Vegas, baby 🎰 & what to watch [Like You Know Whatever]

Plus: an update on my Sephora sale haul.

Hi friends!

How are you?? I’m doing well, but very tired. As I sit down to write this, I have just gotten back to Los Angeles from, truly, a whirlwind weekend in Las Vegas. I have a lot of sleep to catch up on, but it was a lot of fun, too. Last Friday, my husband Ross and I got up at 4:30 AM to drive to Vegas with two friends, to meet up with eight other people, to celebrate our friend’s last days of bachelorhood before his upcoming wedding. Then, on Saturday, our bachelor pal and about half the group went on to camp at the Grand Canyon, while I and the three people I traveled with stayed on in Vegas until Sunday. 

Las Vegas is such a weird place, glitzy and trashy, full of winners and losers, a quickie wedding chapel next to a gun range. I’m always amazed at how it’s just in the middle of nowhere. When you drive there from Los Angeles, your GPS will say that you’ll be at your hotel on the Strip in 20 minutes, and you’ll look around and see nothing but desert and mountains and think “No, that can’t be right.” But then, all of a sudden, there it is, in all its noisy, glittery, seedy glory. 

Time works differently in Vegas. Of course, there are no windows inside the casinos so that you’ll lose track of time, but there are other things, too. People start drinking at 10 in the morning – and not dainty little mimosas, either, I’m talking about pounding beers or giant yard drinks. We got pizza at Grimaldi’s at six p.m. and I said, “What a nice lunch,” before I realized what time it was. It just felt like the middle of our day, considering we woke up at 11 and stayed up until three. At one point, around two in the morning, while my friends played blackjack at the Golden Nugget, I looked out through the glass doors to Fremont Street and it looked like daylight with all the light from the giant LED screen overhead. It was all very disorienting.

I have to say, I’m someone who enjoys a drink, but I realized on this trip that the Vegas drinking culture is so not my scene. I like to share a bottle of wine with Ross and watch a long movie, have cocktails with friends with some food and gossip, or even crack open a can of wine and sit down to write for an hour or two. Slow, lingering, chilled out drinking. It’s not that I never get buzzed, or do more active activities like dancing or karaoke, I just usually prefer a more laid-back vibe. Everyone in Vegas feels so aggressively drunk, in-a-hurry drunk, drunkenness tinged with desperation to have The Best Time Ever because they paid so damn much for the experience. The whole city has big New Year’s Eve energy. Maybe it just comes down to me being in my mid-30s and other tourists mostly being in their 20s, I don’t know.

I’m also not a big gambler. My mom always says, “When I have 50 dollars, I’d rather go out and buy a dress with it, not spend it gambling,” and I generally agree with that philosophy. The thing is, though, when all your friends are playing blackjack and you’re trying to be virtuous and save that dress money, it can get very boring. When my husband and I gamble, we both decide on a set amount of money that we’re each willing to spend on gambling and then stop once that money is gone (because let’s face it, it’s almost always gone). I spent (lost) $100 on gambling over the entire weekend, which I feel is pretty reasonable considering some of the money I saw people throwing down around me (not my friends, other people at the casino). I see gambling as paying to get a few minutes of entertainment, not necessarily a chance to make money. I only played the slot machines this time, which I know people say is the worst way to gamble, but I like that you can spend less than a dollar per bet, versus the blackjack tables where you have to put down at least $15 per round. That means that you can play for a while without spending a ton of money. (Also, honestly, I don’t really understand blackjack.)

That is not to say that I had a bad time in Vegas! Not at all! We packed a TON into the less than 48 hours we were there. Here are some highlights:

- Frozen margaritas by the pool two days in a row? I said yes and yes. There was one downer, though. On the second day, I looked up from my phone at one moment to find that a woman had fallen and hit her head getting out of the hot tub. I didn’t see it happen, I just looked up and saw blood all over the ground and medics and lifeguards surrounding her and applying pressure to her head where she lay on the ground. I waited a bit, hoping she would get up and walk it off, but I ultimately peaced out once it was clear they were waiting for paramedics. It just seemed like the best way I could help in that moment was to get the fuck away. The DJ never stopped playing music, although he did switch from hip hop to a simple “unce unce” beat that played over and over again. I wondered if he did that to prevent people from panicking. Vegas can be a very dark place. I really hope she was okay.

- An epic 12-person Italian dinner at Ferraro’s! I had a Caesar salad and spaghetti carbonara and a lot of wine, and it was all delicious. The service was fabulous, too, especially considering we were a huge group and a little rowdy. Check it out if you’re in town and want a celebratory dinner.

- Seeing O by Cirque du Soleil. I had never seen a Cirque show before, can you believe it? O is known as “the water one,” meaning that for much of the show, most of the stage is actually a pool filled with water. Man, synchronized swimming is so beautiful, and so impressive! I have to say, as corny as it is, I did have a similar reaction to the acrobatics as Seth Rogen does when he’s on mushrooms in Knocked Up (to paraphrase, “Stop clapping! You’re going to make them fall!”). Also, I get that there’s a rich history behind them, but I found the clowns dreadfully dull. Ross kept dozing off due to the darkness and humidity and the fact that we had gotten up at 4:30 in the morning that day, and he said afterwards, “Every time the clowns came out, I knew that I could take a little nap and not miss anything.” lol

- Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart! Some of you may recall that in 2021, I traveled to Denver to visit the Meow Wolf Convergence Station installation with a friend of mine who lives in the city. That was an incredible, one-of-a-kind experience, and it made me want to visit all three of their exhibits eventually (four actually, once their upcoming one in Texas opens!). So when I realized that we had a free day in Vegas with nothing planned, I suggested we go to Meow Wolf, and luckily, everyone was game. Omega Mart is a fake grocery store with hilarious, surreal products that is run by a fictional evil corporation that’s apparently polluting the nearby lands and mutating animal and plant life. While the storefront is fun, if you explore enough, you can find portals to a whole other, trippy, futuristic dimension.

I’m always impressed by how much detail goes into these exhibits. They’re super interactive, so you can touch just about everything, pick up papers on desks and read them, scroll through computer files, and watch videos, too. There are just so many different components that it’s a bit mind-boggling to me to think of the project management that had to happen. The Vegas exhibit is 55,000 square feet, while the Denver one is 90,000, so it’s smaller, but still just as immersive and fun and overwhelming in its depth. The cool thing about the Vegas exhibit is it’s in a building with a bunch of other stuff called Area15, all with a sort of arty, futuristic angle. There’s an arcade and a toy store and a candy store and ax-throwing and a couple of bars. It was a nice break in Vegas from spending all our time in casinos.

- The people-watching. 10 out of 10!!! The most fascinating thing to me was how you would see people in all different states of dress at any time of day, from wearing nothing but a skimpy bathing suit and sandals to sweatpants and a t-shirt to essentially lingerie with plausible deniability as a club outfit to completely dressed up to the 9’s in designer gowns. People of all different levels of wealth all coming together to lose money: truly, can you think of anything more beautiful?

We stayed at Treasure Island, which was one of the cheapest options on the Strip, although we also went to the Venetian and Palazzo, the Bellagio, and the Sahara, and even ventured to downtown Las Vegas to the really affordable casinos, the Four Queens and the Golden Nugget. Some of the casinos are beautiful, and some are… less so. (I used the bathroom at the Four Queens, which was the first toilet stall I’ve ever been in with a drink holder. Classy.) 

By the end of the weekend, I became obsessed with the casino carpets of Vegas. They all have such intricate patterns on them. I also spent a lot of time wondering about the interior lives of the late night blackjack dealers at the $10 tables in the Golden Nugget. They were all hot young women who wore the same low-cut, short red dresses with fishnets and knee-high black boots. How did they end up there? Do they like their jobs? Are they treated well by the male pit bosses, or are they sexually harassed? Are they nocturnal? Do they ever worry about all the secondhand smoke? (I’m fun, I know.)

Actually, so much happened that I can’t fit it all into this newsletter, so in next week’s newsletter for paid subscribers, I will share my in-depth review of Magic Mike Live, on which I think I could write a full dissertation about the intersection of gender and sexuality and Ginuwine’s “Pony.” Absolutely fascinating.

This is a great time to remind you about the Mercury Retrograde Sale I’m currently doing on annual subscriptions! Get some money off on premium content to make up for all the havoc Mercury has been wreaking on our lives. I’m offering 20% off all annual paid subscriptions to Like You Know Whatever until Mercury goes direct again (May 14 – that’s Sunday!). Use this link here! Or this button:

Alright, enough of Vegas, let’s get into Some Things:

- What kind of music do you listen to when you are sad? For reasons that should be obvious if you’ve read my past few newsletters, I have been thinking a lot about this lately. You might think I would go for some Elliott Smith or Fiona Apple or even some classic blues, and sometimes I do. But when I’ve been crying and want to get out of it, my go-to album since my teenage years has been blink-182’s Enema of the State. I was actually not allowed to buy that album when I first approached my mom with the CD in Sam Goody, at age 13. She took one look at the porn star nurse and parental advisory sticker on the cover and said um, noooo. So, of course, I snuck back into Sam Goody and bought it with my allowance while she was in the dressing room in Stern’s. Good times.

Somehow, those juvenile lyrics and upbeat pop-punk bops have become my time-tested way to get out of a sad mood. I start off soggy-eyed with “Dumpweed,” squeeze out my last few cathartic tears during “Adam’s Song,” and I’m ready to face the rest of the day by the time “Anthem” plays. It always works. What’s your go-to stop-crying album or playlist?

- Fall (2022) (for rent on Prime). I really enjoyed this low budget survival thriller about two twentysomething women who climb a 2000 foot tall TV tower in the middle of the desert and get stuck at the top! The trailer is great if you want to check it out. A lot of the beats are fairly predictable at the beginning, but if you stay with it, it really picks up speed. Unlike some other survival thrillers, I didn’t find it very anxiety-inducing, because there is no world in which I’d ever end up in that situation. When I go out to the desert I like to write and play board games and watch the sunset, not climb shit. The movie is also under two hours long, which is always a delight.

- Top Chef: World All-Stars (Bravo or streaming on Peacock). I’ve really been enjoying this season of Top Chef, in which all-stars from various Top Chef franchises all over the world compete against each other. Usually on Top Chef, the first few episodes are weeding out the weaker contestants who are just obviously not on the same level as the other competitors (not that they’re bad chefs, but they are not strong competitors in Top Chef’s weird reality show environment). That is not the case this season; they’re all very strong competitors. It’s also a truly diverse cast, and the show is so much better for it. I’m obsessed with Gabri Rodriguez’s frantic energy, Sylwia Stachyra’s Polish obsession with putting potatoes in every dish, and Victoire Gouloubi’s super interesting combination of African and European flavors. I do feel like Ali Al Ghzawi is kind of running away with the win right now, but the thing about Top Chef is that you never know when someone is going to have a bad week and try to do risotto in five minutes or (gasp) inadequately season their food or something like that. Whatever ends up happening, I know I’ll be watching!

- Beef (Netflix). This has been out for a minute, so I’m not going to write much about it. I will just say that I thought that this show was great, and it’s a shame that David Choe was such a big part of it. I only found out about the gross and disturbing story he’d told on a podcast (TW: sexual assault) and that Steven Yeun and Ali Wong had defended his involvement with the show after I was already almost done watching it. It’s just such a bummer when there are so many positive things about a piece of media/art but someone problematic who’s involved taints the whole thing. I don’t know if I can really recommend this show, given the circumstances. If you watched it, what did you think?

- Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld. Now for a palate cleanser! This romance novel about a female comedy writer for an SNL-type late night sketch show flirting with the male pop star who’s guest hosting the show was a lot of fun! I zipped through it a few weeks ago, and I loved getting to be a part of the behind-the-scenes world of the fictional TV show that Sittenfeld created. I could tell that she had done a ton of research into the way SNL functions. My one complaint is that it was SUCH a slow burn romance! I started to get quite impatient for the two of them to get together already, damnit! But yeah, as the weather gets warmer, consider this an excellent vacation read!

A Sephora sale haul update

Remember way back in mid-April when I shared my recommendations and wishlist for the Sephora sale? Well, here’s what I ended up picking up!

- Haus Labs by Lady Gaga Color Fuse Talc-Free Powder Blush in “Dragon Fruit Daze” ($38) This was $38, which is very expensive for a single blush IMO, but wow, is it beautiful! I got it in the cool bright pink shade that is currently sweeping the nation as far as blush goes. One unexpected thing I love about it is that it has a real luminous, lit-from-within quality on the skin. It’s not shimmery, but there is some kind of radiance about it. And I love the weighty, luxury feel of the packaging. I think a lot of the fun of makeup is actually in touching it and looking at it, not necessarily wearing it, if that makes sense? At any rate, I’m very happy with my purchase and might pick up the shade “Pomelo Peach” sometime in the future, but it will be a while from now, because them shits expensive.

- Haus Labs by Lady Gaga Power Sculpt Velvet Bronzer in “Light Level 4” ($38). I loved the Haus Labs blush so much that I decided to try out their bronzer, too. This is supposedly the same shade that Gaga uses, and it has a really lovely neutral undertone, which can be difficult to find in a bronzer. I feel like a lot of bronzers either lean too cool and come off grayish or lean too warm and come off orange. Like the Haus Labs blush, this bronzer is super easy to use and builds gently. I don’t like when a product is TOO pigmented and then you have to handle it like Jeremy Renner defusing a bomb in The Hurt Locker, lest you end up looking like a clown. This bronzer is lovely and I look forward to getting a lot of use out of it, which is the best thing I can say about a relatively expensive product.

- Rare Beauty by Selena Gomez Positive Light Silky Touch Highlighter in “Exhilarate” ($25). It was insane that I was able to even get this shade of highlighter during the sale, as it’s constantly sold out, but I snapped it up once I got notified it was in! I heard people saying that this highlighter was blinding, and actually a little TOO much, which is exactly the vibe I’m going for in 2023, so I was psyched. I have to say… I’m a little disappointed! It’s just a regular, finely milled, shimmery highlighter. Beautiful, but definitely NOT the wow factor I was looking for. This shade is also more golden than the pale champagne I was looking for, and quite sparkly. I like a highlighter that is more shiny than sparkly, if that makes sense.

I am MUCH happier with my e.l.f. Halo Glow Highlight Beauty Wand in "Champagne Campaign" ($9), which is supposed to be a dupe for the four times more expensive Charlotte Tilbury version ($42). I’ve never used a liquid highlighter before, but this product is sooo easy to use. I apply it directly to my cheekbones with the sponge tip and then diffuse it with a fluffy brush. It adds a nice glow and can easily be built up for more high beam intensity. Don’t you love a bargain?

- Patrick Ta Major Brow Lamination Gel (Mini Size) ($15). I wanted to try this clear eyebrow gel after beauty YouTuber Angelica Nyqvist said that it provided a “BDSM hold,” so I threw a mini one onto an order. I like it a lot! It does indeed provide a flawless, all-day hold. I’ve just been using this and a little eyebrow pencil lately, and my brows have never looked so snatched and full. And even though the gel I bought is a mini, the packaging is weighty and feels like a luxury product. I’m very pleased with this purchase and will definitely buy a full sized one once the mini is used up.

And that’s all I bought! I kept it somewhat reasonable this time.

Aaaand that’s all she wrote! I kept it a little long this time to make up for the fact that I missed a newsletter. Next week, I’ll be sharing even more TV & movie recs with paid subscribers, in addition to that very detailed review of Magic Mike Live that I promised you.

Don’t forget to like, comment, and share this newsletter if you’d like–you can use the buttons at the bottom or the top. You can also upgrade to a paid subscription if you want extra content–remember to use this link for 20% off an annual subscription! (Valid through May 14.)

Until next time—turn the lights off, carry me home.

Love,
Liz
XOXO

P.S. My dad is back at home and doing well! Thanks again for all your well wishes. ❤️