*This piece first appeared in [Volume Four of our magazine](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/volume-four-inside).* 

Hiking on a trail over a mountain pass in New Zealand last February, I stepped over a log, and stumbled. The trail at that juncture bordered a sheer drop, but was wide and well-made, and I don’t remember feeling fear in the split second before I recovered my footing. In fact, I remember thinking how incredible it was that our bodies know how to do this. There is a small monument to evolution in the mechanics of each footfall, the perfectly held tension in the muscles. 

I’m not a particularly outdoorsy person, but I never have trouble going outside when I’m somewhere Extremely Outside. I’ve done multi-day hikes, camped on beaches, slept under the stars. At the house on Fire Island where I spend extravagant amounts of the months May through October, the outside-inside border feels porous, and going outside is often the first thing I do after waking: I open the screen door and step across the threshold by instinct, in my nightgown, a bipedal animal pre-caffeinated and blinking in the morning sun. But I struggle in the city. I work from home, which means my desk can hold me fast like an anchor. 

In Brooklyn, I sometimes feel sequestered. Between me and outside, there are three flights of stairs and three heavy doors. To successfully emerge requires planning, a negotiation of clothing and footwear and keys and purse. Sometimes, it’s more daunting than I’d like to admit. In my grimmer periods, which mostly coincide with the colder months, I ration whiskey and pasta, the prospect of going out even for groceries sometimes beyond me. At times, staying inside seems like a form of protection. 

On a conscious level, I recognize this is foolish: that, maybe soon, there will be a time when I may not be as free to go out or to wander, whether due to mobility, age, or changing life commitments. If I sometimes struggle now to go outside because it involves confronting creaking stairs and winter layers, imagine how hard it will be with a baby, or when I have to use a cane. But sometimes the most tempting thing to do in the face of future loss is to pretend it does not exist, because to alter one’s behavior in response to the loss would be a way of acknowledging its reality. All I can say is that I am a person who lives with a not-insignificant amount of anxiety, and I try, as best I am able, to be alert to its exigencies, and to not let it make my life too small. 

Recently, after a breakup, I set myself the small task of going outside every day for a week. Sometimes you get the choice whether to wallow or rally, and I wanted to tip the scales for rallying; I suspected it would ultimately make me feel better, even if it made me anxious. 

Some days I barely strayed from my building, and just sat outside on the stoop for a spell after closing my laptop, or walked to the bodega for a ginger ale. One evening, a friend came over and we climbed onto my roof with a bottle of wine and watched the sky turn pink over the distant Manhattan skyline. We talked, and I cried a little. That mundane spectacle is one I never miss on the island, where seeing the sunset is a matter of ambling to the little dock at the end of my walk, but in the city, my most frequent view is an oblique wash of pink and orange from my bedroom window. 

On more ambitious days, I went for long, aimless walks in my neighborhood, walks that usually grew from some notional errand. The best one happened because I needed to mail a package. It was late summer, so I watched children playing in opened hydrants and firefighters recovering between calls at the local firehouse. I tried not to think about my ex, a volunteer firefighter in his small town. I smelled hot garbage and baking bread and sour beer, spilled from someone’s late-night festivities. Virginia Woolf said that the plot of *To The Lighthouse* came to her while she was walking around Tavistock Square; in her diary, she called walking alone in London “the greatest rest.” 

Walking can be liberating. You can recognize the strength and wisdom of the body, the intelligence of motor memory. Like driving, I find that walking engages just enough of my brain to dim the anxiety, leaving the rest of my mind to wander as freely as my body.

After the week was up, I extended it by another, and then another. I eventually made it a month. I realized I felt better. The only way to go outside, after all, is to do it. You brush the hair and put on the shoes and stand up straight, giving yourself whatever pep talks or threats are needed, and then you open the door and find out what awaits.

YaelMalka Gossamer NightShifts 180 copy

YaelMalka Gossamer NightShifts 180

How to Go Outside

Since moving to Berlin a year ago, I have tried my best to avoid using easy stereotypes. No, not all Germans are rule followers, though many don’t care for jaywalking in front of impressionable children. Yes, Germans can be funny, though typically not in the style of American sarcasm. Obscenely long German words are actually just compounds without spaces, so it’s not that big of a deal. But there is at least one principle that, in my admittedly limited focus group of local friends and acquaintances, holds true: Germans fucking love asparagus season.

It comes as a surprise to newcomers who associate German cuisine with bratwursts and bread dumplings to learn that Germans cherish white asparagus, in some cases above all else. Known as Spargelzeit, white asparagus season begins in mid-to-late April. Lines form in grocery stores, farmers markets, and freestanding Spargel kiosks. Restaurants offer entire white asparagus menus, from soups to side dishes to a traditional preparation in butter or hollandaise with potatoes and ham. Last year, the chocolate company Ritter Sport even posted a fake white asparagus flavor on Instagram (see, Germans are funny). In the town of Beelitz, an Asparagus Queen is crowned at an annual festival. But on June 24th, the midsummer celebration of St. John’s Day, white asparagus promptly vanishes.

Spargelzeit is singular, but Germans commemorate other seasons with characteristically quirky passion. Like many other facets of German life, this is usually regional. Oktoberfest, in Bavaria, marks the most well-known example as a beer-focused tourism draw, but in Germany’s north, for instance, people celebrate winter grünkohl season by going on kale-eating, schnapps-drinking hikes led by a Kale King and Kale Queen.

Germans’ enthusiasm for seasonal goods is reflected in a place that can really make you feel like an expat: the grocery store. In the U.S., I came to expect the availability of all fruits and vegetables year-round, with some minor exceptions. German shoppers, by contrast, have been disciplined by discount chains to wait for things like blackberries, cherries, and the “white gold” of Spargel. There are exceptions here, too, particularly when it comes to wider offerings at upscale grocers. But there is real merit to this kind of lifestyle beyond “eating local” or considerations about the environmental impact of imported out-of-season food. To live and cook in Germany is to accept and ideally embrace a greater sense of seasonality.

Denied strawberries for months on end, I idle in German grocery stores thinking about how American capitalism has flattened the calendar. Things are accessible at all times—for a price. I probably made brussels sprouts all year long in America only to move and discover they are exclusively a winter vegetable here. I enjoy them more now that they are seasonal to me.

We act this out in our lives already. I could stream Christmas music on Spotify whenever I want, but I choose not to. We treasure seasonal delights not because we are deprived of them, but because we deprive ourselves of them. German grocery stores have, improbably, given me a greater respect of the calendar in an era when everything is so readily at our fingertips. I guess I am advocating for delayed gratification, a buzzy phrase promulgated as a novel concept by Instagram hype that is nevertheless good for the soul. I hope I can carry on a more seasonal way of thinking even if I return to America. I will only cook brussels sprouts when it’s cold out, but I will never make white asparagus, because it’s really not that good.

A Matter of Time

I love my work, but my work is not who I am. My career does not make me. I am a fashion and creative director, but there’s so much more that I want to accomplish outside of it. I’m definitely an Aries, in the sense that there are a lot of things that I want to be part of. 

I was born and raised in Richmond Hill, Queens, but grew up in New Jersey. The area I grew up in was not diverse at all. There were only a handful of Black people, and that can form and shape who you are and how you view yourself. But I grew up in a very Haitian household, too. Both of my parents were very, very instrumental in making sure that I loved my Black skin. I loved my culture, I loved Haitian culture, and I loved being Black. 

![110520 GOSSAMER RAJNI 0060](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/7wGy3RGYKwyQYdmfr86HEc/7b3ae3b761a71a5e244e4872622d79f8/110520_GOSSAMER_RAJNI_0060.jpg)
>I loved my culture, I loved Haitian culture, and I loved being Black. 

My parents did everything they possibly could to instill in me the beauty of being Black, whether it was putting me in specific after-school activities, or making me read and watch movies geared towards a love of being Black. They wanted me to embrace myself. Even though I was in an environment where there weren’t many of me, they wanted me to think very highly of who I was and where I came from—and where they came from.

My grandmother, who regularly came up to the U.S. from Haiti, exposed me to a lot of things, from art to music. She was a lawyer, but she was also an opera singer. She just loved culture. She’s the one who introduced me to the great artists of our time, the classic artists. I think this allowed me to expand my mind and delve deep into that realm. 

One of the first American novelists I was introduced to at a very young age was James Baldwin, through my grandmother. Back in the day, especially in Caribbean cultures, people really didn’t talk about homosexuality. Baldwin was open about his homosexuality and his differentness. My grandmother would never touch upon that, but she would always say, “There is a beauty in not being the same. There is a beauty in not necessarily thinking the same way as everyone around you. There is a beauty of having your own kind of conviction. There’s a beauty about having your own thought process. There is a beauty about coming to the same conclusion as someone else, but not getting there the same way.” So Baldwin became a figure who really impacted the way that I thought, the way that I came about to things.

[[1]]

I was never a big fashion girl. I knew what I liked, and I knew I had great taste in things, but it didn’t necessarily mean that I was wearing them. For me, it’s more about the creativity behind everything. That’s what I love about fashion—not necessarily the boot, or this, or that, but the story behind it. How a particular collection, show, or photo shoot came together. 

I never thought that you could have a career in fashion or even a career in the arts, as much as I loved both of those things. So when I was in school, I thought, *Okay, I guess I’m just going to follow my parents and become a physician. That seems like what I should do*. Or even when I knew that I didn’t want to become a physician, I thought maybe I should be a lawyer. I was going down that track, when my mom who was like, “Don’t do something that you don’t love. If you’re going to put that many hours and years into school, you better love what you’re doing or you’re just going to regret that you wasted all that time doing something because you *think* it’s what I want you to do.”

The cool thing about my career is that every place I’ve worked has always been so different. I get to learn about their world, and at the same time, teach them about mine. And along the way, I took what I learned at this publication and moving it to the next one. 

![110520 GOSSAMER RAJNI 0367](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/V0a1fpQZXz2lIBgye4jLR/b176f852ed19f23e1c81b300ce879779/110520_GOSSAMER_RAJNI_0367.jpg)
>If you’re going to put that many hours and years into school, you better love what you’re doing.

*Teen Vogue* was the first where it was a team of just young women. At the time, Elaine Welteroth was editor in chief, Marie Suter was the creative director, and Lynette Nylander had come on as deputy editor. It was a really nice group of women who were racially diverse—and socioeconomically, too. It was probably the first place where it felt like the stories that we were trying to tell were stories that I wanted to push. Previously, sure, there were ones that I loved and I wanted to push, but there were tons of others that I just  didn’t understand. But it was above me and I had to execute it.

Maybe it was also because the world was changing, too. Culturally, there was a shift that was happening, around Trump’s election and beyond, and it was like, “We’ve got to nurture this conversation.” Those were the stories I was proud to present and I was proud to execute myself. 

It was the same thing at *Allure*. When I started there, it was the science of beauty. But then we really started to dig deep into the culture of beauty. That shift made me excited to work on and put those stories in the book.

[[2]]

The idea of [Building Black Bed-Stuy](https://www.instagram.com/buildingblackbedstuy/?hl=en) was something all three of us—my friends Kai Avent-deLeon and Nana Yaa Asare Boadu and I—were already individually working on. Kai was born and raised in Bed-Stuy, and has Sincerely Tommy, so she’s always had that community mission. As for me, being ingrained in a community doesn’t just mean moving here, but truly getting involved. So I would do block association things, and I got involved with the [BELA Charter School](http://www.belahs.org/), which is a school for Black and brown girls. 

We all were doing our own thing and because we’re such good friends, we would talk about what we were seeing, what we felt was missing, and certain incidents that would happen in the neighborhood, like people calling the cops on the culture—things like that. 2020 probably lit a fire under our asses because the consequences and the need were bigger. So that’s how Building Black Bed-Stuy was born, but we had been talking about it for probably a year or so before we actually launched it.

The way that I live my life is community-based—it takes a village. Whatever it is I’m doing, whether it’s with BELA or Building Black Bed-Stuy or an individual thing—I always think about children and the world that I want them to live in. Obviously I have my individual goals, but everything I am trying to do is to help build a world that has never been seen before. I know I can’t take it all on, but whatever I can do to help, I’m going to try to do it.

![110520 GOSSAMER RAJNI 0344](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/6hljQobhc8qp4C6Fzmzc3b/46b8acdf084868becbdaee003d057507/110520_GOSSAMER_RAJNI_0344.jpg)
>We have such a rich history that doesn’t just start with slavery.

That’s what, in my head, I think I’m doing at Building Black Bed-Stuy with my team of friends: we’re literally helping Black initiatives and Black businesses empower themselves. Sometimes you need your community to help you. The first iteration of Building Back Bed-Stuy was to help buy real estate to build a community center that is run by the Black community, run by the people that live around the area.

The places, the initiatives, and the businesses that we truly try to get behind are not one-offs. We try not to do things like a candle company, or things like that. We focus on nurturing businesses that are about teaching Black youth, teaching our kids who are two or three or four years old what it means to be proud of being Black, and of their heritage. Growing up, we all had history class, but I had to learn how to unlearn the history that was taught in my high school. There’s so much that was missing.

When you think of the Black history you learn in high school, you think of slaves, then Martin Luther King, then kumbaya. Obviously, that’s not it. We have such a rich history that doesn’t just start with slavery. We weren’t these downtrodden people from the get-go. We had civilizations. We had working towns and working neighborhoods. With the [Watoto Freeschool](https://www.savingourbabiesinc.com/) and [Little Sun People daycare](http://www.littlesunpeople.com/), it’s about teaching the youth these things when they’re young. There’s an ambulance network called the Bed-Stuy Volleys. It’s an all-Black run, volunteer group that provides free ambulance service. Essentially, when people don’t have money to call the ambulance, they can call the Volleys to be picked up au gratis. These are the types of initiatives that we try to back. 

![110520 GOSSAMER RAJNI 0271](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/3cjq7Ase2xNXQ4hkZqTCt1/45af1e5b694e5b459f2dd0f7bcdc72c0/110520_GOSSAMER_RAJNI_0271.jpg)
>Self-empowerment is not only about money, it’s about taking care of your bodies.

We raised funds for the Life Wellness Center on Tompkins to talk about mental health in the Black community. Self-empowerment is not only about money, it’s about taking care of your bodies, it’s about making sure that you’re healthy, and that you can live a long life in order to implement all the ideas and things that you want to do. 

We also want to build Black generational wealth. These are Black businesses and we want them to reap the same benefits a lot of our white counterparts have. We don’t take a cut. [The money we raise](https://www.gofundme.com/f/building-black-bed-stuy) goes straight  back into their businesses so they can build their businesses. We’re helping create that wealth so that the next generation can build upon it and doesn’t have to start from scratch. The Black family dollar hasn’t moved since 1958. Meaning, for every dollar a white family has, a Black family has 10 cents. That statistic has been the same since the civil rights movement and has not budged for a second. So it’s just hard. 

![110520 GOSSAMER RAJNI 0137](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/7I8o5XhauqXEUUaWJXAZ6V/38f2a07efd7bf310998f436c3a936609/110520_GOSSAMER_RAJNI_0137.jpg)

It’s one of those things where you look at it and you’re like, “Wait really? But it seems like we’re prosperous. It seems like we’re getting better.” But then I think, “I’m in a bubble, too.” I live in New York City, and there’s still obviously plenty of poverty here and people who are living below the line, but it’s just crazy that economically and as a whole, we are not empowered at all as a people.

I am not a big weed smoker, but have I done it? Of course. I mean, I definitely have a little chocolate here and there. Actually, maybe like three months ago when I couldn’t sleep because I had just way too much on my plate, I was taking Dusk. I take Dusk when I cannot fall asleep or when I know that my mind is racing and I know I want to go to sleep early. It’s super nice. And I use weed leisurely. If I’m with a group of friends and it’s just us and have no kids around and we’re having a good time, I’ll definitely take a little draw and just chill and have a glass of wine.

But so many Black males have gone to jail over selling and smoking weed on the street. Yet now it’s cute, now you want to profit. Now you want to create farms, and do all of these big, grandiose things, and there are so many people sitting in jail for years and years just for having weed. Now it’s cool? Now you want to legalize it? It’s kind of like that t-shirt that says, “[Ghetto until proven fashionable.](https://www.teenvogue.com/story/designer-nareasha-willis-cultural-appropriation)” That’s how I see everyone jumping on the weed bandwagon because people have gone to jail and are still in jail and God knows when they can get out.

![110520 GOSSAMER RAJNI 0357](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/1QTTP1JyVq43oEb9PQvO2G/87ad7df1dd69744a2367e495200ed72f/110520_GOSSAMER_RAJNI_0357.jpg)

***
*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. [Rajni Jacques](https://www.instagram.com/rajni_jacques/?hl=en) photographed by [Meredith Jenks](https://www.instagram.com/meredithjenks/?hl=en) around Brooklyn. Donate to Building Black Bed-Stuy [here](https://www.gofundme.com/f/building-black-bed-stuy). If you like this Conversation, please feel free to share it with friends or enemies. Subscribe to our newsletter [here](https://www.gossamer.co/subscribe).*


Rajni Jacques on shifting fashion, community organizing, and the beauty of being Black.

110520 GOSSAMER RAJNI 0182

![110520 GOSSAMER RAJNI 0042](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/3pzDAa2TW9ANyyEg9nWqgw/9f0885127422a3f6adf9a354d6821786/110520_GOSSAMER_RAJNI_0042.jpg)

110520 GOSSAMER RAJNI 0060

![110520 GOSSAMER RAJNI 0199](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/5vGwN2LPAi4Dvq8A1r48bb/95345b8fd92887285deb8664304680a1/110520_GOSSAMER_RAJNI_0199.jpg)

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The creative director and *Gossamer* contributing editor on nurturing cultural shifts, community organizing, and the beauty of being Black.

Rajni Jacques

I feel like I’m a woman of many slashes. But I celebrate succinctness, so I guess, in a single word, I’m a teacher. 

[3rd Ritual](https://www.3rdritual.com/) is very much my life’s work, but I’m also involved in a couple of other projects. I’ve never publicly explained that 3rd Ritual is really one of a trifecta of offerings. It’s a labor of love. When I say that, people are often like, “Well, then how do you make money?” That comes from the work that I do at [Sky Ting](https://www.skyting.com/), as well as with a new wellness startup that’s still under wraps.

[[1]]

I have a very heightened sense of smell. As we say in spiritual talk, I’m an HSP—a highly sensitive person, and my sense of smell is definitely one of those little antennas. It’s invisible but it’s always firing. I also have synesthesia. Both of those inform who I am as a person and the way I create things.

Synesthesia can manifest in different ways for different people, but it’s essentially when one of the sensory or cognitive pathways leads to an involuntary association with a second pathway. I don’t know if I explained that properly, but for me, scents have a color associated with them, as do letters and numbers.

I see the alphabet: A is red, B is a kind of orange-y brown, C is a charcoal-y, grayish-purple. It’s been that way since I was really little. I remember always trying to explain that to other people. It wasn’t until I was in a meditation class where someone else described their synesthesia that I realized not everybody sees things that way. That was a revelation.

![JTMove](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/4icJY9PlL9UNzcY0EaJDk1/f01e6419c43b92456ffde1ebbca951fd/101420_JENNTARDIFF_2009.jpg)
>The need to have a repeated series of small acts has always been vital to my sense of safety and ability to exist.

The need to have a repeated series of small acts has always been vital to my sense of safety and ability to exist. There’s a psychoanalytical approach to unpacking that, which is, my mom died when I was young, and so putting myself to bed at night—all these things—was a way to mother myself. But I think the kinder way and the way that I like to think of it now is that it was a ritual. It was an attempt to create order in what was an otherwise chaotic world.

I’m from Ottawa, the capital of Canada. Why do people always think it’s Toronto? I was born and raised there and then when I was in middle school, my dad moved to Quebec. But I still went to high school in Ottawa. That ended up having a really big impact, I think, on my life. Without traffic, it was an hour drive to get to my school. Before I had my license or access to a car, it meant that in order for my dad to be at work on time, he would often drop me off an hour or two before school started and then pick me up later as well.

So I had this really weird experience of having to figure out what to do with myself at seven in the morning in this suburban neighborhood. For most teenagers, that either means you can get into some trouble or you can learn to sit with the discomfort. While I definitely did get into trouble, I also found this Jewish community center down the street from my school, thank god. It’s where I took my first yoga class. There was a teacher there who really welcomed me in. She seemed like this incredibly evolved adult, but, in hindsight, she was probably 19.

[[2]]

I think in some ways that saved my life because it gave me something I could always find my way back to. When I had a panic attack at university and the nurse at the local health clinic told me to go practice yoga, that didn’t seem crazy. I already knew what that looked like—it wasn’t a foreign and scary thing. And I found my way back to it again after experiencing my biggest heartbreak and the end of a really tumultuous relationship in my early 20s.

For the first 10 years of my teaching career, I really kept yoga separate from the rest of my professional life. It was a secret. While teaching at this yoga studio in NoHo, I would get changed in the bathroom because I didn’t want people to see me looking all corporate. And then at my day job working for a tech company, I wouldn’t tell anyone that I was using all my saved up vacation days to go on a yoga retreat. I thought people wouldn’t take me seriously. Now I realize how much they both informed the other.

At my job, people would congratulate me on my ability to remain calm in this incredibly intense, high-stress environment. That was because I was secretly doing box breathing during meetings where they’re telling us that our budgets had been slashed. Meanwhile, during my yoga classes, I would talk about the return on your investment, like, “We have 60 minutes, what is the ROI here?” I would focus on poses that were really geared towards people sitting at desks all day or hunching at a screen. That was a really helpful entry point for a lot of people who weren’t ready for the philosophical elements behind yoga.

![JTFence](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/2vTZsfLyHbIJ0N0mZ0Trqs/6eee333ce2b3471e5f7a388c98ce7984/101420_JENNTARDIFF_2084__1_.jpg)

I moved to New York from Toronto without a job or a place to live or any friends. I had just ended a relationship and was really sad. I had also been working for a public figure in Toronto who was a very, very, *very* difficult boss. I never dreamed I’d talk about this on record, but thanks to the #MeToo movement, now I’m not the first. 

Moving was one of the crazier things I’ve ever done. I bought a one-way plane ticket with two suitcases. I either gave away or sold the remainder of my belongings. I rented an Airbnb for two weeks, and within those two weeks, I found a job, found an apartment with somebody who is one of my best friends to this day, and met the man to whom I’m now married. 

I think that’s an example of how powerful a mindset shift can be. I’d been in this environment where I felt I was a victim of both my romantic partner and my boss. When that happens, you can end up thinking, *Well, the common thread is me, therefore it’s my fault and something’s wrong with me*. Giving myself an entirely clean slate meant that I literally had nothing to lose. I’d given it all away already.

![JTFence portrait](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/25RmJqptc7xfHvwbm2cTWN/e277078174eb41656c38ca9cc3b7d96f/101420_JENNTARDIFF_2095.jpg)
>Giving myself an entirely clean slate meant that I literally had nothing to lose.

At 3rd Ritual, I like to say that our offering is equal parts tools and techniques. We create physical objects—like the bell candle, which uses fire, gravity, and sound to measure time—and share techniques that are our way of modernizing and distilling ancient wisdom. We pull from a wide variety of sources, so it’s non-dogmatic. Anything is fair game, from art and architecture to poetry and religious philosophy.

We are trying to, by way of the tools or even something as simple as a post shared on Instagram, help people slow down and make sense of what comes up in that stillness. In a society where we’re so conditioned to have this constant stream of stimulation and information, stillness is a pretty intense juxtaposition. It can almost feel like you’re being confronted with the silence of yourself, and the mind then tries to fill it.

I first started smoking weed in high school, but I think it’s safe to say that that was one of the darker periods of my life. When I went to college, I didn’t touch it. I associated it with secrecy and peer pressure and some of the people that it was tied to. So I didn’t smoke weed for a long time. But then I moved to New York and met my husband, Pierre.

![101420 JENNTARDIFF 2116](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/1bk2ABRI6bTOg2mzuBrZJM/5bf91ab17b4d635b2dd7d637776dee50/101420_JENNTARDIFF_2116.jpg)

Pierre is one of those people who, everything he does, he does with intention. You know that saying, the way you do one thing is the way you do everything? That’s him. He doesn’t talk about his morning coffee as a ritual, but it is. He has an old-school coffee machine and grinds his own beans using a manual system. He is the greatest living example of the way that I want to be in that—whether somebody is watching or witnessing or not—he’s the same. That consistency is really safe and really grounding.

One of his rituals is rolling a joint at night. It’s a clear marker between working and being productive, and resting and being more passive—like watching a movie or whatever. It reframed weed for me as something that could be safe, creative, positive and fun. That’s when I got back into it, and now it’s definitely become a regular part of my routine.

There’s this Ram Dass quote where he says, “The quieter you become, the more you can hear,” and to me, that’s the thread between wellness and weed. So much of this work is about releasing the burdens of our past and the anxieties about our future so that we can be in the moment and wake up to what’s happening here and now. The trouble with that—and it's why so challenging—is that the voices of our memories and our worries can be quite loud. But weed, at least in my own experience, helps turn down that volume. It’s also why—and I’m sure this has already been said in many interviews before—food tastes better and jokes are funnier and sex is better when you’re stoned. 

![101420 JENNTARDIFF 1960 (1)](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/1xaHA4W4u3dpRL8RuXtOmb/dbd30088948624c8554370d20f63e0d1/101420_JENNTARDIFF_1960__1_.jpg)

It feels important to be honest about one of the tools that’s really helped me transcend my anxiety, self-loathing, and self-inflicted suffering in a way that I’ve never done before, because I live in the wellness world where a lot of false narratives are being spun. The idea that you just wake up in the morning and drink a glass of lemon water and have a perfect day—that’s such bullshit.

Now someone will be able to google my name and find out this thing about me that some of my best friends and colleagues don’t even know, but it’s real and it’s true: part of my ability to recognize and hold space for myself, to be really devoted to meditation and yoga and mindfulness, comes from being able to smoke weed. Same for my love of journaling and writing, and reading *New Yorker* cartoons. 

When people look at the yin-yang symbol, they often think it’s binary.  But it’s actually non-dualistic. It’s about the relationship between the two, and the constant ebb and flow. As somebody who is type-A, addicted to productivity, and a recovering perfectionist, smoking weed is instrumental in my ability to rest and to give myself permission to create something without worrying so much about the finished product. Instead, I get really lost in the process and prioritize the act itself.

>I had this deep, dark secret that I was running a mindful business and yet I was so stressed out I couldn’t sleep. 

I’m really trying to move away from needing to be on the other side of things in order to speak freely about something that’s, I don’t know, “taboo.” Talking about money has been part of that for me, because I’m trying to demystify it and just make it another tool. I grew up in a house where you didn’t talk about money and that created this mindset of scarcity about it for me, which meant that I also wasn’t great at managing it. 

When I left my day job to start 3rd Ritual, I gave myself about a year to do R & D and saved up a small budget with which to launch the company. Then I completely blew past that because I was naive and making physical products is really expensive. The less that you make of something, the more costly it is. This probably sounds so obvious, but I was so green. I had only ever worked in tech, so I had no idea what it meant to have something hand-cast in brass, or how much these things actually cost. That was a real steep learning curve.

I looked at what a lot of other folks do in this space: I pursued venture capital for a while. It was awful. It felt like I had to make a lot of compromises that would turn something that I loved and believed in so deeply into something totally watered down and not all that different from a million other things that already existed in the world. I had this deep, dark secret that I was running a mindful business and yet I was so stressed out I couldn’t sleep. 

![101420 JENNTARDIFF 1903](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/3uUCVL2khpx2cMzpq27xXL/7d472b5776dd89feb3bf5452d79f083c/101420_JENNTARDIFF_1903.jpg)

Money was at the root of a lot of that. We didn’t end up raising and instead I pared down the business so that it wouldn’t take up all of my time. At the risk of oversimplifying it, I shifted my mind away from from the binary, from believing that it had to either be really big and venture-backed and scale really fast, or that it was a fucking failure and I needed to shut it down. Instead, I recognized that there was actually this third way, which was medium-sized and meaningful.

I don’t make money from 3rd Ritual and that feels like a scary thing to admit. But I also know that talking about it will help to dissolve that shame. So that’s why I am, right now, doing something that feels scary and vulnerable because I also know that that’s the medicine.

I have a trifecta of offerings—mind, body, spirit. 3rd Ritual is the spirit. I serve the body by teaching yoga through Sky Ting. Then the mind piece kicks in with the new wellness startup I'm working with. And I can, in all honesty, say that venture capital is the best thing that never happened to me, full stop. 

![101420 JENNTARDIFF 2068](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/6rTU85PpSlUtZXFs1e0cUU/2882ab842dd593d60b8ef69f94d047e2/101420_JENNTARDIFF_2068.jpg)
***
*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. [Jenn Tardif](https://www.instagram.com/jenn_tardif/?hl=en) photographed by [Meredith Jenks](https://www.instagram.com/meredithjenks/?hl=en) around Brooklyn. If you like this Conversation, please feel free to share it with friends or enemies. Subscribe to our newsletter here.*

Jenn Tardif, 3rd Ritual founder and yoga instructor, on synesthesia, the quietude of weed, and how medium is the new big.

JTGreen

JTMobile

![JTWind](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/C1Ae8cKos0tlkWCsPf16W/df55950d061ded0096c1e17f39487458/101420_JENNTARDIFF_1830.jpg)
>I see the alphabet: A is red, B is a kind of orange-y brown, C is a charcoal-y, grayish-purple.

JTSmiling

JTLooking

The founder of 3rd Ritual on synesthesia, the quietude of weed, and how medium is the new big.

Jenn Tardif

I’m very proud to be from Michigan. I grew up in Huntington Woods, which is a suburb just outside of Detroit, but also very much a world away. It’s a small little town that has that small town feel, but in the middle of a very bustling metropolitan area. 

I’m from a super Jewish area where there were three bar and bat mitzvahs a weekend and people competed for who was going to which one. This might be an old statistic at this point but, historically, Detroit has the densest population of Jews in the United States outside of New York and Los Angeles. I am proudly a part of that. Yeah, I love Michigan. 

[[1]]
>I’m from a super Jewish area where there were three bar and bat mitzvahs a weekend.

My sister and I were raised with theater and movies and TV, and we were constantly playing dress-up, performing for each other and singing. It’s been in my bones for as long as I can remember.

I’m actually working on a screenplay about this right now, but my mom was an actress—is an actress. It’s kind of a was/is/maybe, or somewhere in between. Where to begin with this? She grew up doing theater. She comes from a very musical and artistic family. My aunt was a professional ballerina. My other aunt was a professional pianist. My mom went to the University of Michigan and studied theater and musical theater there. She went on to star in a movie called *The Evil Dead*—the original.

Then she went and had kids and a whole life. Ten years later, *The Evil Dead* became a huge cult film, and she started getting more recognition and opportunities, but it was this very strange, super delayed response. So she never really became an actor, but at the same time, she’s a professional actor known for a very famous movie.

![6X9A7918](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/3zrK6nSPUQQn6ywbtWTT10/9e4de8e2ee09f17f69e73a16d5ce478f/6X9A7918.jpg)

I spent my adolescence finding weird acting opportunities. I was in ... I don’t even know what you would call this. I was in a musical review at the mall where we would sing and get a $25 gift certificate as payment. I was constantly doing that kind of stuff. By the time I was in high school, I was doing all the plays and the musicals. 

Musical theater performers are fucking Olympians. I just didn’t have the strength or stamina vocally and I found it extremely stressful. I can sing one night really well, and then I have to let my voice rest for two weeks before I can sing really well again. By the time I went to college, I was like, *This is too much*. And also, I wanted to drink and smoke and have a life. You can’t do any of those things, especially if you have any weakness in your voice. I decided my life would just be easier if I kept singing on the side but didn’t make it a part of my career.

My parents are very liberal, but they were also strict. It was not a household that was like, “Well, you’re safer drinking here.” My parents were more like, “You’re not safe doing any of those things, and so you’re not doing it.” 

[[2]]

My parents were getting divorced between my sophomore and junior year of college, so I really didn’t want to go home. Instead, I found this summer program in Antigua, Guatemala. The idea was to get certified to teach English as a foreign language, live in a home-stay for next to nothing, and teach English at a local public school for girls in exchange for getting private Spanish lessons.

When my mom came to visit, I took her to this volcanic lake that has two or three volcanoes in the middle of it. It was super Jurassic and all very ex-pat-y. We stayed at a bare bones bed and breakfast run by this gorgeous woman who I think was European, but who was definitely from somewhere. 

I brought some weed with me, and now that I think about it, it was one of the first times that my mom and I had ever smoked weed together. I rolled a joint and we sat down on the dock, and we’re looking at this epic, volcanic lake. My mom is in the middle of a divorce after 23 years of being married. I’m in college. To me, the moment just feels so revelatory and meaningful: we’re in Guatemala, in the middle of nowhere, smoking this joint together, and we’re talking. There’s this long pause and it all feels so meaningful. Just like ... *life*. 

>I learned very quickly that weed and alcohol don’t mix for me. That’s a spinning situation. 

Then my mom takes a deep breath and she looks over at me and goes, “I just really want some chocolate.” Turns out we were each having a totally different experience of that moment. But that’s weed to me! It is both of those things. And my mom’s vibe was so good. Just perfect.

I went to NYU, to the Tisch program there. It was conservatory style, but in a traditional university setting where we actually had to get an academic degree as well. I graduated in 2008—directly into the recession. As if it wasn’t already hard enough for actors to get a job or get representation. But I felt very lucky to already be in New York. My career started off very slow and steady, doing friends’ plays, a web series, and auditioning for non-union commercial stuff. 

I started working at this place called [The Flea Theater](http://theflea.org/), which is really wonderful. It’s an equity theater in SoHo run by Jim Simpson, who is married to Sigourney Weaver. They do real professional equity theater, but then they have this non-equity program within it called the Bats. Plays at The Flea get reviewed by the *New York Times* and all the outlets you want to be seen by, and real people come to see their shows. So it’s one way to get into the industry when there are really not a lot of opportunities.

[[3]]

Through that experience, I was cast in a show called *The Great Recession* made up of six one-act plays about the recession. One was by Adam Rapp, who wrote *Red Light Winter*. Adam is a very prolific playwright and was one of my favorites when I moved to New York. He’s very edgy and cool and very downtown.

Adam asked me to audition for his next play at the Vineyard Theatre. I auditioned, and I got it. I was like, *I have made it! This is the coolest thing I could be possibly doing! I’m making $330 a week!* It was shocking even at the time. That was not enough to live in New York. After the excitement wore off, I remember thinking, *This is not sustainable. How are people doing this?* I literally was like, *What am I missing?*

That’s when I started to realize that a lot of people—not all, I’m not trying to make a sweeping statement—but a lot of people who are able to do theater in New York come from money. Or they grew up in New York, so they’re still able to live at their parents’ house, or there’s some other catch because I couldn’t see any path forward for how that was going to be sustainable. It was my first professional theater experience, and my last. I was like, *I can’t do this. It’s going to take me until I’m 40 to be on Broadway and then I still won’t have any money*. So I decided to move to L.A. to with the hope that someday I’d have the ability or the luxury to come back to do more theater. 

>For me, weed is about turning my brain off, not turning my brain on in some very specific way. 

I was in L.A. when I got cast on my first show, *Hindsight*. It was such a sweet, enjoyable show, and honestly has one of the bigger fan bases of anything I’ve done. We waited eight months to start shooting the second season, and then the month before we were supposed to start, they canceled it. That sucked. It was so disappointing, because that show—it’s cheesy and whatever, but it is a little gem. People loved it.

I’m working on two screenplays. One is with a friend, and the other is by myself and is based on my life, and my mom’s life, and her experience with *The Evil Dead*. I just had a producer sign on to that, which is very exciting. We’re at the beginning of figuring out what that’s going to be.

I’m someone who responds to fear and anxiety by going into productivity overdrive—which, by the way, isn’t necessarily the most artistic state to be in—but it results in a lot of writing. It helps me feel focused, and I needed to do a rewrite anyway. That’s really been taking up all of my time right now.

[[4]]

For me, weed is about turning my brain off, not turning my brain on in some very specific way. It’s something I want to do at night, alone or with my husband to relax and be done with the day. I’ve smoked a lot of pot and eaten it and taken tinctures and done every version of it whatsoever and I’ve never found a strain—sativa, indica, whatever—that doesn’t eventually put me to sleep. That would be true even if I smoked it at nine in the morning. 

We’ve definitely gotten into some lower THC strains. That that’s more enjoyable for us and more functional, because I can take a puff of something and still feel fine and, like, cook dinner. Otherwise, I smoke something and I’m on planet Zenon. Like, I have to go to bed immediately.

Smoking is such a nice ritual, especially at the end of the day. When I was shooting *Indebted*, I would get home and make or order food. Then I would roll a joint—or a spliff sometimes, because that’s also mitigating how high you’re getting—and sit in this hanging, swinging chair that we have. I’d sit on that and I just look out at the hills and swing and smoke. It’s such a ritual, and it’s so relaxing. It puts a cap on the day.

[[5]]

My husband Beck [Bennett] and I have historically tried to keep things as separate as we can. I know so many couples who, the second they get together, are like, “We’re working on a screenplay.” We have very much made an effort to not do that. I will say it creeps in, especially because we do really respect and trust each other’s work and instincts. Often we can’t help but be like, “What do you think about this?” We go to each other for input and collaboration in that way. Also, *SNL at Home* basically meant we didn’t have a choice. The other thing is that we both work with our friends a lot and we have the same friends. We actually met working together on a sketch where Beck was playing my boyfriend. But, at least right now, we work better when Beck is helping me with my thing, or I am helping him with his thing. We are both each other’s biggest fan, and we’re in the front row.

Quarantine kind of landed at a good time for me because I was already really starting to focus on making my own stuff. That’s going to be my reality moving forward, I think. Luckily, I feel excited about that. I don’t know, maybe once I have five screenplays written I’ll be like, *Okay, that’s enough*. I couldn’t shoot all those in a lifetime. But that’s all I can really focus on these days. So now I’m thinking like, *How can I teach myself to direct from the confines of my home?* And with Beck Bennett as my sole, but very talented and very diverse actor. He can be my muse and do every part, every accent. 

I think about friends, or my cousin who is an event planner and is totally fucked because of quarantine. She’s learning Spanish and taking online classes. She’s like, “I’m just trying to get more skills for my job.” I’m kind of trying to look at quarantine the same way. How can I refine skills right now?

![6X9A8105](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/3JljK5sVSXJohojbLBfTUO/8df6d89332ed1a1c8f1cc098013360e7/6X9A8105.jpg)

***

*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. [Jessy Hodges](https://www.instagram.com/jessyhodges/?hl=en) photographed by [Maggie Shannon](https://www.instagram.com/maggiehshannon/?hl=en) in Los Angeles. If you like this Conversation, please feel free to share it with friends or enemies. Subscribe to our newsletter here.*

Jessy Hodges on Michigan pride, Broadway pay, and smoking with parents. 

JLooking

JMobile

JessyPreview

![6X9A8032](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/5wphDJNjd237qgOJ4JW8TW/478d9183ca5bde207f58fcbe1c236f05/6X9A8032.jpg)

6X9A8048

<p>
So I did not grow up with cannabis. I smoked weed for the first time in high school, but only a handful of times. I learned very quickly that weed and alcohol don’t mix for me. That’s a spinning situation. 

I started to get more into it in college. That’s also when I realized that my mom loves weed, too. This has a lot to do with the screenplay that I’m writing—but she’s very cool, and very funny, so everyone always loved her, including me. She was a friend, except that she was very strict, and in that sense she wasn’t cool at all. She was the first person calling people’s parents when parties were happening. So there was always this very weird kind of dance that she and I were doing where I was like, “Are you my friend or are you my mom?”

But as soon I got to college, she dropped the act instantaneously and was like, “Okay, I don’t have to hide anything from you anymore. I love weed! We can smoke weed together.”

6X9A8104

![6X9A7957](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/rm78eUApLNp79Y779Vse5/55494de5a3eccc35add474e91059857e/6X9A7957.jpg)
>It was my first professional theater experience, and my last.

6X9A7944

![6X9A8132](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/20CnHAze0xEKrDvnNSeW9A/d2c9e4b673169c32e49f8d3356e543e5/6X9A8132.jpg)
>I’ve never found a strain—sativa, indica, whatever—that doesn’t eventually put me to sleep.

JointRolling2

6X9A8155

The actress on Michigan pride, Broadway pay, and smoking with parents. 

Jessy Hodges

Gossamer looks at the world—travel, design, art, culture, and food—through a green lens.

Open plan offices for new media companies, beautiful as they are, contain few physical pleasures.

There are no opaque phone rooms for naps or crying, just glass boxes with doors that don’t lock. No coffee pots, just a cumbersome robot that spits out diesel-scented “espresso,” and milk substitute. No room for a plant on your desk, which is more like designated space at a table.
 
The office I worked at in the summer of 2017, which was situated on two floors of the graveyard of Goldman Sachs, offered a few things worth having: narrow windows with views of the East River and the Stone Street meat restaurants, proximity to a neighbor’s helicopter pad, and an array of Fresh Direct-supplied snacks. La Croix in 10 flavors, single-serving discs of hummus and guacamole, pita chips of every stripe, slimey packages of hard-boiled eggs that came in pairs, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, hundreds of dollars worth of cashews and almonds, apples and oranges and one or two rock-hard green pears, and, most importantly, Babybel cheese. I ate it every day.

I spent that summer thinking about a crush, and complaining about my job, which was to pay attention to Tumblr and *Game of Thrones*. I thank god that we are not all bloggers, and that we have not all spent time in Manhattan’s Financial District, but I imagine you still know what I am talking about: each day is the same. An iced coffee drips condensation next to your laptop, an idle conversation about going to the beach this weekend ends with no one making a plan, and a music video or two breaks up the hours by giving you something to tweet about. Mercifully, the day will end when the sun is still out, the way it doesn’t for three-fourths of the year. It’s not all bad.
 
Plus, Babybel cheese. After breakfast, but before lunch, the same little red wax guy. Originated in France, manufactured at a factory in South Dakota, one of an estimated 1.5 million wheels per day. Driven to a 30-story office building in lower Manhattan at five in the morning. You can pop them like pieces of gum while you stew in the the languid but fizzy energy of waiting for a day to end.

It’s the perfect snack. For staring into space and dreaming of never returning another email. For doing something, anything, with your hands, while you recite a fraught iMessage conversation from memory to whomever sits next to you. For swallowing a low-calorie placeholder in two bites and, synched with the crouch to the trash can, subtly dipping your chin to find out if you remembered to put on deodorant.

 
The red cellophane wrapper makes the whole package look like a Valentine. The Valentine weighs exactly 20 grams every time, which according to some reliable-enough internet resources, is the same as a mouse and twice as much as a human eye. The wax shell looks like something that’s been hatched out of and discarded in a weird place, as chilling as a cicada husk dropping into an open pitcher of sangria. You can warm it in your hand and make a tight, shiny ball. But it’ll leave a pink film on your skin, so why would you?

The experience is sensual, like the slow drag of a zipper that you’re opening mostly for effect. The wax resists. It’s basically alive. Then there’s a two-centimeter gasp of bright white, appearing like a not-yet-tan belly peeking out from the narrow, moving gap between jean shorts and crop top. It is pretty much as close as you will get to a strip tease in a work environment.

The experience is also a little bit gross. Like peeling anything is a little bit gross. Like the word “peeling,” which is gross. Depending on your mood: a little bit like in *Black Swan*, when Natalie Portman peels back a frayed strip of the skin around her cuticle until there’s a bright red bloody line all the way down her finger.

And then there’s the cheese itself, which, bitten into, looks like an orthodontist’s upper jaw mold, and tastes like nothing.

***

*Kaitlyn Tiffany is a writer living in Brooklyn. She co-authors a [weekly newsletter](https://famouspeople.substack.com/) about terrible parties.  *

GreenBabybel

Babybel

The first time I fell in love, we bonded in the early stages through phone Scrabble. “Scrabble back,” he’d text me, if a few hours passed without my next move. This was pre-Tinder, and our matches got heated. We eventually spent enough years together to re-download the app for a burst of nostalgia in our long-distance monogamy.

As our relationship wore on, Newtoy’s then-wildly popular Words with Friends became available on my Android, like the Snapchat app we’d use to sext. Then came Scramble with Friends (renamed Word Streak), which really spiced things up.

To me, word games will always be kind of romantic: a throwback to simpler times. They’re nerdy, but nobody really cares that much if you underperform. There’s space to slack, to try too hard, or to embarrass yourself only in front of a bot.

On Wikipedia, a website predicated on people volunteering to write and edit words, “word games” [are categorized by type](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_game). There’s letter arrangement (Scrabble), puzzle (crossword), structured (Mad Libs), or linguistic recreations (spelling bees).

These games predate artificial intelligence by eons, well before Siri had all the answers and Merriam-Webster Dictionary started dragging people [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/MerriamWebster).

Words, one of the most basic forms of communication, can be primal. Like puzzles—or a budding relationship—they can leave us vulnerable or confused. Choosing the right word could win you millions of dollars, grant you acceptance to a prestigious school, or earn you 10 whole seconds of glory on a dimly lit stage before a crowd of boozing spectators.

We may be post-truth, but a word well-played still brings people together. On a recent Galentine’s Day, I watched a group of grown adults in a Manhattan speakeasy compete in a spelling bee. “French from Latin,” the moderator read. I sipped my beer. “Can you please define the word?” Plot twist! In line for the restroom, I learned one very good contestant spoke only English and Portuguese, the latter not much help here. More were eliminated. No mercy was spared. Only one speller—who asked to hear a word in a sentence—behaved as a “douche,” at least according to the moderators.

For the same reason I go to estate sales, word games have retro appeal. They’re a haven from the noise, and from a president who does not open books. They’re a cerebral flex in a society that keeps telling me how to fix my face, company for a “lonely generation.”

If we match in a Scrabble game, thanks to some algorithm that connects people all around the globe, your choices tell me something about you. Maybe you learned a word from reading The Hobbit as a kid, which totally changed your life. Maybe you’re really into Shakespeare, or you’re a jackass who keeps making two-letter combinations until one finally sticks.

People separated by time or distance or language can play word games. True to form, most Americans are unwittingly more limited: notorious for only speaking English, and often afraid to look silly. It’s a humbling thing to admit that you can’t make a halfway decent play in a word game.  

Maybe you’re like my younger brother, who at age 10 won a round of Scattergories, the 30-year-old board game that includes pencils and paper in a box. For the category of “medicine” and the letter of “M,” he chose Midol, much to our mom’s and aunts’ delight. Obvious victor.

Maybe work is boring and unchallenging and you’ve been entertaining fantasies of quitting, but there’s some temporary spontaneity in the daily crossword—or whatever the frequency, depending your source.

In a culture that thrives on superficial connections, when your next lay can be only a few swipes away, word games can be intimate. An opponent’s assemblage of letters is suggestive, tells me something different than the 280-character tweet you spent an hour crafting and retooling.

On a recent early-morning bus ride to Manhattan from Philadelphia, I passed time by redownloading the word game apps I deleted forever ago. Delirious from little sleep, I felt slightly self-conscious and rusty playing against random players or bots. I remembered that I preferred Scrabble, because the virtual instructor would tell me if I chose the best possible word based on the tiles given. Uncertainty can be thrilling, until it’s not.

I drag the tiles: “F-I-R-E.”  Best word! “R-I-D-S.” Best word! An analog-looking, starry popup appears on my screen, a form of congratulations.

Is this as hard as it gets? Maybe I’m taking the easy way out. Or maybe, I still got it.

***

*[Natalie Daher](http://www.nataliedaher.com/) is a writer and journalist based in New York. She co-authors a newsletter, [Clipped](https://us16.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=469667a58e33374cf748297f7&id=4e1050af80), about women's media.*

Finding common ground one letter at a time.

scrabble

Word Games

In 2016, I moved into an apartment outfitted with a panini press, a clunky appliance I used exactly once and which then served as an ersatz modern art installation for the remaining 364 days of my lease. Its worthlessness was solidified when, on a camping trip with nary a press in sight, my roommates and I placed hunks of cheese-stuffed baguette on a grill and flattened them with large rocks. Me, dependent on a single-use appliance? I scoffed as I bit into my panini. Please. I was practically Bear Grylls.


My ambitions — at least when it came to eating sandwiches — may not have been lofty enough to capitalize on a panini press, but its existence served as a gateway gadget, paving the way for what I now consider to be the holy grail of single-use appliances. It sits in my kitchen. It is small. It is sharp. It cuts without hurting and slices without contrition. Friends: meet the egg slicer.

 
Invented in the early 1900s by a German man named Willy, the egg slicer was created for the sole purpose of — this isn’t hard, folks — cutting eggs. The device itself is composed of two parts: a slotted base and a hinged frame strung with taut metal wires. To wield this contraption, all one has to do is place a peeled, hard boiled egg on the base and lower the top, allowing the wires to cut through the membrane and separate the orb into equal segments. As Willy was clearly aware, no one wants to accidentally coat their egg with fingerprints or deal with buckled whites, two common hazards of holding an egg and cleaving it with a knife. Best yet, these slicers transform the yolk (which I’ve always found slightly repellant) into manageable, aesthetically appealing ribbons of chalky yellow fat.

 
There is something pleasingly democratic about an apparatus that elevates an egg from an inexpensive, ubiquitous form of protein to a delicacy with one quick sever. The devices are also widely accessible, with myriad brands, styles, and price points from which to choose. While I prefer the bare bones, 100% aluminum version that sells for [$2.81 online](https://www.tigerchef.com/tigerchef-round-aluminum-egg-slicer.html), egg-eaters with upscale taste can purchase fancier instruments. Williams Sonoma offers a [$14.95 BPA-free "Egg Slicer and Wedger](https://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/williams-sonoma-egg-slicer/),” which one online reviewer bought "on a lark" and then loved so much that she ordered another for the kitchen in her lake house.

 
The egg slicer may be my favorite, but a brief tour of my pint-sized Brooklyn apartment reveals that I now own a small army of single-use appliances, all honed to execute one task perfectly: there is a [milk frother](https://www.amazon.com/Bellemain-Stainless-Steel-Frother-capacity/dp/B010E1ZQVC/ref=sr_1_20?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1529576025&sr=1-20&keywords=milk+frother), which I use every morning and a [rice cooker](https://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-SR-G06FGL-1-Step-Automatic-Cooker/dp/B01DGQVX46/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1529575340&sr=8-3&keywords=panasonic+rice+cookers), whose services I employ on occasion; on the table sits a [small wedge](https://www.amazon.com/Bobino-LATOFTQ-Laptop-Foot-Turquoise/dp/B0758161RQ/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?ie=UTF8&qid=1529575443&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=bobino+laptop+foot&psc=1) that serves no purpose other than propping up my roommate’s laptop and which she claims stands between her and a lifetime of carpal tunnel; and in the back of my closet is a [sweater razor](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015RN9JN8/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1), which I drunk-ordered last winter after reading that it would slice the fuzz off all my sweaters and, thus, “change my life.” I still believe this although I have yet to prove it true — in my aforementioned state I forgot that I own only one sweater and zero of the batteries the device requires.

 
The beauty of single-use appliances is that, unlike Pokémon or sexual harassers, it doesn’t behoove anyone to catch ‘em all. Unless you happen to inhabit a mansion of Versailles-style proportions, collecting these contraptions forces one to prioritize. Would you rather be greeted every day with the dead-eyed stare of a [hot dog steamer](https://www.amazon.com/Nostalgia-HDS248RD-Extra-Large-Steamer/dp/B01LVWIIVR/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1529576752&sr=1-1-spons&keywords=hot+dog+cooker&psc=1) or a [strawberry huller](https://www.amazon.com/Chefn-27466-StemGem-Strawberry-Huller/dp/B002XOHZWC/ref=sr_1_4?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1529575061&sr=1-4&keywords=strawberry+huller)? Are you the sort of person who values flawlessly [spiralized zucchini](https://www.amazon.com/OXO-Grips-Handheld-Spiralizer-Green/dp/B013KAW5IQ/ref=sr_1_8?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1529682126&sr=1-8&keywords=zuchinni+spiral+noodle+maker) over a properly [scraped coconut](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D59NVXH/ref=sspa_dk_detail_0?psc=1&pd_rd_i=B07D59NVXH&pd_rd_wg=iz3Tv&pd_rd_r=SGF4GQ8K4JYKWNKRHBV0&pd_rd_w=PPENA)? At some point, the questions become nearly existential: in the vast scheme of things, do the rewards of a [banana bunker](https://www.vat19.com/item/banana-bunker-protects-bananas?adid=gshopping&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&adpos=1o2&scid=scplpbanana-bunker&sc_intid=banana-bunker&gclid=CjwKCAjwma3ZBRBwEiwA-CsblIot5ie4bOdhlrGp7z1XY6XwEvJyHjmvyPgJiWZMXMWQXpNZe5JBShoCsrcQAvD_BwE) trump the spoils of a [hamburger press](https://www.amazon.com/Weston-Express-Hamburger-Ejector-07-0310-W/dp/B000XB45DO/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1529576579&sr=8-3&keywords=hamburger+press)?

 
I was speaking with a friend recently who admitted that she has a rule against owning single-use kitchen appliances, her reasoning being that in most instances you could probably use a knife to accomplish the same task. Does she have a point? Sure.


But sometimes “good enough” just isn’t good enough. And if anyone needs me, I'll be in my own (slightly more crowded) kitchen, with my slicer, basking in that rare flavor of joy that accompanies placing a perfectly mathematically bisected egg atop an otherwise mundane salad.


***


*[Luna Adler](http://www.lunaadler.com/) likes to think of herself as an agreeable Scorpio. She lives in Brooklyn.*

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