🔥 Hot Takes and Tangents 5/11/25

Hi everyone!

I’ve been thinking a lot about celebrating recently. We’ve had a lot of things to celebrate this week (I accepted an offer of admission for grad school, Rylee got a job and finished finals, etc), but it’s given me the opportunity to reflect.

There has to be something about celebrating often. Sure, there are the big things, like everything that I mentioned, but sometimes the biggest thing is to celebrate the littlest thing. And maybe sometimes celebrating can be the cause for celebration too. And there for sure is a way that this could lead to over-inflated egos, there’s always the saying that hubris is the downfall of man, but I feel like life’s too short not to be celebrating something.

Anyway, let’s find out what’s up with Will…

Since we now know we are staying in the bay for a while longer, we are in full-blown house-hunting mode. After enjoying my day trip last week to Walnut Creek, I decided that it could be an ideal midpoint between Rylee and I’s new respective opportunities. 

We toured a couple of places to check out the area because Rylee has never been before, and we think that this could be a viable spot.

I am pretty obsessed with House Hunters, but it always felt that they made finding a house that fit the budget while also having all of their wants a promethean task. But it turns out that it is, in fact, impossible to get everything you want, unless you strike gold. That being said, California was home to the gold rush, so maybe it’s not impossible. Or maybe the solution is just to go on House Hunters…

I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about The Thunderbolts, so I went to see it on Friday at the Grand Lake Theater, a historic neoclassical movie palace. It feels like I have been on a cinema kick recently, that is, if you consider Star Wars Episode Three and The Thunderbolts as cinema.

Without spoiling anything, it’s an analysis of what happens when a superhero has a midlife crisis. I will say that this movie is probably the best Marvel movie I have seen recently. I would argue that you could even drop the Marvel qualifier, and the statement still stands. Blasphemous? possibly. 

I have some hot movie takes, don’t I?

Afterwards, Rylee and I ran over to our friend Alannah’s birthday party.

To the uninitiated, every year, San Francisco throws a picnic where everyone in attendance brings a cake. Last Cake picnic pulled in over 1300 people. Can you even imagine that many cakes? 

This birthday party’s theme was inspired by that event. I have to admit, it’s a baller move to say, “let them eat cake” for your 30th. It also begs the question of why I have only ever had one birthday cake at my party before.

Here’s another hot take for the day: cake is way overhyped. When I opted for dessert growing up, I would always pick something else, normally a cookie cake. I always felt that most cakes I had were subpar (too dry, the ratio of frosting to cake isn’t off, etc). My bar for a good cake is pretty high, and let’s face it, my standards for a cookie are a lot lower. Even if it’s the worst cookie I’ve ever had, it’s still a cookie, and I am going to eat it. A cake? Not so much. That being said, all the cakes at this event were good! (I didn’t realize I had so many friends who were talented at baking.) 

As I mentioned, Rylee is graduating from her master’s program, but to get her graduation commencement is across the country in Connecticut. What’s more is that both Rylee and I’s parents and grandparents would be in attendance.

Early morning Saturday, we took the first flight out to Boston, where we were picked up by Rylee’s family as we made our way to our Airbnb in Mystic. Rylee texted her mom that I was hungry, and they gave me an arepa (which isn’t the easiest of foods to eat in the car).

Rylee’s parents wanted to get the entire Connecticut experience, so they picked what they thought would be the most Connecticut home they could find online. And in that regard, they succeeded.

This place was adorned with American flags and pictures of the founding fathers, not to mention an overwhelming amount of sailor knots and fake candles to really give you the feel that you are living in an 18th-century colonial house. You get second-hand patriotism just from stepping inside.

The next day was Mother’s Day, and funnily enough, we had 4 different mothers in the house (5 if you consider Rylee a mom to our cat Cleo, which she most definitely does). So after opening gifts in the morning, we drove to UConn to pick up Rylee’s regalia. 

I have never been to her campus, so I was happy that she gave us a tour. That being said, since she was only here 4 times in her grad program, she shared with us the hotel bar that she went to and the place where she fell in a snow bank. The part of campus that I was most excited about was the UConn Dairy Bar. 

UConn has its cows for its agriculture program, but they let the culinary school make ice cream milk they produce. I have been dying to go here ever since I heard about it, so I made our whole group take an ice cream break before going to lunch. I had a banana chocolate chip, and a blueberry cheesecake with Biscoff cookies scoop (which was the senior scoop, a flavor designed by this year’s graduating class).

Rylee took us to the spot where her program goes for their group dinner, called the Willington Pizza House. This place won two awards for its Red Potato Pizza and Seafood Circus Pizza back in 1994 and hasn’t once stopped mentioning it. It was plastered all over the menu. Being the pizza aficionado that I am, I felt compelled to try what was the best pizza in 1994, and found that we might have taken a step back in pizza ingenuity. I imagine that the owner is some old guy saying, “Back in my day, we didn’t just do pepperoni.”

Sidetrack here: something that I’ve noticed about Connecticut. They are very quick to use the word “best” in every single store. For instance, I have gone past one place that says it’s the best lobster roll in Connecticut, and then right across the street, that says that it is, in fact, the “best” lobster roll spot in Connecticut.

For another example, we came back to the house to head to a nice Mother’s Day dinner at an Italian place called Via Emilia, which they touted as one of the best new restaurants in Connecticut.  That being said, I don’t think I can judge because the pasta was good, and I have nothing else to compare it to in Connecticut to say that it is not the best.

Enjoy the classical stylings of Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso on Bassoon. (Will has an obsession with Sabrina Carpenter, and I’m convinced they’re secretly dating. -Rylee) Ta Ta For Now (TTFN).