brushes, applied an expired face mask, transcendentally meditated, scrolled reddit in the shower, folded laundry, cooked a smoky fish chowder that was actually really good, envisioned rescuing a puppy, flipped through my old notebooks to remember what i sound like when i’m not anxious about sounding like myself.

i’m always kind of amazed by how dread is just Part of the Process. i wonder whether everyone feels this, whether it’s something you get over or just integrate. to read pages and pages of fears and perceived failures from my younger self makes me sad for her, but there’s also something kind of beautiful in knowing that in the long run, dread didn’t prevent me from making things. we create a lot of art, apparently, in the presence of fear; it’s not impossible that i might do it again.

anyway here’s some writing advice from a past self, via a white pleather notebook, c. 2012:

• you can write a whole story in scenes, but you can’t write a whole story in summaries. give without giving away

• energy is activated in an enclosed space

• if there’s a conflict within you, it can be translated into writing

• ambiguous is good, confusing is bad

• be deceitful

• be more than friends with god

• life is a constant search for the One Right Thing, endless comparisons between idols and comforts, doubts, chances, suicides…

• never end a scene with someone going to sleep

• to destroy yourself and not feel it is totally fucking wild

• the divine voice is a machine

• make all established appointments, say no to everything else

• Do Not Ruminate. better late than never!!!

x aiden