The best miniskirts are in the swimwear section
Plus, my sourdough bagel recipe and my first night living in New York
Brand to look for when shopping secondhand
La Blanca by Rod Beattie.
I was digging through racks of clothes at a thrift store in Oakland Park, Florida called Chabad off the Dixie Highway when I found the most perfect black mini skirt. I’d been wanting the Tankair one but felt like I could find something at the thrift store and lo and behold: exactly the right length, sits right at the hip, and only $2.
I looked into the brand – La Blanca by Rod Beattie – and discovered that it was actually a swimsuit cover-up. Rod Beattie is a 64-year-old designer from California, and from 1988 to 2010, he designed swimwear for the brand La Blanca, including the cover-up skirt I now wear at least twice a week. A quick search on Depop found dozens of perfect mini skirts/micro-mini skirts from the same line, which I’ve linked below. But I also recommend checking the swimwear section of the thrift store; the swimwear skirts are often cheaper, shorter, and cuter than those in the regular skirt section.
Pink and orange side-tie skirt (size L)
Brown terrycloth skirt (size S/M)
Navy skirt with slit (size M/L), the exact same one I have (but in black)
Red skirt with metal hardware (size S)
What I’ve been reading
Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan, along with her Substack Roulette.
Heavy content warnings for the Acts of Desperation: domestic abuse, self-harm, and eating disorders. I won’t go into detail about the book except to say that if you are in a place to read it, I highly recommend it. It was one of the first books in a while that made me fall in love with an author’s specific writing style and want to consume everything they’ve written, which led me to her Substack. She publishes essays about her own life, along with short stories about everything else, and I read every post in one night because I couldn’t get enough. Two posts that particularly resonated with me were Christmas and Cass McCombs and Operator. In the former, she writes about how:
“Back home for Christmas this year I felt the usual enormous grief I do when I come back to Ireland and see my family. I never see enough of anyone, I’m guilty all the time. I always think I could return for longer and make everyone love me and feel loved by me when I’ve figured my life out, but that’s never felt true despite whatever ostensible progress I’ve made. I love to be there, and I need to leave immediately too, to make myself worthy of it.”
I read this a few weeks before going to Antigonish, Nova Scotia to see my Oma. Antigonish is one of my favourite places in the world; I visited most summers during my childhood and looked forward to it all year. Now, visiting as an adult, I feel the same sense of comfort when I’m there, but it’s mixed with uneasiness because I feel that I have to make myself deserving of it. I’m worried that I’m not living up to my vague “potential”; I want to prove that I’m a hard worker, because I’m surrounded my farmland that exists as testimony to my family’s hard work. When I got back to Montreal from Antigonish, I read this Substack post again, and felt that Nolan was putting feelings I’ve always had into words I could never have written myself.
In the former post where Nolan writes about moving to London, she discusses being “in a very strange place where I am not at home in any place right now, and know I won’t be for a number of months.” She includes a quote from Jeanette Winterson:
“When I left home at sixteen I bought a small rug. It was my roll-up world. Whatever room, whatever temporary place I had, I unrolled the rug. It was a map of myself. Invisible to others, but held in the rug, were all the places I had stayed – for a few weeks, for a few months. On the first night anywhere new I liked to lie in bed and look at the rug to remind myself that I had what I needed even though what I had was so little. Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you.”
Exactly a week from today I’ll be on a train to New York City. I’ll pull into Penn Station around 10:15 pm. I’ll take an Uber up to central Harlem, probably an Uber XL to accommodate my 4-5 suitcases, because I’ll be less than one month away from turning 25 (the minimum age for renting a UHaul – something that would have made this whole ordeal much easier, since Montreal is only a 7-hour drive away). I’ll have to leave suitcases in the foyer as I take multiple trips up the two flights of stairs to my third-floor sublet. I’ll unlock the door to an empty apartment, and I’ll immediately put the dozen sesame bagels I brought in the freezer. I’ll put my sheets on the bed (my least favourite household task). I’ve been walking through these steps in my mind, hoping that my small rug will appear to me – the thing that will remind me, on my first night, that I have what I need to be okay, and I can’t pinpoint a specific object. My mind keeps coming back to how easy it would be to just stay in Montreal. It took me so long to create a home for myself, but I have a gut feeling that right now, the safe place isn’t helping me, or maybe I’m not allowing it to help me in the way that it could.
*EDIT*: I wrote this a week before leaving for New York. 48 hours before I was supposed to arrive, my sublet fell through and my train was canceled. I somehow still made it – and found a new Brooklyn sublet within 24 hours – but none of the above went according to plan (and I forgot the dozen bagels back in Montreal). But I’m here, and it turns out the rug wasn’t with me, but waiting for me in my sublet. I went to make some buttered sourdough toast at 11 pm for comfort on my first night here and pulled out a navy blue plate left by the owners with dragonflies painted onto it. I have a dragonfly tattoo, dedicated to my mom (who collects items with dragonfly motifs), and my mom has a navy dragonfly-printed soap dish made by the same potter who made the plate I found in my sublet.
Recipe on repeat
My sourdough bagel recipe.
Ingredients
150 g sourdough starter (at peak volume after feeding)
250 g warm-ish water
30 g brown sugar
500 g bread flour
12 g salt
30 g maple syrup
1 egg yolk mixed with 2 tbsp of water
Method
Mix starter, brown sugar, salt, and water until fully combined, then stir in the flour.
Using a stand mixer with a dough hook, mix on medium-low speed for 6-8 minutes until super smooth.
Place in an oiled bowl, cover, and let sit at room temperature for 1-2 hours.
Refrigerate for 12-48 hours (the longer they sit in the fridge, the tangier they’ll be).
Remove from fridge and divide the dough into 8 pieces.
Shape the pieces into dough balls, cupping your hand and swirling them around on a flat surface until smooth.
Let rest, covered with a tea towel, 15-30 minutes.
Puncture the centers of the dough balls with your finger, then stretch them into bagel shapes (making sure the holes are 3-4x bigger than you want them to be when they bake, since they’ll close up as they rise/bake).
Let rest, covered with a tea towel, 3-4 hours or until puffy.
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
Boil a pot of water and add the maple syrup.
Boil the bagels 2-4 at a time, making sure not to crowd the pot, for 1-2 minutes per side.
Drain, remove, and place on a parchment-lined baking sheet.
Brush on egg yolk + water mixture and add toppings (sesame seeds, everything seasoning, grated cheddar and sliced jalapeño, etc.) if desired.
Bake for 20-22 minutes, or until puffy and golden-brown.
Way to say “I love you”
Ask to see the photos when someone is excited about something (their trip, their new baby cousin, their Facebook Marketplace find). They want to show you, but they also want to be asked.
Things that feel important, but aren’t
Nice luggage (this might be an unpopular opinion but – suitcases get all banged up anyway! I always thrift mine, and to be honest, the thrifted ones have lasted longer)
Saying the perfect goodbye
Things that don’t feel important, but are
Salted butter (putting unsalted butter on a piece of toast and sprinkling it with salt to make up for it just isn’t the same)
Writing down exactly where you parked at the airport
Congrats on the move! Your bagels always look so beautiful I can’t wait to try the recipe.
Hey! Can’t wait to try your bagels they look so good! Have you been to courage bagels in la? How do yours compare to airy/fluffiness and that shattering glassine crust? I really want to achieve that so I’m thinking I’ll start with more hydration and then go from there