1/15/2017
i'm thankful that though i slept poorly last night, i sleep well most nights, so it could be worse. i'm thankful for the weird dream i kept having where there was a woman who was squatting in the attic of our house and i couldn't get to her because there wasn't a ladder and also none of the lights in the house would turn on. i'm thankful to recognize that this is is a common trope of scary dreams for me, trying to turn a knob or flick a switch to turn on a light and see what is there and nothing happening, me stranded in a darkness which is full of horrible possibility. i'm thankful that i kept doing that thing where you have a bad dream and wake up from it and then try to go back to sleep and go right back into it and this happens multiple times. i'm thankful eventually i stopped this cycle by putting on my sleepphones and listening to an old episode of food on franklin at low volume.
i'm thankful for the strange thing i have noticed when i have scary dreams now, which i don't know if it's a side effect of medication or aging or both, which is that when i wake up in a sweat, it's usually not my whole body that's sweating (though sometimes that), but is my pubic hair and genitals that are hot and damp with sweat. i'm thankful that sometimes i reach down after waking from a scary dream and touch myself as i guess a way of knowing how scared i really was? or maybe it's just a way of asserting i am in the here and now, the way children are told to pinch themselves to tell whether they're in a dream. i'm thankful to know this is weird and tmi but i'm thankful to somehow find my wet pubic hair comforting in the middle of a dark night.
i'm thankful for the conversation we were having during a break at band practice the other day, which was about flying dreams. i'm thankful to have surprised everyone by telling them that i am jealous of people who fly in dreams because i have never been able to. i'm thankful for my consolation prize for flying dreams, which are my dreams of bouncing, in which i shoot off the ground into the sky as if out of a cannon and i think i might be about to fly but then my velocity slows and at a certain point i hit the apex of an invisible arc and start falling. i'm thankful that this is often terrifying, as i plummet back down to the earth, about to be smashed against the ground, but i'm thankful that in the dreams, just when that's about to happen, instead, my feet connect with the ground painlessly (with reassuring solidity, even), my knees bend, and i spring up into the air again, tracing a new arc. i'm thankful that though i hope someday to fly in a dream this is still a pretty amazing sensation to experience in a dream. i'm thankful for our singer, who was talking about how she flies often in dreams but there it feels difficult, like she's in a heavy fluid and it's difficult to get anywhere.
i'm thankful that work was good on friday. i'm thankful that i got a promotion, which does not fix everything that is broken about work but could maybe help some and which at least has given me a bit of hope, which i needed. i'm thankful that i noticed an important bug before anyone else and am thankful to have written a good bug ticket about it. i'm thankful to have built an internal tool to make a team process easier. i'm thankful for the new weekly friday afternoon thread in our main channel that somebody created where we can talk about books and tv shows and music we are enjoying. i'm thankful that it was not so busy on friday afternoon so that i was actually able to participate in this thread. i'm thankful for the way that learning about what people do in their free time can help to deepen and complicate the office caricatures that can form in our minds.
i'm thankful for the new xx album, which i'm thankful i saved to listen to with d on good speakers after dinner last night. i'm thankful to think is a perfect third album in that it has all the magic that made me love them in the first album but puts an entirely new frame around it. i'm thankful that it has inspired me to try harder with jamie xx's solo work, which i've never really been able to get into so much, since his sonic fingerprints define so much of what makes their music great. i'm thankful that as a band, i think they have an association with melancholy, but what i love are the moments when brightness peeks through the clouds, which are nicely spread across the new album. i'm thankful for the quiet ambient album migration by bonobo, which includes a gorgeous guest spot from the singer from rhye. i'm thankful for the lily allen cover of the clash's "straight to hell," which d introduced to me and which is very beautiful despite being such a dark song.
i'm thankful for this clip of the office, which is one of my favorite clips of the office. i'm thankful that our dinnertime rewatch is on the last season, which is the worst season, but i'm thankful that even in bad seasons of television, there are often wonderful moments. i'm thankful that last night, we watched the first episode of the young pope, which is so bizarre and which i kind of love so far. i'm thankful for decadence and thankful for spectacle. i'm thankful for the period in my life where i was addicted to cherry coke zero before i realized that 90% of the time caffeine makes me feel like i'm dying, which is not worth the 10% of the time where it puts me into a perfect flow state of productivity. i'm thankful for diane keaton.
i'm thankful for this clip of the office, which is one of my favorite clips of the office. i'm thankful that our dinnertime rewatch is on the last season, which is the worst season, but i'm thankful that even in bad seasons of television, there are often wonderful moments. i'm thankful that last night, we watched the first episode of the young pope, which is so bizarre and which i kind of love so far. i'm thankful for decadence and thankful for spectacle. i'm thankful for the period in my life where i was addicted to cherry coke zero before i realized that 90% of the time caffeine makes me feel like i'm dying, which is not worth the 10% of the time where it puts me into a perfect flow state of productivity. i'm thankful for diane keaton.
i'm thankful to feel mild distress that i haven't been able to really get into a book deeply recently but i'm thankful to know that i have felt this before and that it will eventually pass. i'm thankful that d checked out the scratch anthology from the library (ha! i'm thankful for all the people who stole steal this book) and that i was able to read the essays by the three writers in it that i know. i'm thankful that last night i started a reread of erik larson's in the garden of beasts, which is a nonfiction book about a university of chicago historian who FDR picks for lack of a better option to be the US ambassador in berlin in 1933. i'm thankful for the book which is terrifying re: the normalization of fascism in our present tense, but at the same time readable (i'm thankful that history is less frightening than journalism right now, since at least it already happened and the world didn't end and we lived after it).
i'm thankful to say fuck this and fuck him forever. i'm thankful for today's feeling. i'm thankful for this amazing bit of flash (i hope) fiction. i'm thankful for jenny slate. i'm thankful for chat with friends about mice and semen and supplement hauls (i'm thankful to wonder how long before mouse semen becomes a supplement, which it maybe is already but i'm afraid to google). i'm thankful for these handwritten thank you notes from rohie's tinyletter. i'm thankful for the new chapstick i got at CVS yesterday, which is blistex's orange mango blast and which tastes exactly like the tropical flavor pack of tic tacs, which is a very good thing.
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