I’m All Lost In, #77: Egyptian cotton sheets; Vegan Chips Ahoy version; Expatriate of the week.
I’m All Lost In…
the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.
#77
1) New Cotton Sheets
My pal Johnny Rotten Shoes, aka Erica, thinks I got duped—$85 seems suspiciously inexpensive for a “luxury” set of “800-thread-count” cotton sheets, she warned.
But judging from how comfy my bed has been, now newly fitted in the sage-colored set of 100% cotton sheets, I ordered from Luxury Egyptian Linens, I’m convinced I made the right move.
Switching to cotton sheets.
In particular: The move from the slippery bamboo set I’ve been using for the last couple of years (that always ends up in confusing and bunched disarray at the foot of the bed) to the soft cotton sleep-study experience I switched to this week has been the coziest of mid-life revelations.
Every night, I feel like Madonna expressing herself, or perhaps it’s Blondie’s Debbie Harry beseeching us to “call me,” crooning about designer sheets at bed time.
2) Plant Based Chocolate Chip Cookies
Back in I’m All Lost In #13 from January 2024, I identified my sparkling cookie jar as an apartment therapy achievement, claiming it was an aesthetic obsession rather than a sugary one.
The number of boxes of Back to Nature brand Chocolate Chunk Cookies I’ve gone through in the past few weeks belies this claim—and confirms I’m hooked on this hippie rendition of Nabisco’s Chips Ahoy, a beloved childhood confection—the crunchy ones, not the queasy chewy version.
Back to Nature is certainly the worst name for a chocolate chip cookie imaginable, but the plant based, no high-fructose, no hydrogynated oils, no saturated nor trans fats, no artificial colors nor flavor ingredients justify the Woodstock-era reverie and explain why they taste so malty and delectable rather than sickly sweet and industrial.
3) Daria Kasatkina Serves Putin
For regular readers who typically skim (and barely) my WTA entries, you may actually find this dispatch exciting:
Gay tennis star, World No. 12 Daria Kasatkina, announced on Saturday that she will no longer play as a Russian. Obtaining Australian residency, Kasatkina, who fled her native Russia two years ago because it’s impossible to live openly under the Putin regime as an out lesbian, says she will now compete under the Australian flag.
Notably, Kasatkina has also been an outspoken critic of Russian’s war in Ukraine. It’s easy to imagine that Kasatkina, 27, was something of a Pussy Riot fan when she was a teenager; the math works out perfectly: Young Kasatkina would have been 17 during the heyday of Pussy Riot’s revolutionary story line. With her bold anti-war and LGBTQ politics, Kasatkina is certainly practicing what original Russian riot grrrls Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina preached.
In an inspiring, and kind of urbanist Instagram post, this week Kasatkina said:
Australia is a place I love, is incredibly welcoming and a place where I feel totally at home. I love being in Melbourne and look forward to making my home there. As part of this, I am proud to announce that I will be representing my new homeland Australia, in my professional tennis career from this point onwards.
While this righteous news transcends my scoreboard fixation with the WTA, I will also say that last December when I made my predictions for the 2025 season, I picked Kasatkina as one to watch.
—————
I’ve kept this week’s three items short because I have quite a few follow-up items to get to.
First, regarding my recent boozy matcha latte discovery: I’m now swapping in whiskey for the vokda-like shōchū I initially experimented with two weeks ago. This “Botcha Latte”—Maker’s Mark bourbon, matcha tea, and hot oat milk—has become my happy hour go to at my other recent discovery, Peloton Cafe.
Second, while I understand the value of U.S. Sen. Cory Booker’s (D-NJ) anti-Trump performance on the Senate floor this week, my takeaway was a sad one. With the comparisons and juxtaposition to Dixiecrat Sen. Strom Thurmond's epic (and racist) 1957 speech, Booker’s stand ultimately highlighted a dispiriting fact: Thurmond’s defensive speech was delivered at a time in history—mid-20th Century America—when his segregationist movement was in its throes and the civil rights movement was ascendant. Along with Gov. Wallace’s school door stand, Thurmond’s filibuster represented a dying gasp for American racists. Nearly 70 years on, Booker's speech showed the roles are now reversed.
Third, you’ll remember I was painfully cynical about Rocket Taco’s current play to activate the underachieving corner spot on my block. I posited that unless they changed from their HOA-friendly model and instead took on the role of a warm neighborhood bar, their reboot would fail. Well, I dropped in this week to both give them a fair chance and to sit at the bar and send a message about the bartop demand. The good news is that there were more people in the place than I imagined there’d be (still not bumping, though) and the regal bar was stocked. The bad news: we were the last people there as they put up the chairs at 8:20. I did get some encouraging info about the business that’s taking over Rocket Taco’s old, smaller space across the street, though. It’s going to be a cafe and women’s sports bar. Maybe they’ll stay open late? I’ll be there on Day One anyway making sure they subscribe to the Tennis Channel.
Fourth, I’ve written plenty in this space about my young musician friend, yeoman artist Rob Joynes, including about his killed-the-assignment computer-music opening set at my book release reading in May 2023 and about his abstract beats solo show at Vermillion last summer. Well, I saw him perform once again this past Saturday night. It was an unconventional show for a Seattle rock club. Rob set up and hosted a folk night at downtown rocker oasis, the Belltown Yacht Club where he set out chairs in front of the stage. For an electric guitarist who leans My Bloody Valentine, Rob played a surprisingly stark and confessional acoustic set. But the night ultimately starred his songwriting idol, Kath Bloom, who he invited out for the show. Bloom is an obscure musician from Connecticut. She put out some odd folk albums in the 1970s and early 1980s, and Richard Linklater used one of her songs in 1995’s Before Sunrise. She’s now 70-something, and to a roomful of Rob’s adoring friends and to many of her own cult fans who showed up, Bloom, accompanied by her melodic, young sidekick guitarist David Shapiro, played a tender, frolicking, intimate performance of her own.
Kath Bloom and touring partner guitarist David Shapiro on stage at the Belltown Yacht Club, 3/29/25
Fifth, and with some exertion, I finished the Bryan Washington novel I started two weeks ago, Family Meal. There are lots of paragraph-ending mic-drop insights that would work in their own right as poetry (“The sirens behind us don’t sound any closer, but they don’t disappear either. It could just be the backdrop of the city. Houston’s natural state.”) But in the context of this forced novel about self care as philosophy, I found myself missing Washington’s superior, attention-to-detail driven short stories, one of which showed up in this week’s New Yorker.
Sixth, and sorry, but it’s tennis time. My favorite WTA player Aryna Sabalenka ended up winning the Miami Open this week, convincingly: 7-5, 6-2. She beat World No. 4, American Jessica Pegula, who she also beat in last year’s U.S. Open, which I saw live. More importantly (to a Daffy Saby fanboy like me), she finally got the props she deserves for her overlooked yet defiantly impressive 2025 stand to date; four months in with a tour-best four major finals appearances and a tour-best 23-4 record overall, she’s World No. 1, leading former invincible World No. 1, and current World No. 2, Iga Swiatek in the rankings by more than 3000 points. Go to the 30-minute mark here and listen to prodigy tennis podcaster Matt Roberts—the unencumbered boy-genius analyst on the tour—sing Sabalenka’s stats while conjecturing with his two cohorts that she could win Roland Garros and Wimbledon for a career grand slam. “I think I’d have said no to that in the past,” Roberts says, but noting her new and suddenly comprehensive game, Roberts concluded, “this is the year for Sabalenka, playing like this.” By the way, I played tennis myself on Saturday, facing a new opponent who had drop shot and slice expertise. He beat me 6-4, 6-4, but not before I responded in the second set from down 0-3 with a strong first-serve and passing-shot-heavy, 3-game winning streak to suddenly even things up.