Our Pleasure in June

all hotdogs and atrocities

We’ve been quiet online this month. It’s been a weird one, best explained in Z’s favorite format: hotdogs and atrocities.¹ To get her coworkers at her last job to practice gratitude, Z devised a strategy based on this meme:

Image Description: A tweet from @awaitingtrial with a picture of a large sheet pan of hot dogs, most of which have already been taken, and a pair of tongs and text reading “Boss brought in hotdogs! I feel valued and respected as an employee, and I am more likely to perform at a high level 😁I will turn a blind eye to the atrocities.”

Every day, she’d start a running list of the hotdogs (good things) and atrocities (self-explanatory) at her job. Her coworkers would add to it throughout the day, and when she left her job in April, she started a list for our household on a whiteboard in the dining room. We add to it daily, and now our friends contribute their own hotdogs and atrocities when they come over. Z moved out at the end of this month (a hotdog/atrocity hybrid for us—we are so happy for her starting a new part of her life and sad that that part is far away from us) but the hotdogs and atrocities board with “and yet, somehow we persist” in Z’s handwriting at the bottom has stayed.

Some hotdogs from this month:

• We celebrated Emory’s birthday at a slumber party with our friends.

• After months of trying to change our municipal garbage can size, the city finally took our bins and gave us a new, smaller one.

• Emory and I have been married for two years

• We kept up with the garden, which yielded oodles of spinach and six large heads of lettuce this month.

• Chosen family and new friends came over for dinner multiple times a week.

• We finally got Emory’s long-forgotten childhood bank account reactivated in his legal name.

• The fifty cent sale at the kids’ consignment shop meant we got a great head start on our baby clothing stash.

• There were so many keffiyehs in the Pride parade in our city, a beautiful reminder that we’re in the fight for liberation together.

• Mahmoud Khalil was released from ICE detention.

• Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic mayoral primary in NYC, as did the progressive candidate for mayor in our city.

The board is silly, yes, but it also makes me feel saner. If I’m feeling really down or overwhelmed and I look over and see that the atrocities are outweighing the hotdogs by orders of magnitude, I’m like, “duh, of course I feel like shit.” So many atrocities, things that will take generations to repair, are happening every single fucking day. I swear I wake up to a new horrible thing in my inbox every morning.² And at the same time, I’m surrounded by love and kindness and generosity and hope that we can be good to each other at least as often as we are horrible, and I think, “okay, maybe there’s a chance that we don’t all destroy each other in the end.'“

I’m finding it difficult to explain why I think paying attention to the positive things feels so difficult sometimes, and when words fail me I turn to poorly made graphs. What I reasoned out in MS Paint is that when you allow yourself to experience good things at the same intensity as bad things, the gulf between the two grows and the whiplash from bouncing between the good and bad is more pronounced.

Image Description: Two grainy dot plots depicting emotional intensity on the Y axis with the labels “positive emotional intensity” (top), “ambivalence” (middle), and “negative emotional intensity” (bottom) and time on the X axis. A grey line extending horizontally from the “ambivalence” label through the center of each graph separates the scattered negative dots in cool colors from the warm colored positive dots. The negative dots are the same on both plots, but in the left plot, the positive dots more diffuse across the Y-axis, while in the right plot they hover closer to the “ambivalence” line. A darker grey diagonal line connects the highest and lowest dots, which are at the same time points on each plot, with the right plot having a shorter diagonal line between the two points. A label next to this line on the left plot says “~130% further distance between most pos. & most neg. emotion.”

One way to avoid this dissonance is to ignore one side of the scale—become either totally engaged in toxic positivity or fall into complete despair. Sure, you’re missing half of the human experience, but there’s comfort in knowing what you’ll get each day. If you can’t or won’t ignore the atrocities, being ambivalent to everything else at least decreases the sharp contrast between the fact that things can not be terrible and that things clearly are and probably will continue to be terrible. So you refuse the boss’s hotdogs because it’s not going to change the fact that things are very, very bad beyond the hotdogs and the tasty reminder that nice things exist too doesn’t appeal to you.

But this is pleasure studio and the good stuff is kind of our thing. In the words of

Jacqueline Novak

, “Permit me but one last metaphor?”³ When Emory’s family lived in an area heavily populated with Latter-Day Saints, the Mormon Church would host hotdog parties during school lunches to recruit students to join. Emory’s younger sibling, not one to turn down a free hotdog, would go each time, eat their hotdogs, and leave with an “I don’t think so,” when asked if they’d be joining. Was the family still socially isolated from pretty much everyone else in their community because they weren’t LDS? Yeah. But a hotdog is a hotdog. Take it while you can.

If hotdogs and atrocities aren’t your thing, let me offer you something more polished from Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You that captures the point:

“Every evening now when we’ve finished our work, Simon turns on the news while I cook dinner, or I turn on the news while he cooks dinner, and we talk about the latest public health guidance, and what’s been reported about what everyone is saying in the cabinet and what Simon has privately heard everyone is actually saying in the cabinet, and then we eat and wash up, and afterwards I read him a chapter of David Copperfield while we lie on the couch, and then we look through the trailers on various streaming services for about an hour until one or both of us falls asleep and then we go to bed. And in the morning I wake up feeling almost painfully happy. To live with someone I really love and respect, who really loves and respects me—what a difference it has made to my life. Of course everything is terrible at the moment, and I miss you ardently, and I miss my family, and I miss parties and book launches and going to the cinema, but all that really means is I love my life, and I’m excited to have it back again, excited to feel it’s going to continue, that new things will keep happening, that nothing is over yet…I suppose I think having a child is simply the most ordinary thing I can imagine doing. And I want that—to prove that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care. To prove it to whom, I wonder. Myself, maybe.”

I hope we’re all finding ways to prove that to ourselves. Without further ado, here’s where we found pleasure in June!

XOXO, Jozef

Here is the further ado Jo just said we’d be doing without. I’m writing my roundup on the first day of the next month—my first time being late on one, about which I’m trying not to feel shame. As I write this, Jo is performing with our local queer chorus before Shakespeare in the Park, while I sit among the audience on our blue striped picnic blanket (a gift from our dear friend C). I prefer to give his singing my full attention, so let this vignette illustrate both my effort to stick to our publishing schedule and how difficult it’s been for me to find time to write. I’ve been working on some fiction, usually just a paragraph or two every couple of nights, but beyond that… I’m burnt out. There’s so much to do, and I’m struggling to manage it all. But we persist! I have a few essays percolating in the back of my mind, and I’m going to do my best to get them on paper for you while doing All The Other Things.

~ Emory

Emory

I started reading The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr on the recommendation of our friend A. (And thanks to her generously lending me her copy. A, if you’re reading this, I promise I’m taking good care of it!) I haven’t gotten too far into it, but I’m really enjoying her frank, warm voice and unapologetic attitude.

And like Jo mentions below and we’ve mentioned in the past, I’m reading Station Eleven aloud to him. Today, as we were leaving the park after watching the performance of Twelfth Night, Jo remarked, “Now we know who our symphony will be.” It was exactly what I’d been thinking, too. The beauty of Shakespeare, and specifically watching a performance of Shakespeare—if I may go on a tangent better suited for our “watching” section—is seeing that though the vocabulary and syntax have changed, little has changed about people’s emotional lives. The people Shakespeare wrote about loved and laughed and lied and cried, in all the same ways that we do. (Well, I guess we have less swords now… and let me tell you, I’d much prefer that to today’s widespread gun ownership.) It’s not just Shakespeare, of course—people create art, I believe, in an effort to capture the wonderful, painful contradictions of being human as particularly as possible, and in doing so, to reveal some deeper, fundamental truth about being human generally. And when I sat on the hill laughing with the rest of the crowd at the antics of Twelfth Night, I thought about us all in that moment and the characters in Station Eleven’s near future and Shakespeare in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. I could feel us all, together, connected in that moment. Real and fictional, writers and audiences.

Jozef

Emory is still reading me Station Eleven, usually while I’m folding laundry or doing dishes. For a post-apocalypse novel, it’s been uplifting so far. Our friend E also lent me their copy for Annihilation and I’m about three quarters of the way through that—I have to be in a good mood to read it though, because otherwise the whole concept of the ecological disaster and the way people treat each other in Area X makes me so sad I can’t read it.

Emory

Because I said all my stuff about Shakespeare above, I’ve got a more controversial pick to put here. One of the things I watched that brought me the most joy this month was the clip of Tr*mp talking about Pete Buttigieg riding his bicycle to work with Chasten on the back.

“In all fairness, with his husband on the back, which is a nice, loving relationship.” There’s just something powerful about queer love that even the bigots can recognize. Even Tr*mp acknowledges that the Buttigieg family has a nice, loving life. It makes me chuckle, but it also reminds me that living your life with love, care, and kindness does make a difference. Even if the difference is as small as a ten-second clip, it means something. It’s worth celebrating.

Jozef

Every Sunday we watch Hacks with our friend A. We’ve made it to Season 2 and I’m still loving it. Jean Smart is incredible at being absolutely heinous and still making you love Deborah, but my favorite parts are when Meg Stalter is getting on Paul W. Downs’s last nerve.

Emory

Lorde. Virgin.

Need I say more? I mean, holy fucking shit. What an album! I love listening to it while writing fiction—Lorde’s music helps me access a sort of raw, tender part of myself. I’ve cried listening to Virgin more than once.

Jozef

Is it cheating to say the birds and the rain? We’re running lots of fans in our house so the noise can be too much for me sometimes, but the nature sounds from the open windows are just the right amount of ambient sound. Summer is here, so I returned to Courtney Barnett’s Things Take Time, Take Time, which has been in my rotation for this part of the year since 2023. For working outdoors, I’ve been listening to a shuffled mix of Big Thief/Adrianne Lenker. And of course, new Lorde made huge splash in the final weeks of June.

Emory

Believe it or not, I went to my first-ever Pride parade this year! My anxiety can make it really difficult to leave the house, let alone go to busy events, but the chorus was in the parade, I like being a good chorus husband, and Z and I got to hang out together. Highlights include:

• ordering iced coffee from the cafe while Chappell Roan was blasting

• Z in her keffiyeh, with her giant binoculars and a Red Bull held up between her teeth, making “eye contact” with people in the crowd across the street

• someone in the parade wearing “deny, defend, depose” booty shorts

• the satanic temple’s little goat

• someone giving Z beads and her immediately turning to me to say, “Let’s tell Jo I showed my tits to get these!”

Image Description: A person holding a hula hoop and wearing booty shorts printed with “DENY, DEFEND, DEPOSE.” The float they’re standing on is decorated with balloons.

I’ve also been playing the occasional game of Ecologies, going to restorative yoga (more on that in a dedicated essay), and celebrating my birthday with friends.

And one of my favorite pastimes is solving crosswords—so, I’ve decided to up the ante and try my hand at making crosswords. It’s a real challenge! A fun one, too. So, I’ve decided to write a puzzle to include in each month’s “our pleasure.” Since they really do take a long time to make, they’ll be for paid subscribers in the future, but this month’s is for everyone. You can find it here. (A Canva site was the easiest way I could find to share it; I’ll also see if I can send it in our chat as a PDF. I know it isn’t the most convenient, but hey, I’m doing my best! I’m very open to feedback, so let me know if you have any thoughts.)

Jozef

Before the heat dome, Z and I removed over nine contractor bags of garbage left in the backyard by the previous homeowner to get the yard in working order for the summer. After that, we got some wood to rig up the world’s most basic raised bed, filled it with two yards of soil, popped some potatoes, carrots, and a weird cucumber variety in there, and planted a grass/clover mix outside of the walkways. I also got some free broken pavers from F*cebook Marketplace (my guilty pleasure 🙈) and made us a little patio in the part of the yard that had too much broken glass in it to be safe otherwise. We’ve spent lots of evenings in the backyard with friends since the night cools the outdoors faster than the house and the sun stays out until 9 PM.

In other home improvement news, I managed to wipe most of the paint off the leaded glass window in our stairway, finish painting the kitchen cabinets, prime the kitchen walls, and put peel-and-stick wallpaper over the busy grey backsplash tile in the kitchen. The best part about having an old house is that there is no shortage of project to be done, so I’m never bored and have plenty of things to squirrel around with. My next self-assigned task/fool’s errand will probably he taking advantage of the high humidity to scrape some ugly latex paint off our stair banisters.

Image Description: Jozef and Emory’s kitchen, with clean dishes drying on the counter. The upper cabinets are bright orange, and the lower cabinets are a dark green. The backsplash has been covered with a peel-and-stick wallpaper of lemons and leaves (the lemons are sort of orange, though). Disco balls hang across the windows above the sink—we like to keep it fun.

Emory

This is non-specific, but sometimes after a really tough day, Jo and I treat ourselves to a Doordash order. Usually, it’s something cheap and on a discount, but for our anniversary, we chose somewhere a little bit nicer—casual instead of fast food or fast-casual. We had churros for dessert!

Jozef

Spinach and lettuce from the garden have been my favorite things we’ve eaten this month. The heat has made cooking suck a little bit, so I’ve been trying to overcome that by cooking from the heart instead of from a recipe so I don’t feel compelled to turn on any heat sources that don’t sound appealing.

Image Descriptions: (1) three bowls of vegetarian taco salad on our counter in front of the storage containers from our folk art dishware set, with quilt patterns printed on them; (2) a spicy tofu, summer squash, and rice dish; (3) freshly washed spinach from the garden in front of the same storage containers

For our craft club this month, I made a chocolate caramel toffee cake from a recipe our friend A gave us. It’s been her birthday cake for years, and Emory loved it so much that he wanted it for his birthday too. It’s one of those baked goods that only gets better with time in the fridge, but it lasted less than 24 hours in our house.

Image Description: Emory’s chocolate caramel toffee cake on the counter in front of the quilt pattern-painted storage jars and the new lemon backsplash.

That’s all for now! Thank you, as always, for reading. This month, we’re hopefully getting back on track (though I—Emory—am still just as busy and stressed). But like I said, I’ve got some essay ideas percolating that I’m hoping to get written soon! xoxo

1. Emory and I also love the vegetarian version of this meme:

2. If you are thinking, “man, I’m missing out on the atrocities,” here’s some headlines from just this week:

In the Gaza Strip, We Are Dying Silently by Ghada Abu Muaileq

“We Don’t Answer To Courts”: Trump Admin Refuses Compliance With Trans Passport Court Order by

Erin Reed

The Senate is about to destroy clean energy to give tax cuts to billionaires by

Michael Thomas

3. If you *still* have not watched Get On Your Knees after our rave reviews, you are missing out. I promise you that it will go on your “hotdogs” list.