When I lived in Hell’s Kitchen, a friend of mine came to stay with me for a couple weeks while he found an apartment in the city. In so many ways, this friend was a wonderful house guest. He was very clean, walked the dog for me during the day, stocked my pantry, took me out to dinner…and only smoked pot outside on my fire escape (awww, so nice of him, right?). But at the beginning of the third week, when I knew there was only another couple of days before he moved into his own Brooklyn apartment, he spilled half a jar of spaghetti sauce in my kitchen. I heard the crash from my bedroom and shrugged it off. I spill shit all the time. I grabbed the paper towels which were in my room since I had been cleaning and headed toward the kitchen. When I reached the doorway, I saw him bent over the mess using my beautiful William Sonoma towels and a hand embroidered towel a friend had gotten me from Italy to clean up the marinara sauce.

It took all of my strength not to make him sleep in the street those last couple of days.

Pictured above are my new towels. The bird towel I found in a tiny boutique in Long Island. Within a day, I caught Sean using it to dry the dishes. Is this a man thing? It must be…my only solution was for the first month to have a post-it on the towel that said “Fancy Towels - Do Not Use!  It finally got through to him.