Friday Five: September 22, 2024

Oops, I'm late.

Hi y’all! If a Friday Five comes out on any other day, is it still a Friday Five? I can’t come up with a cute alliteration for a Sunday Series (or can I!) but also, I think this newsletter is truly meant for Fridays. Please bear with me on the weeks where everything is too dang busy to get this out on time!

Album: Surprise, this week you get an entire album instead of a song! My dear friend Jess and I are the only people we know who like this Canadian band called Stars. Growing up in Australia, Jess discovered them through the soundtrack to The OC while I found them in a pivotal Degrassi season finale. Now we’re both in New York in our thirties and Stars was playing a show in our neighborhood for the 20th Anniversary of the album we discovered when we were teens. It was a perfect concert, we held hands and got teary, we danced, we scream sang the lyrics, and it felt surreal to experience the soundtrack to our very different teenage years. Anyway, if you just want one song to listen to, “Your Ex-Lover is Dead” is the one — a cathartic journey that will cleanse you of anything you want to shed.

Bonus Footage— here’s that Degrassi Clip that led me to Stars. Ed Note: I won’t include this as part of the ‘five’ out of respect for the Consumers who were not obsessive fans of Degrassi. Watch from 18:30 onwards, the song will hit about 30 seconds afterward but you deserve to see Spinner and Jimmy’s friendship reconciled, followed by Spinner trying to rekindle with Darcy right before she leaves for Christian Summer Camp. Shout out to the Degrassi music supervisor who just said ‘We will put this entire song at the end of the episode with no edits,’ because I need more season finales to culminate with the entirety of a song. Also, another fun bonus fact: as a teenager I showed a photo of Shenae Grimes as Darcy in Degrassi as haircut inspo, and my resulting haircut looked nothing like hers.

Newsletter: I love beauty and skincare! This shouldn’t come as a surprise but I don’t write about it too much. Thankfully I have many brilliant friends who do, and my friend Jolie’s newsletter is a font of widsom, just like Jolie herself. I love the humor, the knowledge, the skincare rabbitholes and honest reviews on her Substack and think you should check it out.

Recipe: I’ve been on my smoothie kick for months now and I want to share my simple formula for a filling smoothie. Start with whatever protein powder you prefer, currently I’m using one called Kos which should sound like a huge joke to any Farsi or Arabic speaking consumers. Add in almond milk (I find that oat leads to bloat — too many oils in most oat milks), a generous pinch of salt, a few Tbsp of cold brew concentrate (or more if you need caffeine, I am going for coffee flavor and minimal caffeine), and a small handful whatever frozen fruit or greens you might have laying around. The salt and coffee balance out the weird sweetness of most protein powders, the protein leaves you full, frozen fruit and greens are great in thoughtful quantities. Cinnamon or cardamom are optional but great to have. Try it and let me know what you think.

Celebrity Quote: I don’t know Mads Mikkelsen all that well but I think about this quote all the time. I love the idea of his small Danish children saying, “If you don’t do this I’ll kill you.” I feel like that could be any of us if our parents came home with a job opportunity from Rihanna and didn’t know who she was.

Joyful Internet Content:

Intendo,

Roya