11/27/17

i'm thankful that i am good at my job and in fact really like my job and that i know i will be okay when i get back into the groove and i'm thankful to know that the feelings of dread i have right now are just projections of my mind. i'm thankful to recognize one of the weird things about our minds, which is that we can know that something is a projection and is artificial and yet knowing that doesn't stop the roller coaster drop in your stomach on monday morning. i'm thankful to wish you comfort if you are feeling that feeling right now too and to try to reassure you that it will go away and you just have to keep going until it does.

i'm thankful for the moment in the joan didion documentary on netflix where she is talking about the early days in her relationship with john gregory dunne and she says some very joan didion thing about how she doesn't believe in love but says, of the relationship, that she felt "a very clear sense of wanting this to continue" which is a nice way of describing what i and other mortals might call love. i'm thankful for what she calls love, from this passage she reads from an essay about john wayne:

"We went three and four afternoons a week, sat on folding chairs in the darkened hut which served as a theatre, and it was there, that summer of 1943 while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John Wayne. Saw the walk, heard the voice. Heard him tell the girl in a picture called War of the Wildcats that he would build her a house, 'at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.'

As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear."

i'm thankful that d and i split the prep work for spring rolls yesterday evening—i thawed and peeled and cooked the shrimp and and cut up the peanuts and jalapenos, she cut the cucumbers and combined the ingredients made the sauce. i'm thankful that i had been annoyed that the grocery store didn't have actual carrots (!) and so we had to buy a bag of precut matchsticks, which felt like a sin but actually was fine. i'm thankful for the ritual of dipping the clear circular wrappers into a dish of water, how they go from being hard plastic sheets to supple skin in an instant, and am thankful for d's careful work wrapping them into neat bundles. i'm thankful for alexa's hilarious/frustrating foibles as we tried to get it to play songs for us while we worked.

i'm thankful that i finally understand javascript promises, which are something i struggled with for a while but which now make so much sense to me and seem so powerful. i'm thankful for the remake of the magnificent 7, which i watched while on the treadmill and which, while unremarkable, had a very exciting closing set piece that was nice to run fast to. i'm thankful for the pumpkin pie that d made—i'm thankful that though i never think of it as one of my favorite desserts, it is always really good and something that, while really good, i can control myself with and not eat too much of. i'm thankful for whipped cream.