Staying inside has given me much time to reflect, ask questions, and seek their answers. While I have yet to find the true meaning of life, I’ve learned how to buy more summer-appropriate fabrics and, most importantly, ask for help when needed. I often feel this pressure to move at the speed of light to ensure I won't be forgotten, and by doing so, I fail to live and not just document.

I forgot about Christmas this year, and I was okay with that; It wasn’t until I started seeing all of the Christmas sales and the Trees at Jewel's that I realized it was that time of the year again. Somehow, I’ve managed to avoid all of the Christmas Cheer!

First, I hope it brings you comfort—there's a lot of media, which can sometimes get confusing. Second, I hope this letter invites you to let your curiosity take the lead. Third, I hope this letter is a gentle reminder to drink some water, put your phone on dnd and try being present with yourself. And lastly, if this letter does not find you well, I hope something in this letter is helpful.

This year we’ve decided to celebrate Pride by celebrating and collaborating with the community. To close out Pride Month, we’re hosting six events with Chicago Athletic Association[CAA]. For this collaboration, we wanted to focus on the intersection of Pride Month and Juneteenth.

My 2020 spiral lead to me removing booze from my diet. I felt as though it consumed my life. Everything I did was centered around drinking. There were moments when I would drink an entire bottle of wine and put on a sad/dramatic show to cry. It was as if I needed to permit myself to feel.

My Sun is in Taurus, my Moon is in Libra, and my Ascendant is in Leo. I never know if I want to be the life of the party or stay home from the party–most nights, it’s both. I often think about throwing massive galas and not attending. Now that I think about it, I’ve always been this way. I’ve never wanted to be ‘in the limelight but adjacent to it.

I wish I were the type to drown in hope and ‘the best-case scenarios.’ If you know me, you know that I’m stubborn, calculated, and pessimistic. I wish the world were different–I wish people were different. But, we’re not different; we’re flawed.

When you were your most honest self, how did you feel? Do you ever think about that moment? Did you feel free? When I think about that moment, I am free. I feel safe. I feel like...me.

There’s an embedded confidence within Los Angeles-based photographer Kort Havens’ work that only comes when one has a firm understanding of their craft. Personally, I was struck by how inviting and tangible his representation of space is. Whether it’s images of food or a courtyard, it was not much of a stretch to imagine myself stepping into and existing in that space. Photography has that quality to it where depiction of real space can either be too familiar or too foreign.

Hello! I guess I should’ve done this earlier, and I’m pretty sure it’s on one of my many to-do lists that I actually never cross off. (I hope that gives you some insight as to how my brain works) Here’s the deal: I’m the ‘Director of Content [Chaos], and what that means is I oversee and manage all content. Outside of OK, I’m the Art Director & Co-Founder of Monday Coffee Co and a freelance photographer. I do a lot of things. I’m often told that I do too much, but yolo.

This morning, I had this grand plan of waking up at 4:00 AM CST, making scrambled eggs, potatoes, and a 16oz bottle of coffee. As it turns out, my body had other plans for me. I woke up in a state of desperation at 4:15 and drank some water, made myself a bowl of cereal, prayed Fajr, and went back to sleep. For a moment, I felt bad by not making the spread I daydreamed of, but I decided to give myself some grace and listen to my body.

When I woke, I still felt that same sense of connection to my body, but something was missing. I knew fasting wasn’t going to be easy, but I still hoped. Here’s some truth: I have a complicated relationship with food. I have a gluten allergy, which is unfortunate since gluten is basically in everything. I had an eating disorder in high school, where I became a vegetarian to lose weight and ended up eating maybe once a day—french fries were my go-to of all things.

Now based in Brooklyn, New York, Morton’s obsession speaks for itself. Black Boy Plants is a growing collective of Black men and boys who have chosen to enter the conversation surrounding indoor plant care, gardening, and wellness.

Do you ever wake up at a decent hour, but choose to go back to sleep? Not because you need the rest, but because you are afraid to wake up to your life? I practically invented this phenomenon. I set and reset my alarm, and then forget about it all together, eventually crawling out of bed sometime in the early afternoon and feeling just as paralyzed by my life’s problems only with less time to solve them.

The perfect juicy pimple can be the ultimate social kill-shot. The small pockets of bacteria come in various shapes and sizes. Sometimes they come with henchmen, other times they can drift alone. But every time a pimple forms, a siren goes off in your head to eradicate the enemy.

Many of us have thought of ourselves as invincible, as if we could not be easily defeated by the same weaknesses or flaws of other people. But the truth is, that is just a mask we put on when we face the world. It might be to impress the popular girl in school or get that raise at work.

It could be that caring for plants implies that one has an ability to nurture, a characteristic often attributed exclusively to women. Tenderness is a trait not typically attributed to the Black male body. Far too often, our men are solely depicted as aggressive, destructive, and distant. However, it is impossible to deny the quiet, generative properties of plants

There's an intimate level of craftsmanship that does into the production. The ingredients that go into their drinks are entirely real and exclusively natural. They pride themselves on their drinks being "farm-to-bottle." And with this membership program, the new process can be "farm-to-bottle-to-doorstep."

This underhanded appropriation led to slow proliferation of different strains of gin—Dutch genever, London Dry, and, eventually, American, a sub-group exemplified by craft distillers like Few. The Evanston-based distillery is no stranger to changing the formula- in addition to their classic American-style, Few also offers Breakfast Gin, distilled with earl grey botanicals in addition to juniper, and Barrel-Aged, a woody, spiced gin aged in whiskey barrels.

On Saturday, May 2, 2020, I found Islam, or rather I pulled-up a seat to the table. Religion has always terrified me— it still does. “Believing” was a difficult thing to wrap my head around, because it requires submission, and submission was synonymous with weakness in my eyes. I never grew up practicing any form of religion. In my 26 years of living, I’ve been to church maybe two dozen times.