Welcome to For Your Consideration, a series about things we love and love to do — and we’d like to give you permission to embrace your authentic self and love them too.
Like any good under-employed, over-online millennial, I treat my physical and psychological wounds with face masks and plants and seltzer water and, yes, stupid fucking juices. One, two, three ginger shots to the face and I’m invincible, baby! Brunch isn’t brunch without a minimum of three nonalcoholic beverages in addition to the booze. The Juice Press in Soho? Oh yes, I’ve had many a meltdown in or around it while melting in New York summer heat. Hell, meet me at the bottled juice section of the grocery store and let’s get weird!!!
Yes, this $12 juice was a great choice — an excellent choice! At least it’s not another iced latte! I’m supposed to be cutting back on caffeine! Something I keep telling anyone who will listen as I continue to not cut back on caffeine! I will also continue to recklessly spend money on juice and also have juice delivered to me like I’m some kind of all-natural, fresh-pressed goddess.
This stupid fucking juice tells me it will revive, energize, replenish my body and mind. This stupid fucking juice tells me it will give me superpowers, allow me to see through time and space or some shit. It’s acidic (lemons and bitter greens) to the point of slightly burning. There’s sediment. It tastes and feels like I’m drinking vegetables mixed with the soil they grew in. I don’t hate it.
This cold-pressed, organic, lacto-fermented, natural, biodynamic, raw juice is the answer to all my problems, surely. It promises to cure my breakout, breakdown, breakup. I fall for it every time, and sometimes I even feel it. It’s temporary, sure, but I’ll take any escape I can get at this point, and at least it’s not tequila, the other post-breakup juice, although there’s been plenty of that, too.
Does anyone else get an immediate head-high after pounding fresh ginger juice? Is there a medical explanation for the way juice sometimes makes me feel like I can write an entire novel in one sitting?
I signed up for the loyalty program at Moon Juice, the Gwyneth Paltrow-approved self-parody of a Los Angeles juice shop that sells products like “sex dust.” I think you have to spend $200 to get one (1) free drink. But I was visiting Los Angeles and depressed and thinking I might move to Los Angeles soon/eventually, and the girl working was cute and poured me an extra ginger oregano immunity tonic shot (“you look like you need this”), so when she asked me to sign up for their cosmic rewards or whatever the fuck they call their points system, I said “sure!”
As far as stupid fucking juices go, Moon Juice is the motherland and probably the reason we hit Peak Juice a few years ago. You’re gonna just have to trust me and drink a Cosmic Matcha Latte and a Gingered Lemon juice and then transcend to a different plane of existence for approximately 27 minutes. They literally refer to their Cilantro Celery Punch as “newage Gatorade.” It is profoundly dumb, and I’m a sucker. I love this stupid fucking juice.
The perfect juice breakdown? A citrus, a green, copious ginger.
In December of 2016, I was at my parents’ home in Virginia, cut off from my stupid Brooklyn juice shops. The closest thing I could get to juice was Tropical Smoothie, so I decided to make my own juice with the absurd amount of kale that has taken over my mother’s vegetable garden. I made more kale-ginger-lemon juice than I knew what to do with, and I drank it on the back porch while journaling about my family’s upcoming trip to India.
I’d be away from my stupid Brooklyn juice shops and from my girlfriend for the longest time since I’d moved to New York. What I should have written in my journal: Being apart feels like the hardest thing we’ve ever done, but it won’t even come close. Only I couldn’t have known that.
Not long before I left for India, she had spilled beet juice on my favorite white blouse. Then she meticulously scrubbed it out with club soda right there in the middle of the almost-closed restaurant. I thought it was so hot. Isn’t it funny how we find the most mundane things hot when we’re in love? Still, I exercised caution with beet juice around her from then on.
There is a smoothie (yes, I know that’s technically different from a juice, but I do make the rules here!) that I wake up craving all the time. It was made with dates, almonds, cacao, banana, hemp, and almond milk, and since I remember those ingredients, I could easily recreate it. But that isn’t the point. The point is that we used to drink it together, in the first home we shared, the apartment she lived in when we first met, when she was just supposed to be that girl I made out with against a cab that one time, before we built something together and then blew it all up.
We were drinking that smoothie from the stupid juice shop in Williamsburg when we piled on her bed with two friends to watch my webseries from start to finish on the morning it debuted. Smoothies and mimosas and breakfast sandwiches. That room was always so bright during the day but especially that morning, and maybe that sounds corny, but it’s true. The room was bright-white with sun, and I was so happy, and that smoothie and that room are things I’ll never experience again, not really.
She keeps telling me she left a juicer at that apartment, but I don’t remember ever seeing one.