Up until December of last year, Emory and I had both been working the same full-time, salaried jobs that we’d gotten fresh out of college. Now, we’ve held five different jobs between the two of us in the past year. Needless to say, the last few months have been a frenzy of routine changes.

When I left grad school in the winter of 2024, Emory’s nine-to-five remained the backbone of our routines. I got a summer job, and when my contract ended in August, I was hired by the same organization to keep tutoring students throughout the school year. As it became increasingly apparent that Emory would be leaving his job, I started interviewing for a second job. I ended up in an academic support role at a small local college and started my new job the week after Emory started his new job.

Things are settling down now (picture me furiously knocking on wood as I write this) and we are figuring out how to balance our paid work and all the other things we do. Along with the work changes over the last few months, we had three houseguests, sometimes overlapping, and an increase in intensity of our volunteer/mutual aid work. We’ve also celebrated the arrival of our dear friends’ baby, grown Marmalade’s sweater collection twofold, and spent plenty of quality time with each other and our friends. It feels good to look back on the last few months and see all the ways that we made room for pleasure, even when things were overwhelming and stressful. In the words of my favorite autumnal series, it just goes to show you stuff—stuff like “those DBT strategies you learned two years ago really stuck!” and “hot chocolate doesn’t fix anything, but sometimes looking forward to it all day makes you a slightly more functional person.”

Without further ado, here’s our pleasure for… the past little while.

XOXO, Jozef

Emory

On my lunch breaks during my days in the office at my new job, I read a few pages of David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives while I eat. There is something comforting about Wojnarowicz’s rage in our current moment; as we stare down the barrel of a total descent into fascism, I take solace in the art from the AIDS era—the fierceness of our queer elders and ancestors who resisted the oppression of their time with every skill and gift at their disposal. I think we could all learn a lot from the organizing of ACT UP, and I feel less lonely in my anger when I read my own rage refracted in writing from that moment in history. Sometimes, I feel like the people around me today aren’t angry enough—there is so much apathy and avoidance right now. Maybe “comforting” isn’t the right word exactly, but that’s how I feel when I read a passage like this one:

…I want to throw up because we’re supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder and I’m amazed that we’re not running amok in the streets, and that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this.

Even after Wojnarowicz’s life ended, the “lifetimes of all this” continued, and they continue to this day, and I, too, am “amazed that we’re not running amok in the streets.” The cycle continues, and all we can do is what Wojnarowicz and his fellow activists and artists did: try to break the cycle by throwing everything we can at the killing machine. The work feels easier when I remember that I am but one person of many in a long line of resistance, connected by our grief and by our gestures of loving.

Other than that—I’m still reading Station Eleven aloud to Jo, and we’re almost at the end. Beyond books, there are a lot of newsletters. A lot of the work in the first weeks at my new job has been focused on responding to the SNAP crisis, so I’ve been appreciating ’s writing on the state of food in the US more than ever. I also always read , , , and when they land in my inbox. is another favorite—it’s so nice to wake up to poetry every morning.

Jozef

The amount of Station Eleven we read at any given time is directly proportional to the amount of dishes done in quick succession, which is to say that we have not been staying on top of the dishes. We’re back on track as of this week though, and we’re getting closer to the end of the novel. I love when all the threads of a sprawling story begin to twist together, especially in books taking place over many years. I’m especially impressed with Emily St. John Mandel’s ability to write characters who feel like they keep existing past the pages they appear on. I’ll definitely be thinking about this book for a long time after finishing it (and if I am not finished with it by the next edition of Our Pleasure, someone please text me and tell me to do my damn dishes).

On the nonfiction front, I’m about an hour and a half into the eighteen-hour-long behemoth that is Karen Hao’s Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. It’s long for good reason—Hao spent the greater part of the last decade and a half covering Altman and OpenAI. I’m listening to Empire of AI on the heels of finishing David Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire and I’m curious to see how Immerwahr’s analysis of imperialism as state policy within the industrial economy (think guano islands) and Hao’s analysis imperialism as business strategy within the attention economy (think data centers) compare to each other.

Emory

Jo and I have been watching old seasons of Project Runway, and we’ve gotten at least two friends to do the same. I grew up watching Project Runway, and Tim Gunn is such a familiar, comforting presence. It makes me so angry that he’s not in the reboot—fuck the producers who made that bullshit decision!

When our friend C was in town, I watched some episodes of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City with them. They wanted to watch the latest season, but I found Lisa Barlow’s presence to be so soul-sucking and terrifying that we had to go back a couple seasons—to try to pinpoint when Lisa became so scary!

We’ve also been watching lots of comedy specials. Top picks are Hannah Einbinder’s Everything Must Go and Caleb Hearon’s Model Comedian. (I’ve been reciting Caleb’s speech for little fat kids nonstop since I heard it.)

I’m showing Jo Battlestar Galactica for the first time. Shout-out to our local library for having the show on DVD! I check out one disc at a time, and we watch on the weekends.

We saw Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein at our local historic theater with some friends. It was fun to go out with them, but the movie pissed me off—I didn’t like the changes from the novel, particularly the decision to turn the Creature into a sort of perpetually innocent, needy child. I missed my vengeful Creature who had to learn how to direct his rage toward his cruel creator. Still, I love movie theater popcorn, and I love my friends, so it was a good time!

There’s also been a lot of YouTube for us lately, which is a bit unusual. Highlights include Jinkx Monsoon on Ziwe, Jinkx Monsoon on Las Culturistas, and Eric Adams on Ziwe.

Jozef

I missed a lot of the last two decades of pop culture (shout out to evangelical Christianity for that!) so I am slowly catching up a couple of films at a time. Luckily, since our friends A and S had their baby, they have been more than willing to have us over for movie nights (and movie afternoons). A has been compiling a list of other movies I haven’t seen that he deems critical for us to watch together, including the Jurassic Park movies, Jaws, and the first Pokémon movie. We watched Jurassic Park yesterday and also marathoned all of the Twilight movies in October. It felt like a fever dream. Seriously, what the hell was Stephenie Meyer on?1

Emory and I also kicked off our holiday season by watching The Family Stone, which neither of us had seen. The first half was fairly standard, but by the end the heterosexuals were truly doing the most and we felt deeply unsettled. We might return to the straight holiday romcom genre once we feel a bit braver, but for now we’ve switched to Christmas episodes of shows we’ve already seen.

Emory

‘Tis the season to listen to Sufjan Stevens; I’ve been listening to Javelin a lot.

On the mornings when Jo drives me to work, I like to put in a CD to hype me up for my day. Options include brat, Virgin, and Man’s Best Friend. “House Tour,” you will always be famous to meeee.

The new Florence + the Machine album, Everybody Scream, is fucking fantastic. My personal favorite song on the record is “Kraken.”

I also listened to / watched Jo’s performance with the local gay men’s chorus. Jo had a solo, and he sounded amazing! I love to watch Jo perform; he has such a beautiful voice, and I love to see how happy it makes him. I don’t film his performances—I like to just listen—so all I have for you is a photo of him beforehand.

Jozef

After our yearly rewatch of Over the Garden Wall, I wanted to hear more of Samuel Ramey, who is the voice actor for The Beast. That’s how I ended up making Emory and his brother listen to a recording of Haydn’s opera Armida, conducted by Antal Doráti, multiple times in the span of a week. I also loved Dodie’s album Not For Lack Of Trying and Florence + the Machine’s Everybody Scream.

Emory

At the height of summer, we had a lake day with friends. I was able to collect so many cool rocks, which is of course my favorite thing to do when near a body of water, while Jo got to enjoy a swim.

My brother came for a visit in late summer. We played a lot of board games, including Root and Pandemic. We also went to the zoo and saw the cutest freaking baby red panda!

When C was in town, we went to a local farm for some fall fun with Z, N, and A. Unfortunately, our “fall fun” happened to be on an eighty-degree day, so I was sweaty as hell. We had a good time, though! There was a corn maze (that we solved incredibly quickly), lots of farm animals, and apple-picking—plus lots of yummy treats.

For an actual fall adventure, Jo and I went for a walk with Z in a local cemetery. The weather was perfect—a crisp, clear day—and the trees were gorgeous, decked out in their fall foliage.

Now that the weather has cooled off again, I’ve picked back up my knitting. I’m hoping to spend more time knitting this year than in years past, mostly because I know I need to get off my damn phone! I have one more sleeve to go on a sweater I’m making for Jo. And I already have a new pattern that I purchased so that I can start another sweater soon—if I don’t have the yarn I want for it, I might ask Jo to get me some yarn for Christmas (wink wink nudge nudge).

My other activity for avoiding social media time in my phone has been a return to Pocket Frogs, the game I played on my old iPod in the late 2000s. My brother asked me to download it so I could play with him, and I’m totally crushing him—I’m already level 13, while he’s still level 5.

The other game I’ve been playing lately is Hollow Knight: Silksong. The original game is one of my all-time favorites, and Silksong might be even better. I’m currently stuck at, like, six different boss fights throughout the map, but that just means I have more gameplay ahead of me.

My new work schedule has also lent itself well to my writing practice. After I get off work at five, I take the metro to the campus where Jo works in the afternoons, then head to the library there and write until he’s off work at seven. I feel like I’m on the brink of breaking open this novel idea I’ve been toying with for months, so I’m going to try in earnest to write a shitty first draft.

Our local art museum has an exhibit on display that I’ve fallen in love with, so I expect I’ll spend more and more time there over the next couple months. The museum membership more than pays for itself every year—in the chilly winter months, we’re able to walk around indoors, enjoying some exercise (and some art) without being freezing.

Oh! And we harvested my first-ever potato crop. It’s not the largest haul in the world, but I’m still proud of what I was able to grow.

Jozef

We’re working on our next quilt for the Transmissions Quilt Project and recently received gorgeous photos of the first quilt we worked on for the project, which now lives with the recipient. Being part of this project has been such a joy and I’m especially excited about our next quilt since we nominated one of our long-distance friends and it feels extra special to be making something for him.

I’m also back to chorus after our summer break and preparing for the holiday concerts we’ll have in December. I switch out the CD Emory chooses on our morning commute for my rehearsal tracks after I drop him off so that I’m the only person who has to hear me play back the same measure over and over until I get it right.

Emory

Jo makes these really yummy pesto mozzarella open-face melts, and he made some for us this summer with tomatoes we grew (supplemented by tomatoes from the store because it was NOT a massive harvest). If you can’t tell, I’m really proud of my gardening—it’s been such a grounding activity, and it’s helped me feel more in control of my life, especially in this very chaotic time.

To celebrate my last day at my old job, we went out with friends to a Korean BBQ/hot pot/karaoke place. I had a delicious plate of orange chicken!

All October, I was really enjoying the Halloween Skittles. The flavors were fun, and some of them were secretly sour—trick or treat, etc. It’s a good thing they were only available for the month, or else they might’ve become a real problem for me.

Jozef

For weeks in August and September, I was having constant visions of Bloomin’ Onions. I don’t know what possessed me, I hadn’t eaten at an Outback since maybe 2020, but I was consumed by deep-fried desire. I convinced Emory and his brother that we should go for dinner one night when he was in town, and I swear nothing has ever hit the spot the way that onion did. Truly a perfect creation, save for the impact on my blood pressure.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year: soup season. I’ve been taking full advantage of the cool weather and—after months of avoiding heat sources at all costs in my kitchen—finally making massive pots of chicken and dumplings, lentil soup, and slow cooked turkey chili.

Until next time, we hope you’re finding ways to make every day a bit more pleasant. Much love!