10/16

i'm thankful to have been thinking a lot about the implications of small design choices recently.

i'm thankful for the bulk box of rolls of black plastic dog shit bags d bought for us, which are convenient and useful even though they are sometimes so maddening to try to get open so that you can put your hand inside them and pick up the shit, especially if you are me last night and your phone is dead so you don't have a flashlight and you refused d's offer of her own phone for its flashlight with the thought that you could surely just pay close attention and pick up the shit and so cut to ten minutes later and the dog is taking a shit in the same neighbor's yard that she always wants to take a shit in, which always makes you feel uncomfortable, and you are watching the spot and you know where it is, even though it's so dark that you can't see it, but the problem is that you can't get the dog shit bag open and normally if it was light, it would still be frustrating but you could at least see the little bit where it's started to pull apart and focus on that to get it open but you can't and the dog is done shitting and is pulling at the leash and you get off position by this and by your fear that she might eat her own shit, which is something she did frequently in the first weeks of having her and was both viscerally disgusting for you to deal with in addition to being a health hazard and you finally get it open and put your hand inside it and stoop to scrabble at the grass in the space where you think you were and get something that feels warm but also something cold under it and you have to take the dog home with what you think is her shit and maybe some of another dog's shit from another day and then borrow the phone and go back down the street to make sure you picked up all the shit because you are somehow imagining the neighbor going out into their yard later in the night to scope out whether that dog that's always shitting in their yard shit in their yard, but actually you got all the shit in the first place, good job except not good job because you played yourself and went out again in the cold to pick up some shit that didn't exist.

i'm thankful that while i was standing out there in the cold, the difficulty of opening the black plastic dog shit bags made me think of the difficulty of opening the similarly-sized opaque clear plastic bags in the produce section at the grocery store, which always feels embarrassing while you are standing by the cilantro or whatever and it always feels like you are minutes away from somebody taking it and doing it for you like they are your mom, which would feel maddening and condescending and yet also the bag would be open. i'm thankful to remember that the produce section used to more regularly have two kinds of bags, the big thick opaque ones that hang in the refrigerated pantries for stuff like corn and broccoli and then the thinner softer ones by the unrefrigerated boxes for stuff like tomatoes and small fruits. i'm thankful for the thinner kind, which always effortless pull apart in a pleasing gesture that's like rubbing your fingers together (which makes me think of the gel that my father would buy us at a magic shop when i was a kid and you'd put a bead of it between your fingers and rub them together and it would make this "smoke") and which are thin and crinkly unlike the big opaque ones. i'm thankful that the last few weeks, they've only had the big thick kind at all the stations and when we were going through the checkout, the cashier kept asking me what was in each bag because you couldn't fucking see through the bags easily because they were too opaque and i told her a small version of my anecdote about opening the bags, in the hope that she might tell me some kind of secret of the trade about how to open them more easily but she just laughed and nodded in agreement with my complaint.

i'm thankful that in technology design one of the buzzwords that gets used a lot is "frictionless," the idea that the best interaction is smooth, so you slip effortlessly from station to station, interaction to interaction, without ever hitting a resistance that makes you stop, perfect efficiency forever. i'm thankful to understand this as an aesthetic imperative even as sometimes the ideological implications of it make me feel uncomfortable, since like from the company's perspective, it would seemingly be better for the lady to have the thin clear bag that she can see through because that makes her work better and work faster, clear more units, but on the other hand, would it also make her happier if she could see more easily the thing that was the subject of her work rather than having to struggle or ask questions? i'm thankful that this is not a real essay and i don't have to make a point since i don't know the answer to that. i'm thankful for the work that i have been doing on my project this week to try to soften the sharp edges that the last round of testers got caught on and that that has been going well. i'm thankful that even as i try to get rid of friction, i am trying to introduce more of the product of friction (in the physical world), which is warmth. i'm thankful to have had the idea that i could maybe take all the pictures that people post of their dogs in our slack channel and use those pictures like abacus beads showing the progress my coworkers made at their jobs during the day, which in some ways feels like gamification in a way that's gross and an appropriation of sentiment like pieces of flair but also when i am more charitable with myself feels like trying to bend a system in which ultimately we are moving units and serving customers just like the cashier and trying to make it feel like something a person thought about and cared about because they were thinking about you and caring about you, which is what i have wanted my writing to be and what i want the product of the code i am writing to be, an expression of care, and of knowing. 

i'm thankful that friction, when applied with intent, is texture, can be a corrective, the feeling of your hands moving across a surface and reading it without language. i'm thankful for this tim rogers video i was watching about getting over it with bennett foddy, for the part where he describes his theory that in great games, there isn't a 1:1 perfect reflection of the input you press into the buttons of the controller in the movement of the character on screen, how with super mario brothers, which is kind of the perfect crystallization of video game movement, there's a kind of slide to a stop that mario makes after you stop pressing the button to move, and i'm thankful for how he describes that "there, inside this expression of physics, there is an inextricable fragment of this game character's personality, and an intangible invitation to master the game surrounding this inscrutable character."

i'm thankful for the waterproof shoes that d bought us so our feet don't get wet when we take the dog out.