Monday Miscellany: Build you a life that can do both

Notes from June 30 - July 6

Jul 07, 2025

Prepare yourself for a drastic understatement:

Uh, wow, what a week.

I don’t want or need to recap the news for you, and I’m guessing the reason some of you are here is to think about something else for a little while—so let’s acknowledge the flaming pile of dog doo over there, promise to come back and clean it up in a bit, and briefly turn our attention toward more enjoyable, less smelly fare.

Read this week

Raw Dog by Jamie Loftus1 has been floating around in my subconscious for a while. I don’t remember where I first heard about it, but I know that Bria Grant talked about it on the Reading Glasses podcast and the combination of memoir, humor, history, travel, and shtick sounded right up my alley. What finally got me to pick it up was a friend suggesting it for our next small group book club discussion, so thanks, Brian!

The hot dog is born of the sausage tradition, but insists on her own nastiness. (7)

The gist here is that Jamie Loftus spends the summer of 2021 traveling around the country eating hot dogs and reporting back about what she has tasted and learned. We get some history and lore sprinkled in, some local ambience,2 some personal flavor,3 and a pretty harrowing (specific, visceral, narsty) chapter about factory farming and how hotdogs are made. A note I jotted down in response to said chapter reads “feeling awesome about being vegetarian right now.” Loftus’—no, this feels too formal—Jamie’s tone is conversational and wry, and her book falls into one of my favorite categories, “tricking me into learning things.”4 It feels like having a beer or two with your very educated and funny friend and listening to them rant. I laughed out loud many times.

Coney Island reeks, a place that’s a shithole but it’s our shithole, and I piss like a helicopter in a beachside bathroom that smells like eggs and Febreze. (126)

And my god, the factoids! Did you know that famed sixteen-time Nathan’s Famous hotdog eating contest winner Joey Chestnut’s dad’s name is MERLIN? Or that before we decided on Uncle Sam as our national mascot, a Statue of Liberty-esque female figure named Columbia was considered and rejected, but ultimately repurposed to represent Columbia Pictures?

Or that there’s a single red chair in Fenway Park’s green seating section to commemorate Ted Williams’ record-setting 502-foot home run there in 1946? I could go on. Raw Dog is gross, nerdy, entertaining, and funny as hell—basically, the perfect summer book.

Another thing that screams “summer” in the best and most nostalgic way, is a gosh dang mix CD, like the one on the cover of One in a Millennial by Kate Kennedy. This is a collection of essays unpacking teen culture of the 1990s and early 2000s, written by (and largely for) someone who came of age during that time, and as such it generally felt less like reading a book and more like looking in a mirror. From the moment Kate Kennedy said, at the 1% mark in my digital library copy, “in my bones, I don’t know how to not care the most,” I knew she was a kindred spirit, and that fact only became more obvious as I kept reading.5

She speaks directly to my nerdy focus on handwriting and love of school supplies:

Diamonds are cool, but have you ever come home to a fresh pack of midrange office pens? (34%)

But she also understands and articulates some of my complicated feelings toward the religion I grew up with and ultimately left behind, a church “that was supposed to be all about love and light” but that “dimmed a lot of my girlish innocence and wonder.”

I’m quite alarmed when I think about the dangers of telling young people they are fundamentally broken, incomplete sinners who aren’t worthy of God’s grace and mercy during some of the most formative years of self-esteem development. I know this disposition is doctrinal and sacred to many Christian churches, but to use this preaching style with young women present is something I now think resembles an abusive dynamic more than a loving relationship with a well-meaning higher power. (28%)

(Shout-out to my fellow former True Love Waits girlies out there who are still trying to wrench purity culture’s insidious remnants from the deepest parts of your soul!)

Kennedy also writes about fashion, pop culture, music, high school dress codes, employment, economic recessions, feminism, hustle culture, the rise of the internet and social media, and so much more. Some of my favorite moments were when she’d toss out a random tidbit that I had completely forgotten about but that instantly came rushing right back—like, oh my god, SOHCAHTOA, and I’m suddenly sitting at my desk in trigonometry class like no time has passed. This is a thoughtful, nostalgic, fun, and deeply cathartic piece of writing that might resonate with you if you also identify as a sensitive millennial soul and forever try-hard (endearing). The slam poetry style wordplay was sometimes a bit irritating in print (“Limited Too” / “limited to” happened quite a bit), but I didn’t notice it as much on audio, so I’d go with that format if you have the option.

I rounded out last week’s unplanned trio of nonfiction with Life in Three Dimensions by Shigehiro Oishi. The subtitle, “How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life,” sounded like something I should absolutely pick up, and I wasn’t wrong. Oishi’s premise here is that in addition to the two major metrics we currently study to understand what makes a “good life,” happiness and meaning, there is a third to consider: psychological richness.

Psychological richness is different from happiness and meaning in the sense that it is not about an overall feeling of where life is going or what the point of your life is, but about an experience, or more precisely the accumulation of experiences over time. (3%)

Put another way, to lead a psychologically rich life, one can’t always choose the easy, cozy, or predictable thing, even if that’s what might bring happiness in the moment. This type of texture comes from adventure, the unknown, stepping outside our comfort zones, and getting a little uncomfortable sometimes. It’s about learning, and novel experiences, and travel, and playfulness. It’s about resisting monotony.

Oishi goes into detail about many different studies that each illustrate some small facet of this larger idea, and a few of them were pretty fascinating to read about, but overall (no disrespect), I felt like he would have gotten his point across just as well had he written a long article instead of an entire book.6

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Watched this week

I hadn’t seen Isle of Dogs (2018) in a hot minute and had forgotten how sweet it is! This Wes Anderson stop animation film tells the story of Atari, a young boy in the fictional Japanese city of Megasaki, where all dogs have been exiled to the distant landfill due to diseases affecting their population. Scientists have a cure for dog flu, but they’re being suppressed by Mayor Kobayashi (Atari’s distant uncle and adoptive guardian) as election day approaches. Atari goes to Trash Island in search of his own beloved dog and along the way makes friends with a whole band of sweet, scrappy puppers. The voice acting is stellar, the cast an incredible collection of Anderson’s regulars: Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Bob Balaban, and Tilda Swinton, just to name a few. And the animation is so well done! Look how detailed and thorough!

But really, what made it such a pleasant choice for a rewatch this week was the feel-good of it all. Sometimes when the world is on fire and a full panic attack threatens to descend at any moment, you just need a heartwarming story about a pack of dogs and a 12-year-old boy uniting with a rogue scientist or two to save the day and bring joy back to the city.

It rained all day yesterday, and then a rainbow appeared as dusk descended

And another thing

“Romance didn’t just help me make peace with my too-muchness. It threw her a party.” I love this sort of personal essay about the impact books can have on our understanding of ourselves.
Behold: LitHub’s most anticipated books of 2025, part 2! This is a long list, but very worth your perusal. It put several things on my radar, like this intriguing-sounding debut from Katie Yee; story collections from Aysegül Savas and Samanta Schweblin; nonfiction from my queen Mary Roach; and new novels from Helen Oyeyemi, Quan Barry, Claire-Louise Bennett, and Aja Gabel.
Do you need EVEN MOAR BOOKS for your to-read list? Because here are Electric Lit’s most anticipated queer books of the summer, a few of which (this one! this one! and this one!) are on my shelf just waiting for me to pick them up next.
Jordan has made something similar before, but I came across this recipe for mexican street corn pasta salad this week and wanted to try it again immediately.

Haiku round-up

Haiku is a poetic form that originated in Japan, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern. At the beginning of 2024, I started writing one every day, and while traditional examples include thematic reference to the seasons, mine tend to be a bit more all over the place. Here are this week’s efforts—enjoy!