11/13

shadow and claw

                            November 13, 2017

                11/13

                        i'm thankful to have given up for now at least on shadow and claw, which got into being too Ye Olde Fantasy for me. i'm thankful to give myself permission to give up on books whenever i want for whatever reason i want. i'm thankful for the novel i started last night, naomi alderman's the power, which is about a world where teenage girls around the world discover that they have the power to produce electricity from their bodies and that they can pass this power on to older women. i'm thankful the book is a gripping read, which feels like classic stephen king if stephen king was better at writing sentences and had more interesting things to say. i'm thankful to be curious about what is going to happen.

i'm thankful to have learned from a recent episode of glowing up that wendy williams will singe beef jerky with a cigarette lighter as a way of activating its flavor before eating it, which is something i am going to have to try. i'm thankful that my parents didn't smoke when i was growing up and so lighters, rather than being commonplace, felt like magical objects. i'm thankful that as an adult, i get to have my own lighters and can use them anytime i want. i'm thankful for the gray bic lighter on my desk, which is out of fuel and so doesn't actually light but is pleasing to hold and which i like to roll between my fingers while thinking about a difficult problem.
i'm thankful to have worked some on a personal project using react and redux yesterday afternoon and evening. i'm thankful that though i felt walled in and had several false starts at first, i finally started to pull things together and over the course of a couple of hours, all these concepts i had read about over and over without really understanding started to click into place, one door after another unlocking, and i was able to actually use them to put things together and make them work and it felt so good. i'm thankful for create-react-app and especially for this blog post by soham kamani, which helped me to understand the mechanism i was having the hardest trouble grasping. i'm thankful for ellen ullman's description of coding as being like writing, which it is: there is syntax, there are tropes, there are stylistic conventions, there are genres, there is word choice, there are verbs and nouns and adjectives. i'm thankful to feel as though i'm becoming fluent in another kind of writing.

i'm thankful that we are having burritos for dinner this week and d made pumpkin pie. i'm thankful that i finally got to watch the first episode of the deuce, which was a slow burn but compelling. i'm thankful for the season finale of nathan for you, which is one of the most incredible things i've ever seen. i'm thankful for alias grace, which we binged over the weekend and was very well done. i'm thankful to get to watch the series finale of vice principals. i'm thankful for the little cups of instant gomtang i got at the store. i'm thankful for tic tacs. i'm thankful for dumb puns. i'm thankful for this playlist of slow morning jazz.

                            Don't miss what's next. Subscribe to thank you notes: