Monday Miscellany: The scaries cannot find us

Notes from July 28 - August 3

Aug 04, 2025

Man, I had such grand plans to prep this newsletter in advance last week so I could wrap it up and send it off this morning, leaving the rest of my day free to do some yard work and random chores I’ve been putting off. But alas, the cursed procrastination tendency had its way with me again and now here I am at 3pm, staring at a blank page. Are you also guilty of turning fun projects into assignments that you then proceed to put off? Why do humans do this? I would like to stop adding a sense of mental burden to my enjoyable pursuits, please.1

Read this week

After finishing my July to-read list early, I’m still riding the high of unstructured mood reading time before August’s due dates and deadlines start kicking in.

The first book I picked up from my shelf last week was Colson Whitehead’s 2009 novel Sag Harbor. This was a lucky find at the used bookstore a few months ago2 and since it’s set in the summertime, I wanted to make sure I got to it before September. The story follows Benji, one half of a practically-twins brother duo who escape the city every summer for their family’s home in the titular community of Sag Harbor. This particular year, Benji feels on the cusp of something, getting his first job at an ice cream shop, actually maybe kissing a girl, and starting to break out of the linked “Benji-n-Reggie” identity to figure out who he is as a person separate from his sibling. There’s a light sprinkling of plot here, but for the most part it’s atmosphere and vibes, baby. The feeling is wide open hours with no adult supervision and no real plans, swinging by friends’ houses to see who’s free and figuring out the shape of each day as it unfolds. It’s sweat and bicycles and the beach, an occasional fight, abundant boredom. Benji is the voice of the novel, a quiet observer type with a wry sense of humor, the perfect tour guide through this long, lazy season.

Everybody on their own trajectory, although we sometimes intersected. And me? Keeping my eyes open, gathering data, more and more facts, because if I had enough information I might know how to be. Listening and watching, taking notes for something that might one day be a diagram for an invention, a working self with moving parts. (84-85)

Incidentally, that quote just as well could’ve come from the memoir I read next, A Renaissance of Our Own by Rachel E. Cargle, which follows Cargle’s gradual metamorphosis from young Christian wife to divorced baby feminist to self-educated intersectional activist, educator, and entrepreneur. I initially knew her from her antiracist and feminist teachings on instagram, as well as her Rich Auntie Supreme community which celebrates the intentional choice not to have children, so it was exciting to learn more about how she got where she is today. Along the way, she digs into so many meaty topics: religion, desire, sexuality, education, racism, feminism, friendship, business, burnout, and the decision not to have children, her approach always guided by her three “highest values” of ease, abundance, and opportunity. Sprinkled throughout are prompts to guide the reader along their own process of growth and becoming, and while I didn’t sit down and actually write out my responses, they were very encouraging to think through. I appreciated Cargle’s level of thoughtfulness and care, and I walked away from the reading experience energized and inspired to make some adjustments to my own life.

We can all give ourselves permission to be ruthlessly intentional in creating our most intimate relationships. We can choose our family if the one we were born into doesn’t value the essence of who we are. We can choose our romantic partners based on our own desires instead of society’s limited precepts. We can choose how we want to show up as mothers, daughters, sisters, aunties, and friends. (84)

Elsa and Nolan Grey, sibling protagonists of Family of Origin by CJ Hauser, flip this type of intentionality on its head, turning the intensity of their focus toward the past and combing through their younger years looking for the moment they went wrong like a couple of home chefs squinting at patterned kitchen tile in search of a dropped grain of rice. It all starts when their father dies. He’d been living on an island with the Reversalists, a group of scientists studying a small population of ducks in hopes of proving that evolution has started going backward, and Elsa and Nolan are summoned there to clear out his small home. Really, though, they spend the week sifting through their individual and shared memories, sorting out their own emotional baggage, and trying to figure out a way forward. The vibes feel like a combination of Wes Anderson movies, like if you mixed the scientist crew dynamic of The Life Aquatic with the rundown old hotel energy of The Grand Budapest Hotel and the “when did it all fall apart” melancholy of The Royal Tenenbaums. Nolan, especially, has some extremely relatable thoughts about becoming an adult and trying to outgrow the need for parental approval.

Nolan wished he could return to a time before anyone had any expectations for him. Back when he was still becoming, his parents watching with rapt attention, waiting for him to unfurl into someone remarkable. (93)

He had always wanted to please the grown-ups. Because grown-ups were the ones who decided what was good and what was bad. If he didn’t please them first, how would he ever know if he had the authority to be a grown-up himself? (137)

Any other “academically gifted” kids out there still trying to escape the constant burden of their childhood potential? How do we unlearn the metrics of success that we were taught back then? How do we learn to live for ourselves and not simply to make someone else proud? This is something I’ve been thinking about for a full decade or more, so it was gratifying to watch a character struggle with similar questions. “But maybe,” Nolan ultimately muses, “there were no adults in charge of anything. Maybe it was just children above children, all the way up the chain” (254).

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An ominous sky on Friday night and our backyard crepe myrtle after the storm

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!