The Friday Dispatch: October 3, 2025

Hi! It’s October. I have yet to engage with any scary/horror stuff1 YET, but the month is young! I am reading Hench, by Natalie Zina Walschots, which is about EVIL and therefore Halloween-y. If you’ve read Temp, a classic of the “books Hattie pushes onto people” category, you’ll probably like Hench, which is Temp…but EVIL. It’s about working a crappy temp job, and then eventually finding your passion. AND it’s about BEING EVIL!!!!!

I previously wrote about working a crappy temp job. You can read that here:

Also, baseball update, the Royals AND the Red Sox are knocked out, so is Cleveland, so now I am rooting for the Brewers2 and you should too! The ghost of Bob Uecker compels you!!! Sure we all love the Cubs, we love their little song, but save the next Chicago win for the White Sox, in honor of Cool Pope 2: American Pope!

Also also. The YANKEES? More like the STINKEES!3

And in final alsos, new Taylor Swift is out, I have yet to listen, but I think we can all agree that this Lit mashup of My Own Worst Enemy x Anti-Hero is how both songs were meant to be heard. Twice in the last two months, I’ve witnessed someone hear My Own Worst Enemy for the first time. What a beautiful world! It is never too late to learn a new anthem of self-sabotage, to sing along with the “aaaahhh—OOOOOHHHH” in the last chorus.

Personally, I think you should get Taylor Swift’s new music the old-fashioned way—downloading it from a random Google Drive folder you came across on Reddit—and use your money today for Bandcamp Friday, when Bandcamp declines their cut of the profit and gives all revenues to the artists who use them! Might I suggest a soupçon of or Kimya Dawson for your weekend?

Per the Farmer’s Almanac, you should be looking for a specific bug, starting TODAY:

This is just an update on Dottie, who is nice, friendly, soft and well-behaved. And also???? Monday was our 10-year anniversary of being roommates! On September 29, 2015, one day before my 21st birthday, I brought home the li’l cat I’d met a few days earlier. She was born in a friend-of-a-friend’s garden, and was being fostered by the woman who found her until she could find a permanent home. I walked into the room where Dottie and her sister Whisky were living. Whisky (the shy one) saw a new person, and ran and hid under some furniture. Dottie meowed loudly and climbed my leg. That’s when I knew.

Dottie can shake hands now, so that’s very cool:

One thing I’ve always appreciated about Dottie is that she L O V E S getting her nails trimmed. She hears me click the clippers a couple of times and she comes running. At her most recent vet visit, we received two suggestions: start brushing Dottie’s teeth, and start giving her a fish oil supplement. So I got online and updated our next Chewy order to include a tube of enzymatic poultry-flavored toothpaste and some finger-puppet-esque Toothbrushes For Cats. Happily, Dottie took to the toothbrush right away. I approached it the same way I do nail-clipping, with an air of “Oooooh, what a special fun thing you get to do today! Spa day!” The toothpaste has the added benefit of being a stinky chicken-flavored paste, aka one of Dottie’s favorite things. So, that made things easier.

I spent a lot of time doing Panicked Cat Mom research into the best way to deliver fish oil. What I determined: I wanted fish oil derived from smaller fish like anchovies (smaller fish have lower levels of mercury than, say, salmon; cats are smaller than people and therefore more sensitive to mercury), and I wanted oil capsules instead of a bottle of oil with a pump (for more consistent dosing AND because, apparently, fish oil can lose its efficacy/get rancid when oxidized). I bought gelcaps, fully expecting that I would need to cut or squeeze them open and dump the contents onto Dottie’s food. But she just…eats them. I put it in her food bowl and she eats it, no problem. What a perfect and magnanimous creature. The fish oil has made a palpable difference in the luster and texture of her fur, so I recommend you explore fish oil delivery options for the cat, dog, pet or very small hairy person in your life.

If you’re lacking substantial cats in your life, might I recommend the Postman Cats account on Instagram, where a mail carrier in the UK documents the cats they encounter on their route. This round-up is particularly good.

My mood is good this week because—well, my mood is good most weeks. But my mood is extra good this week because Tuesday was my birthday! Everyone was super nice to me. Myles left the house before dawn and came home with a dozen Colson Patisserie jelly donuts (MY FAVORITE), complete with birthday candles, and a bouquet of flowers. My day started out wonderful and only got wonderfuller!4

My friends & family went out of their way to make me feel cherished and treasured. But so did a random gal on Instagram. A meme account I follow posted that September 30 is their account’s “birthday,” when they started their meme-sharing page. So, naturally, I commented & invited the random memester to my birthday party. Then, at 2am, I got an email from a different random stranger. “You don’t know who I am, but I was in a comments section where you said it was your birthday, and your bio says you love emails, so I thought I’d send you a little birthday email!” she wrote. And she made me a digital card, and included some feel-good stuff she’d seen elsewhere on the internet! Just because. I emailed back and shared photos of Dottie and she emailed back this morning and now, I have a penpal, just like that.

After my birthday festivities, when I was back to the “real world,” I set out to tackle my to-do list, which included ordering more contact lenses. I couldn’t find a coupon code for 1-800-Contacts. So I just…messaged them in the customer service chat, and asked. And they gave me $20 off! And were REALLY nice about it!!!!

These are two small happy stories. A sad story: Jane Goodall died this week. Another happy story: her whole life. Goodall was as action-oriented as they come. She believed that the cumulative weight of millions and millions of “small” kindnesses would, in time, outweigh all the darkness and hatred and fear that plague us. I’m pretty sure she was right. Small kindnesses build up and, when you practice small kindnesses all the time, you build your being-kind-to-others muscles, so the big kindnesses are an easier lift. The big opportunities, when they arrive, are hard to pass up. You’ve gotta practice. You have to develop the idea that the world is a good place, and you have to be the good for others; you have to hope and then you have to prove it.

Goodall loved this Far Side cartoon (the Jane Goodall Institute did not). Goodall said it was her favorite pop-culture depiction of her, wrote the forward for a Far Side book and invited Larson to her research facility in Tanzania. There, Larson met a chimpanzee named Frodo, who, hilariously, attacked him.

The world is, as I said earlier, so damn good.

You can use crickets to accurately determine temperature. YOU CAN USE CRICKETS TO ACCURATELY DETERMINE TEMPERATURE.

Let puppeteer Barnaby Dixon explain, in one of the coolest visuals I’ve seen in a while. Please, someone, make a 30-minute educational puppet show for grown-ups. Like Sesame Street but with 6-minute segments about physics and bioscience and literature and music theory.

Also, I want a Kate Bush musical ONLY if there is theremin and ONLY if the characters are all portrayed by sock puppets.

I got a LOT of birthday presents this week. At least 5 of them, from my family, were previous entries into the What I Did Not Buy This Week column. I gotta say, I didn’t intend to create a Hattie-specific gift guide when I started writing this segment, but…it has paid dividends!

Because I didn’t buy a ton of stuff this week, I’m going to use a little of that cash to support this GoFundMe. Chris, a friend of a friend in Phoenix, is raising money for his family. He’s facing a very serious cancer diagnosis, and is trying to remain as comfortable and stress-free as he can, while setting his family up for success. The family is REALLY close to their monetary goals and every little contribution counts.

Okay. Thank you for listening to my fundraising pitch. Here’s WIDNBTW.

Okay, I am off for Birthday Weekend Activities. I will report back on those. I won’t tell you what they are, we’ll leave that a surprise. I hope someone sends you a nice email just because! Actually: I know you signed up for this newsletter, but I hope you remember that I write it because I’m grateful to you, and I want to give you something that makes your day and week and life better. It’s not “just because,” but I hope it can be a nice email anyway.