I've been watching some of the most beautiful weather from my bedroom window. This is, after all, my favorite time of year. The weather is room temperature. Watermelons are in season. Out are winter layers, and in is my navel, which peeks out from an unbuttoned blouse. It’s the season that makes me come alive! I'm just not really doing much experiencing it these days. Even if I didn’t feel a little apprehensive about sitting in a crowded park, breathing my hot mask air—my neighborhood park is still chained shut last I checked. To complain about it would be trivial. To do something about it, though? Downright enterprising!

Skip perfume

I miss wearing a personal fragrance. I tried wearing one, but with no real human interaction, it felt indulgent and confused my dog. I've instead incorporated more home scents into my routine—namely this diffuser. Coqui Coqui's Coco Coco is not only very fun to say, but also impossibly delighting. No one ever seems to get coconut scents right. (The same goes for grape, watermelon, or banana—they're always synthesized and saturated to Bubblalicious levels. Like, how are the wateriest fruits the most cloyingly flavored gums?) Coco Coco smells like a coconut plant. Not an Almond Joy. It smells the way the first hit of vacation air feels when the sliding doors open at your destination airport. Remember those?

Oil up

I love body oils. I love slathering them on my gingerbread man body. I love the way they make my skin look. What I don't always love is putting it on under clothes. Good thing I'm hardly wearing any of those anymore. Costa Brazil's body oil does one hell of a balancing act. It creeps into dry oil (a set of words I never really understood until now) territory, so when I spread it onto wet skin, it absorbs without leaving oil stains on my white linen couch. Plus, that smell. It's very "of the earth"—like a thunderstorm. Some days, it's all I wear.

Crank the AC

I like a little bit of swampy air wafting through the house during the day. Heck, I even encourage it, deliberately forgoing AC just to get that sweet midyear perfume coming in through the windows.

Sleeping is a different story. I like it chilly con carne in the bedroom so I can burrow under blankets and control how warm I am using the Stuck-Out Leg Method. As I always say, "You can always add blankets, you can't remove skin!" The one I use is by Big Blanket Co., a company whose name is death-defyingly descriptive. At 10'x10, it is 100 square feet of blanket—larger than an American bison. My limbs never poke out, accidentally revealing my delicious little piggies to ghosts. Find someone else to haunt! This boy's on vacation.

—Or Gotham

Photo via ITG