10/2/18

i'm thankful that on sunday we went with my parents to see crazy rich asians. i'm thankful for crazy rich asians, which is a technicolor macaron of a movie that for me was pure pleasure from start to finish. i'm thankful, as a person who for a long time loved romantic comedies the most of all genres before feeling that they were increasingly hollowed out (or that i was, by time and experience, in a way that closed off their potential for me, or both), that this movie was so good it reinvigorated my faith in the potential of the genre. i'm thankful, since the movie is so much about filial piety, to have watched it with my parents sitting next to me eating a large tub of popcorn, even though that kind of dynamic doesn't really exist in our family and in fact before the movie i had needed to apologize for being grumpy and rude to them the day before (which in retrospect seems like such a bratty and selfish thing to do during their brief visit). i'm thankful that when i was growing up my parents were always so loving and supportive of me that their praise and guidance isn't that important to me, even though i think that is sometimes hard for them (i'm thankful that my brother is much more open to and needing those kinds of things, which i think makes them happy, even as they worry about him). i'm thankful for what i think part of the reason i was a brat was, which is that they had come to town on the same day that d had come back from being gone for a week and i hadn't gotten to spend any time with her and she is the only person in the world who i really like spending long periods of time with. i'm thankful to have thought of her often during various sweet and touching stomach butterflies parts of the movie. i'm thankful to have looked over to her near the end of the movie and seen tears in her eyes, which i also had in my eyes, and tapped her arm, and then i'm even more thankful, right after the movie ended, to have laughed when i learned that she had slept through a large chunk of it and only woken up for the ending, though she still found it moving.