You've Got Mail: Future Destinations, Productivity Tricks, and This Year's Reading List
Because some questions require far more nuance than others on Instagram, I’ve decided to begin writing responses to certain “AMA” questions on the newsletter. This was written in a stream-of-consciousness style so all typos are there to make sure you’re paying attention. Read all of the mailbags here.
Here are all the questions answered in this week’s mailbag:
“I hate my job and I can’t get a new one. Advice on how to get through it?”
“What’s the ideal way to order a martini that’s not a Gibson?”
“Where are you traveling to in 2026?”
“Do you have any plans for when Sunday Scaries hits 1 million followers?”
“What tricks do you have to stay productive and fresh?”
“What’s currently in your ‘everyday carry’ bag?”
“What’s on your reading list this year?”
“Tell us the most recent random wormhole you went down.”
Word Count: 2,359 (18-minute read)
Here are answers to all of them.
“I hate my job and I can’t get a new one. Advice on how to get through it?”
The year was 2011 and I was living with my parents. I was working a job that largely required little expertise, I felt like I needed to squeeze something more out of my life, and I hadn’t heard back about a job interview in an embarrassing amount of time. Sprinkle in that I was desperately single and probably suffering some seasonal depression? You get the picture.
Work-life balance has always been a trending problem in my life. I come home with baggage, I throw it all over the house, and I let things bother me far more than I should. This was true in the early 2010s and something that still flares up today.
My key? Distractions. Positive distractions. Anything that makes you feel like your head is clear. Anything that takes your brain somewhere distant for even 15 minutes. Anything that leaves you excited to wake up and do the next day.
Before Sunday Scaries, I started several “blogs” that never came to fruition. At that point in my life, I was far more into American sports than I am today. I was also deep into Tumblr, Wordpress, and anywhere else people would share their thoughts. But even just toying around with those things helped me clear my head after a day of work that I’d rather forget.
I’d tinker with the design of the site, I’d write entries, I’d try to figure out ways to get anonymous people to read everything. While I’m not sure entrenching myself in online culture was the healthiest of distractions, it was a distraction nonetheless. When all the roads ended and I found Sunday Scaries, I had already developed all the skills I needed to make it good enough to be sustainable.
Something I often forget is how fortunate I am to work a job that’s completely derived from something I built myself. Without that desperation for distraction, it simply never would’ve happened.
“What’s the ideal way to order a martini that’s not a Gibson?”
I get a lot of martini questions which means I talk a lot about Gibsons. For the uninitiated, a Gibson is the following:
Ingredients
2½ oz gin
½ oz dry vermouth
1–2 cocktail onions (garnish)
Method
Add gin and vermouth to a mixing glass with ice.
Stir until very cold (about 20–30 seconds).
Strain into a chilled coupe or martini glass.
Garnish with the onion(s).
Unfortunately, I’ll well-aware people don’t love onions as much as I do. So here are a couple alternatives:
📈 Vespers
If there’s one version of the martini that seems to be on the rise, it’s the classic Vesper from James Bond. We had a night of these before Christmas at Jeffrey’s steakhouse in Austin, and it will forever be remembered (or kind of remembered) as the night that I understood the Vesper praise. Here’s how to make one:
Ingredients
3 oz gin
1 oz vodka
½ oz Lillet Blanc (or Cocchi Americano if you want it a touch more bitter)
Lemon twist (garnish)
Method
Add gin, vodka, and Lillet to a mixing glass with plenty of ice.
Stir until very cold.
Strain into a chilled coupe or martini glass.
Express a lemon twist over the drink and drop it in or discard.
I willingly admit that I simply cannot describe what these taste like. They don’t taste like anything that I’ve previously had before, yet that remains a compliment.
For the sake of covering all bases here, let’s assume the person asking this question simply doesn’t want gin. While gin is widely accepted as the liquor for martinis, we can also do one that was much more popular in the 90s than it is today: The Cosmo.
Most of us probably picture a basic Sex and The City-esque scene when a round of Cosmos gets ordered but if you request some light coloration, you’ll enjoy the way it all pans out.
Ingredients
1½ oz vodka
¾ oz Cointreau (or triple sec)
¾ oz fresh lime juice
½ oz cranberry juice (unsweetened if possible)
Lime twist or wheel (garnish)
Method
Add all ingredients to a shaker with ice.
Shake hard until very cold.
Strain into a chilled coupe or martini glass.
Garnish with a lime twist or wheel.
My wife always seems to venture this direction when she doesn’t want to go full-steakhouse — but that request for light cranberry is essential. I’ll stick with my Gibson.
“Where are you traveling to in 2026?”
A champagne problem if I’ve ever heard of one, but this has been my biggest stressor as we enter into the new year. If you’ve been following Sunday Scaries for the last couple years, you know that I’ve been attempting to travel more (see: Postcards). This year, however, we are kind of all over the map with not a lot of pins in it.
Travel currently on the calendar:
Capri and Mallorca (for Sunday Scaries)
Wedding in England (June for pleasure)
Wedding in Germany (September for pleasure)
Travel we’ve discussed:
Mexico City (and some coastal locations)
Miramar, California
Scotland (after England)
Dolomites (after Germany)
New York City
As for other personal ambitions, I’d love to do something with Blackberry Farm for their 50th anniversary as well as get a trip out west on the books (ie. Montana or Wyoming).
But again, this is very much a situation in flux that could be torn to shreds at any given moment. Now I’m stressed thinking about it.
“Do you have any plans for when Sunday Scaries hits 1 million followers?”
At the time of writing this, Sunday Scaries has 990,613 followers. If you’ve ever talked to me about the account, you know that I’ve had a pretty stock answer: “I just want to grow the audience so enough people see my creative work that I can keep doing it.” While it is an honest answer, there’s obviously more to it as it’s grown.
There’s only one other time when I was excited to hit a growth benchmark: 100,000. It just felt very different to see six figures atop the page than it did seeing something like “96.7K” — yes, I’m aware how lame this sounds.
When we hit 200,000 through 900,000, I didn’t get that excited. It was nice to get into a new bracket but it didn’t change the way I operated — 1 million won’t either, truthfully.
By all estimations, I should hit 1 million in February or March. And honestly, I just want to get there so it’s behind me. I also want to stack about 10,000 followers on top of that so I don’t have to worry about sinking down after celebrating it.
Anyway, here’s what we were thinking:
If I hit it on a random night, I’d simply like to go to a restaurant and enjoy a “order anything you want” dinner and drink a huge glass of red wine.
If we want to plan something more grand, I’d like it to line up with a trip to Fontainebleau Las Vegas and do an event in their private red velvet room. I may or may not have already asked about this.
Am I excited about the possibility? Yes. Am I letting it run my life? No. Will I be happy when/if it happens? Of course.
“What’s currently in your ‘everyday carry’ bag?”
I need to admit something: I no longer carry a tote bag every day like I did between 2019 and 2024. Somewhere along the way, I fell back into the trap of backpacks. Here is what I’m currently using from Filson:
While it’s not the best backpack I’ve ever owned, it has seemingly gotten the job done since I replaced my old Filson backpack after Black Friday this year. Here’s everything that I keep in it on a daily basis:
Macbook Pro
iPad
AirPod Max
Airpods
Bag of charging cables (I’ve been using the suede bag we did with Dinner Service)
Glasses case — for reading glasses and sunglasses
Wallet
Keys
Two (2) pens that I stole from hotels
Small thing of Kleenex
From there, I usually have a ballcap and extra layer in it just in case the office gets cold.
“What’s on your reading list this year?”
I wanted 2025 to be a year of reading. While I had great stints, I still didn’t create the habit-forming behavior that I really wanted by the end of the year. Of all the books I completed, my favorite read was Keith McNally’s “I Regret Almost Everything” which I could hardly put down.
Here’s everything I have on my reading list for this year:
“All The Pretty Horses” by Cormac McCarthy — I’m halfway through it and have been saving the second half for when I’m ready. This is my top priority to finish in the new year.
“Empire of the Elite” by Michael M. Grynbaum — I want to read this after reading “When The Going Was Good” by former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.
“Sharing in the Groove: The Untold Story of the ‘90s Jam Band Explosion and the Scene That Followed” by Mike Ayers — A book I started recently and have been reading lazily. It’s largely interviews with 90s musicians, so it’s an incredibly easy book to pick up out of nowhere.
“A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles — This is a book that was sent to me from a follower a couple years ago. After seeing it recommended by someone I trust, I want to read it more than ever.
I’m also thinking about letting my wife assign me a romance/fantasy novel, but I haven’t told her that yet. We’ll see if she gets this far.
“Tell us the most recent random wormhole you went down.”
Okay, I’m going to stay true to the question and not make this “the most interesting recent wormhole” I went down. Instead, I’m going to the most recent one I went down: It was about headphones for listening to vinyl with.
Last year, I purchased some equipment for my record player so I could listen to records after my kids went to bed. I bought an adapter, some extra cords (a lot of extra cords) and relied on my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. As I began listening, I knew I could do better.
I had this weird fear that there was an intense static building up in my ears while I listened. While this has no justification to it, it caused me to do some extra research about having the proper system in place for maximum enjoyment.
What I found was that I should not be using my noise-cancelling headphones. Because of the way modern headphones are built, there’s simply too much tech involved to get a true audiophile experience. (This probably makes more sense if you’re well-versed in vinyl but not letting that deter me from further unraveling this wormhole).
From here, I had to do an assessment of the equipment I already own. The audio adapter I purchased is fine, as well as the 8-foot cord that reaches the chair I like to sit in. I was left with only one thing to research: the headphones themselves.
After realizing how ugly most analog headphones are, there was one pair that stood out — unfortunately, the price tag is about $550 and they did not make it under the tree this year. The Grado RS2x Headphones are now owning a lot of space in my mind.
I still don’t love how they look but I have caught the bug that now requires me to hear all my records in the best quality available to me. If I have any updates on this situation moving forward, you’ll be the first to know.
— Will
