March absolutely flew by. I spent half the month in Cincinnati and half back in Brooklyn. Having the extra time back home was completely unplanned, but it was so recharging. While the calendar says Spring is here, I’m still waiting for the temperatures to confirm that.

Out To Eat

I’m going to do a separate blog post on Cincinnati restaurants. I haven’t written about any in years, and there are new and longstanding gems that deserve some praise!

A quick recap: Sotto, Boca, Salazar, Nicola’s, Hart and Cru, Primavista, and Etxe. All tried and true favorites, plus a great new addition to the Cincy dining scene!

Joe and I also dined at a new-to-us spot in our neighborhood that took us way too long to visit. Cafe Brume opened last year in Brooklyn Heights and bills itself as an Alpine-inspired bistro. The wood-paneled walls and green candles on each table make you feel like you’re in a chic ski lodge.

We went to Cafe Brume for brunch and had an incredible meal. I got the Gruyère omelet and the Austrian torn pancake. Until now, I had never heard of an Austrian torn pancake, but I can confirm that I’m obsessed with Austrian torn pancakes. Joe got the turkey schnitzel and loved it. We agreed how great it is to have this wonderful spot around the corner from us.

In fact, we loved it so much we went back for dinner the following weekend! I had the agnolotti, and Joe got the raclette burger. We split the ouefs mimosa. Everything was great!

The burger was surrounded by this beautiful peppercorn sauce. It was like a sauce moat. My love for sauce runs deep. Joe, on the other hand, does not share my sauce love, which is really hard and puzzling for me. Who doesn’t like sauce? Not to be dramatic, but it’s actually criminal in my opinion. You have a beautiful aioli in front of you, and you only let your French fry graze it? Who grazes an aioli? I’m taking that French fry and using it to scrape every last drop of sauce out of that bowl. And then I’m ordering another aioli.

Deep breath. I needed to get that off my chest. To be fair, Joe did utilize a respectable amount of the sauce moat. He said it was amazing. I do wonder if he felt the judgment piercing from my eyes as he ate, making sure he was sopping up the sauce.

Shopping

I have a longer blog post coming soon about the store, but I visited High St. when I was home in Cincinnati. It’s my favorite place to shop in Cincinnati, and in case you didn’t know, they have an amazing selection of women’s fashion and jewelry! My mom and I have a long-time tradition of shopping there, and it’s the perfect place to discover something new.

They now have Rosemary’s, an in-store coffee, wine, and cocktail bar, which is brilliant. I love getting a glass of bubbly and perusing the store. I saw so many good pieces the day I was shooting in the store that I came back the next day to do some shopping.

What I’ve Written

After a little break, I’m back in my sketch and writing routine!

For my online writers room at The Sketch School, we do a quarterly live table read. This quarter, I teamed up with my friend Bev, and we wrote a futuristic sketch about a world without men. Obviously, the world was thriving! When they consider bringing a man back into society, chaos ensues.

For Dad?, my NYC sketch group, we’re prepping for our upcoming show (April 16th at 6:30 pm if you’re local!). Each writer creates three new sketches a show, and then we whittle them down to one or two for the show.

My first sketch is about a millennial nightclub. As a millennial who has not been to a nightclub in this decade, I started dreaming about what my ideal club would look like. It involves a comfortable shoe, an early start time, and the song ‘You Gotta Be’ by Des’ree on repeat.

Next up is an idea I’ve had on my list for a while, and it involves how nail polish gets named. I have so many questions about the process. We’re never just told that the turquoise polish we’re looking at is named turquoise. So I imagined what one of these nail polish-naming meetings looks like and took it to the extreme. I’m going to pretend what I wrote is what actually takes place, so I can stop wondering. This is the sketch we’re using in the show, and I’m so excited to see it come to life!

The final piece I wrote is a pitch from Dan, an actor on our team. I was in tears when he pitched it and immediately knew I wanted to write the script. Basically, a guy’s roommate never leaves the common area, and the guy wants some alone time with his new girlfriend. He’s learned that the only way he can get the guy to leave is by playing the song ‘Father of Mine’ by Everclear. It’s such a random, specific, and hilarious song. Joe and I have randomly sung it over the years, so I felt an instant camaraderie with the idea.

In the sketch, the roommate leaves when the song plays, but there’s a kicker. It’s revealed that the roommate leaves because the song makes him so deeply emotional. We see him crying in his room while singing the song. A confrontation happens, and we learn that the roommate has a perfectly fine relationship with his dad (who lives in New Jersey), despite his weird and uncomfortable reaction to the song.

You can get tickets here for this month’s show!

Health

March was Endometriosis Awareness Month. Every year, I plan on highlighting this, but I struggle to get it done. How ironic that the daily struggles of endometriosis make it too difficult to actually write about the daily struggles of endometriosis!? Somewhere in my drafts folder on my blog, I have a long post from years ago where I started writing it all out. One of these days, I’m going to finish it. There’s so much to say that I think a video feels like an easier medium to get it all out.

This March was an emotional one for me, health-wise. I’ve been dealing with health issues for six years now. After moving to NYC in 2024, I took a bit of a break on my health journey. Well, that’s not totally true. In January of 2025, I had my third endometriosis excision surgery. Other than that, I stopped seeking out new doctors and practitioners because it’s all been too much- too expensive, too stressful, too emotionally and physically draining.

Earlier this year, I decided to cautiously wade back onto the path. I found a functional medicine place, and they asked me to send over any recent bloodwork. While looking through my labs, I noticed something I had totally missed before: my ferritin was practically depleted. I missed this because it shows up as “normal” on the crazy range these medical facilities use. I think the “normal” range is 15-150. My number was 17! I had other labs that were actually out of range, so I missed this massive thing hiding in plain sight. Of course, the doctor didn’t say anything about it. And because our medical system is a joke, I can’t even reach out to this doctor right now because they’re in a dispute with my health insurance, and I’m no longer covered there!

I felt so excited when I saw this test result. When your health has sucked for years, you get excited when you think you’ve found a missing piece. So yes, I was excited. From what my non-doctor brain understands, ferritin is basically your iron stores in your body. I started researching ferritin and realized that I have every symptom of low ferritin. And any practitioner who understands ferritin says that anything below 50 could be considered a deficiency. Could this be contributing to my debilitating fatigue every second of my life? Being barely able to get out of bed every morning?

Long story short, I got really excited and hopeful, only to be knocked down. I emailed one of my women’s health doctors, saying I feel confident this is causing me issues. At the same time, I had a scheduled call with a doctor that a family member sees to discuss working with him. He’s a licensed MD but also does functional medicine, which I like. I was going to attack this on multiple fronts. In the span of about 30 minutes, I was completely shot down by both.

The call with the doctor went horribly, and it was only about three minutes. He immediately shot me down and said, “It’s not that, just so you don’t hang your hat on that.” My face immediately got hot. I physically felt like I had just been slapped across the face. Then, while I was speaking, he started talking to someone in his office. He said, “I’m doing two things at once.” Yes, (insert every cuss word here), I’m aware. Because I’m a polite, nice person, I continued to be polite and nice on the call, all while fighting back tears. I felt totally disrespected. He said his office would call to get me in. I had no intention of actually working with him, but the office never called back anyway.

I got off the call and immediately started sobbing. It’s probably the hardest I’ve cried in a couple of years. You almost become numb when you’re dealing with this constantly. A lot of my hope over the years has greatly diminished, but I somehow still have a flicker remaining. I felt like a bit of that flicker when away after this call. I had let myself get a little excited with this new ferritin finding, and this guy’s dismissive attitude broke me. Oh, and minutes after that horrible call ended, the other doctor I had emailed also did a drive-by dismissal. “While this number is low, it’s still within normal range,” they said. And that was that. I could barely function for a few days because I was so upset.

It’s hard to be vulnerable about this, but I’m always hopeful it can be helpful to someone else going through a similar experience. During my many rabbit holes of research, I’ve always found comfort in reading other people’s stories, whether they’re in the thick of it or have come out on the other side! I’ve done a few things since this bad experience, but for now I’m going to see how that goes before I get too excited or too defeated. One day, I hope I’m one of the people sharing my success story, and feeling like a normal, healthy, functional person again.

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To end this sad story on a lighter note, I was going to compare myself to Rip Van Winkle and put a picture of him here. I thankfully have no pictures of myself in the exhausted, depleted state I’m in, so I thought he’d be a good fill-in. Then I went to Google Images and reread the story. Rip had a pretty happy-go-lucky experience. All the illustrations show him looking pretty content and deep into a solid REM cycle. This definitely does not represent my current reality.

After returning to the drawing board, I realized (a little too quickly) an image that is more representative of how I feel: