After a good week last week, I’m back to feeling restless. It’s my job, it’s the city, it’s the winter that still hasn’t completely gone away, it’s my miniature apartment. I’m dreaming of wide open fields and blue skies and houses with actual kitchens. I go around in circles: leave the city–but it’s not necessarily cheaper, and I don’t want to commute–leave the east coast–but go where?–find a job somewhere–but there’s nothing I want to do but write books, and I could do that anywhere–I’m actually lucky, I work in a job that gives me the time to write on the side–so I should stay here…

You get the idea.

In every week, I have my ups as well as my downs. Here are some good things that made my week:

1. I discovered a new amazing bar in the no man’s land of midtown Manhattan: The Jeffrey. Sit on the espresso bar side, at the bar–there’s a bartender there who’s an absolute cocktail genius. I can’t tell you what I had, but it involved a flaming orange peel, and I highly recommend it. Also, they put truffle oil on practically everything.

2. I fortunately have not had to worry about dating in 4 years now, but for those of you who still do, this article is genius.

3. Oh, and I FINISHED THE FIRST DRAFT OF MY SECOND NOVEL. Now I’m going to do what I didn’t do with my first novel which is put it away and try and forget about it for several months. And when I take it back out to edit it, I’ll be printing it out onto physical paper.

Reading: The Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed me tweeting about them constantly because THESE BOOKS ARE AMAZING. How had I never heard of them before? It’s a weird premise: There’s a town of only men, where everyone can hear one another’s thoughts, including the animals. There’s a boy name Todd, a dog named Manchee … and a beautiful, heartrending story. Just go read them. Now.

Watching: I’m a little late to the party, but I finally watched Frozen and now I can’t stop singing it.

Listening to: The Mumford and Sons Pandora station is absolutely lovely. I like Pandora better than Spotify because I actually like all the suggested music that comes with each station–it’s the only way I discover new music I like now.

Have a great weekend!

Photo by Stefan Johnson on Unsplash