Buyable things I like

Wallet

I have only ever owned one wallet, and it’s this Travelambo card holder. I bought it in high school when I was paralyzed with indecision about what kind of wallet I wanted to own, and decided I could test the waters with this pleather this $7.99 minimalist wallet. If it worked out I thought I would buy a more expensive version, higher quality version of the same thing. Well it worked out, but it turns out it’s hard to find an expensive version of this with as many pockets. So I’ve retained this one for the past nine years. Since then its price on Amazon has increased by two dollars and it has also lost its second ID slot — bad trade. I don’t expect wallets to be useful for too much longer, but until then I’m sticking with this one.

Darn Tough socks

This will not be the last time on this list I make it apparent how merino wool pilled I am. Probably enough has been said about why wool is a good material for clothing, but in addition to being wool, these are also the most durable socks I have owned. Since buying my first pair 10+ years ago, I don’t think I’ve ever thrown a pair out. Honestly I’m a bit skeptical of the business model. I have tried all of the wool weights and they all have their time. They also make non wool socks but I’ve never tried them so can’t speak to it.

Big cashmere sweaters from Goodwill

Cashmere is a type of wool that is especially soft and especially warm. It would be the perfect material for cold workouts except that it is one of the most expensive fibers by weight. At Goodwill it’s usually easy to find sweaters in the 2-3XL range. Washing and drying on high heat can shrink these down a few sizes. Rip the tags out because they are itchy. Boom perfect base layer.

Clear Casio

The perfect clock and stopwatch. Goes with every outfit. I’m bad at keeping track of watches so I prefer to have one that costs less than $20. I am currently on my ninth Casio. I like to think the other eight have ended up on appreciative wrists.

Sleep Mask

This one. I have tried a lot of different sleep masks, including fancier ones like Tempur-Pedic and Manta. Sleeping in darkness is incredibly important for getting high quality, uninterrupted sleep. Basically a sleep mask should optimize for two things: 1) does it block out all external light, and 2) is it comfortable enough that you can fall asleep in it and keep it on through the whole night. There is a subtlety to these points which matters a lot to me but I’m not sure if it’s universal — it is important that I can open my eyes under the sleep mask and see total blackness. MZOO feels like the best version of this for me, no pressure on the eyeballs and essentially total black out in most sleeping positions. Maybe this just depends on face and eye shape though, because some sleep masks I hate other people swear by.

The No Mattress Mattress

I have not had a mattress since moving out of my college dorm. Instead I sleep on two mattress toppers. This Ikea topper underneath this memory foam pad from Amazon. During my less civilized college years, these lived directly on the floor of my apartment, and could be rolled up and put in the closet when I needed the floorspace. Now they sit on a real bed frame. I arrived at this system by accident. I moved into an apartment where the previous tenant had left behind only the first topper, and for a while that was the only layer that separated me (and my sleeping bag) from the hardwood floor at night. This pad is incredibly firm. The sensation is similar to sleeping on a thick carpet. I determined that it needed another layer, and responding to the firmness, I got the squishiest mattress topper I could find. The result system was perfect: 3 inches of easy displacement through the memory foam, with perhaps half an inch of displacement though the Ikea pad. Sleeping on a very soft thick mattress is uncomfortable because you are unsupported at your heaviest points and it puts your body into weird alignment. But sleeping on a super firm surface is sad in a particular Liverking sigma male way. I believe my system is the best of both worlds — giving the illusion of squishiness while under the surface being quite firm. It’s like those anorexic women on TikTok who sniff chocolate and then eat ice chips.

Chomps

Life is a constant battle of getting enough protein. Chomps are just a delicious stick of grassfed beef with no preservatives but still keep forever in the pantry. I always have 5-10 of these in my backpack. I’ve even been stopped at customs for trying to smuggle meat across international borders. There are a lot of very similar meat stick products that are also pretty good, but chomps has a uniquely mild flavor and pleasant texture that makes it easy to eat multiple times a day without getting tired of it.

Teddie All Natural Peanut Butter

I didn’t realize how much good peanut butter matter to me until I moved to California. Peanut butter brands, like vodka, are weirdly regional, and I found the western brands to be disappointing. Peanut butter should have only two ingredients: peanuts and salt. Sugar and palm oil is an immediate pass for me. This leaves us with the two most accessible natural peanut butters in California: Santa Cruz and Trader Joe’s. They are too loose. It’s probably just too much oil, but it makes them quite runny. My theory is that they are crafted for people who like to refrigerate their peanut butter. Teddie, the peanut butter I grew up eating so it’s the best, is very easy to get on the East Coast and very hard to buy out here. Thank you Wal-mart for a recurring subscription to the 12pk of 26oz PB that comes every six months!

Nishiki Rice + Seasoned Vinegar

I grew up in a brown rice family. My parents also believed strongly in the dangers of added salt. This meant a kind of austerity in our dinners, which often just consisted of unseasoned brown rice, steamed broccoli, and a full sweet potato per person topped with black pepper. I didn’t understand for a long time why rice in Japanese restaurants tasted so much better than what we had at home. The secret is shorter grain white rice, with seasoned rice vinegar (which is just rice vinegar with sugar and salt). Now, I should acknowledge this is probably the single worst meal for the glucose monitor. But it’s delicious and sometimes it’s nice to have something that tastes good.

Zojirushi Rice Cooker

Perfectly cooked rice every single time. It’s a little bit slower than past rice cookers I’ve owned, but it does have a faster setting that I’ve never tried. I can’t say for certain that it’s worth $200, but cost per use for me at this point is de minimis so it’s hard to feel like the purchase isn’t justified.

Sunscreen and this hat

I am, quite justifiably, afraid of sun exposure. It has long term aesthetic consequences for your skin, and increases risk of skin cancer. I also don’t like sunscreen because it is slimy and stings my eyes and generally feels unclean. Accepting that sunscreen is a daily necessity, I have experimented with a lot of different varieties and come to the conclusion that I prefer mineral of chemical, because it is drier and less irritating. I still find it unpleasant to have goop on my skin, so I have tried to get used to wearing a wide brim hat. I never saw my grandfather go outside without one, so I think it’s fine to wear one your whole life. Better to acclimate people to seeing you in the floppy sun hat as soon as possible.

Oil Cleanser

This is oil based face wash. There are a ton of brands and I have liked all of the ones I’ve tried. It does more or less feel like putting olive oil on your face, but the formulation makes it wash off more easily. I think this is essential in relation to wearing sunscreen every day, because sunscreen is somewhat waterproof (which makes sense, you don’t want it to come off when you sweat or go swimming) making it really hard to wash off. Oil cleanser makes it super easy to fully wash sunscreen off. I think this can be the only step in washing your face, but I am sensitive to feeling goopy and oil cleanser definitely leaves you a little bit slimed up, so I usually use regular soap or face wash after.

Lifting Straps

Straps reduce the amount of grip strength needed to hold a barbell during a deadlift. For a long time I thought of them as cheating, like you are not really deadlifting the weight if you have to use straps for assistance. But grip strength has always been a huge bottleneck to me. Typically people are much stronger on the deadlift than squat, but I got to a point where I could 5x5 squat nearly a hundred pounds more than I could deadlift even a single rep. I had to acknowledge that there is so much more value to the deadlift than just grip strength and so I accepted defeat and started doing my working sets with straps. Within a couple months I added a full plate to my deadlift. I fear I’ve hamstrung my grip strength development a little bit, but I’m not a competition lifter, and there’s lots of other opportunities to get a stronger grip. Heavy deadlifts are way cooler.

Kindle

For most of college I was a literature major and read around 500 pages of fiction a week, much of which was in foreign languages. I am a slow reader, and a couple years of this made me think of reading as this incredibly onerous, painful thing. When I became a software engineer I was determined to break my literary shackles and never read again. I retained an enormous appetite for content so for about two years I watched a movie, sometimes two, most days. I decided to get a Kindle after trying Sol Readers. My boyfriend had brought them home and after both trying them briefly, they sat on my desk for a couple weeks. One morning I popped them on just to look at them again and opened a book, Project Hail Mary, I’d never read before. Suddenly six hours had gone by, and I came to the conclusion that I really missed reading, and that I liked e-ink a lot. The Sol Readers are a really delightful piece of consumer tech, but the product is still early so there are some kinks to work out, and I’m also just not sure I’m ready to wear VR glasses in public. So I got a Kindle. I got the Paperwhite but the lack of physical buttons bugs me a little bit so I think I’ll eventually replace it with the Oasis. I don’t have anything super interesting to say about it, other than that it brought my daily reading time from essentially zero to about an hour a day.