Refreshing as Hell
I'm talking about kombucha but also two blue perfect shirts and the period between 37 and 45 years old.
Highly Enthused is a newsletter, once a podcast, concerning all the best things to consume in life. It’s written twice per month by Sophie McComas-Williams and Sophie Roberts, and today’s dispatch is written by SoMo! The majority of each newsletter is free, but there are five extra recs in each for paid subscribers. That’s often where the gold nuggets lie. Thanks for being here!
It’s autumn but the water is still so warm for swimming and today it was 37 degrees where I live, so the summer dream lives on. I feel like this month’s recs reflect that vibe a little; shirts as blue as the ocean, kombucha cold in a can, radical personal transformation and snacky but satiating short stories. Basically the opposite of the vibe of LinkedIn. I hope you enjoy!
I feel like the best thing I’ve eaten lately has been a very specific seedy maple Paleo granola from Aldi but alas, I can’t link that here! SO lemme tell you about my favourite kombucha in a can instead. Trainer Tom’s Pine-Lime Aloe Kombucha (Tombucha? That feels weird to say) is organic, low sugar, and with all those pre and probiotics we love in a real kombucha, but it’s not offensively fake tasting like so many are these days. It’s refreshing as hell! It has notes of piña colada! It’s made in Avalon Beach, about an hour north of my house, so that’s great too. I just love it. Get it by the case here.
Gosh I love Curtis Sittenfeld. I went through a MEGA phase a couple of years ago and read a few almost in a row - Prep, Rodham and Romantic Comedy (my fav). Her characters aren’t starlets, they’re almost always introverts who live ordinary lives, each made bigger in the detail. Her latest and second collection of short stories, Show Don’t Tell, is such a gripping format, each story pulling you so close you don’t want them to end! But then a new one starts and the cycle happens again! It’s all very American, but each tale varies quite wildly in setting and plot. If you loved Tom Lake by Anne Patchett (don’t talk to me if you didn’t), you’ll love this.
If you’ve hung out with me lately and are roughly my age (37 in one week!), it’s likely I've talked your ear off about The Portal. About if you’re in it, if I’m in it, or how we’ll all probably be in it soon. If you’re not subscribed to Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study Substack, her deep dives into the most niche corners of online and offline culture are lip-smackingly delicious, like a lolly so hard, sweet and sour you can’t stop sucking on it. She describes a period of what I guess is middle age (yikes), as a great creative surge and transition - either spiritually, professionally or emotionally - occurring to (some) women between the ages of 37-45. This is around the time you’re perhaps juuuust lifting your head from an intense, prolonged period of parenting, or deep professional paid work. You enter a phase where everything shifts, your focus and priorities sharpen. It’s less about the fire of ambition that burned under our twenties, but a re-alignment, a rediscovery of purpose, “an experience of transformation, of refinement,” as she writes.
…She sees it as the moment when “stability types, realizing they’ve climbed to the top of the ladder, see that they want more out of life. And so they search for meaning. The portal might be seen as the work of people who have participated in everything society expected of them on one level or another, and are finding themselves wanting more out of life — and want to find more purpose in life as change makers.”
I’m fascinated by it (Aries = we love change), and feeling something of a shift in my own life, I’m welcoming it. Suck me in, portal, spit me out anew. Read her take and see what you think:
A quick-fire rundown of the miscellaneous finds we’ve loved this month. In this edition: A liquor for Sour Cherry Spritz, two absolutely ideal blue shirts, an app to sort out your shopping wish list, a bingeworthy TV show and a rec for jawline snatching.