12/1/15
i'm thankful that even though it was a gray day yesterday and most of the trees in town have lost their leaves, when i was riding home, i turned a corner on my bike and encountered a majestic set of trees with pumpkin colored leaves in full foliage on the sides of the bridge over the road near our house.
i'm thankful for d's aphoristic suggestion that a good unripe pear is an "ideal apple" in the discussion we were having in bed while she flipped through the harry and david catalog we got in the mail. i'm thankful that we can buy delicious pears for 99 cents a pound on sale at the supermarket rather than ordering them for 60 dollars from the harry and david catalog, though i am also thankful for the fancy foil that harry and david (imagine if they were just two people, sitting in a house full of fruit) wrap the pears in, which i bet contributes as much to their food’s flavor aura as terroir. i'm thankful for the actual ideal apple (for me at least), which is a fuji small enough to be palmed, but i'm also thankful for the crisp complexity of unripe pears.
i'm thankful for the nice conversation i had with my manager while she showed me cell phone pictures of her seven different christmas trees and i'm thankful for the funny sacrilegious office e-mail chain i participated in with a colleague yesterday and i'm thankful for the silly text message chats about christmas lists that d had with her family in the evening. i'm thankful for d's father's wishlist, which featured excellent emoji usage and began with a request for "nut-related snacks."
i'm thankful for the beauty of the white skies that we get here sometimes at night, which i must have experienced before but which i don't remember experiencing anywhere else i've lived before. i'm thankful that i look up at the sky more than maybe i used to and that's why i notice them here. i'm thankful for the view of the white sky i got last night through the top pane of the window in our back bathroom. i'm thankful for the way that the finely inked lines of the tree in our neighbor's front yard were framed against the white sky.
i'm thankful of how that view reminded me of a moment in film school, when i shot a similar, sharp-focus image of a tree up a pedestrian tunnel against a blank sky and left it freeze framed on the avid in the lab while i went down the hall to get a soda. i'm thankful for sandro, a brazilian grad student who did capoeira and who everybody thought was the the coolest, and i'm thankful for how when i came back to the lab, he was standing over my avid staring at the screen and told me with admiration that the frame looked like a painting. i'm thankful for how that made me feel. i'm thankful for another moment he made me feel cool, when i was played some bert jansch as we were auditioning music for some stupid short and he was so excited that i knew who that was that he immediately burned me a cd of burn the maps by the frames and made some kind of nice inscription in sharpie on the face of it. i'm thankful for the way this makes me remember the translucent orange discman i had in college and all the mp3 cd compilations i made for it from rapidshare links on mp3 blogs and all the nice memories encoded in those layers of polycarbonate.
i'm thankful thinking of bert jansch makes me think of nick drake which makes me think of my favorite alternate guitar tuning, BEBEBE, which i would often put my acoustic into in college in order to "break up my patterns" and "find new melodies." i'm thankful to remember how this annoyed my friend and "bandmate" jb (i’m thankful for flying grape jelly, which was our band name) and i'm thankful for the moment my sophomore year when i was vamping in BEBEBE in our apartment's living room and a girl who was visiting my roommate came out of my roommate's room and down the hall and into the living room to ask me what tuning the guitar was in, which was just the kind of thing i fantasized about a girl asking me in college, even if i ended up making the ensuing conversation weird in some way i can only remember as a ghostly cringe.
i'm thankful for the weird person i was then and the weird person i am now.