12/1/17
i'm thankful for that weird phenomenon where you search for a song you want to hear on spotify and play it from the search results and then go back to whatever you were doing before you decided you needed to hear this song in order to continue existing and then after it ends, while you are distracted, because you played it from the search results, you start hearing other songs with the same title, and sometimes this makes for interesting bricolage but often it wrecks the vibe because the tone or feel of the next song with the same title is different than the song you wanted to deploy to season your consciousness.
i'm thankful that the other day i had searched for "pink matter" by frank ocean, a song i have told you of my love for before, and i'm thankful after that song ended, i knew it had ended because i i know the song and yet it seemed to continue into this coda of warm solo rhodes piano restating the themes and i then, flipping open my phone, realized that it was a separate rendition of the same song on an album of lovely intimate solo electric piano covers of frank ocean's music. i'm thankful that if you search for the artist "solo sounds" on spotify there are lots of odd little albums like this (the hits of gorillaz played on solo electric bass? london calling on cello?? the velvet underground and nico played on slide dobro???). i'm thankful to have been reminded of this excellent ny times popcast about how spotify seeds their playlists with what some might call "fake" artists for complicated business reasons and i'm thankful for these fake artists if they make music that makes me feel the way real music makes me feel, i don't care about labels or motives.
i'm thankful for this description of solving big and complicated problems as eating a gigantic piece of cheese by the incredibly named NASA employee "Buzz Hello" in this history of the apollo space program i have been rereading before going to sleep because i haven't lately found the emotional energy required to start a new book:
"Buzz Hello arrived at the Cap on May 7, 1967, to find a place where, in his words, "morale had sagged like a clothesline with ice on it." The North American people at the cape were the people who had somehow burned up three astronauts. "The had no way of knowing where they had failed, what they had done wrong," Hello recalled. "They had lost very close friends of theirs in the spacecraft...The whole world had turned against them." There was no one particular thing that had to be fixed. "You just sort of wade into it," Hello said. "It's like a gigantic piece of cheese—you've got to start biting somewhere."
"Buzz Hello arrived at the Cap on May 7, 1967, to find a place where, in his words, "morale had sagged like a clothesline with ice on it." The North American people at the cape were the people who had somehow burned up three astronauts. "The had no way of knowing where they had failed, what they had done wrong," Hello recalled. "They had lost very close friends of theirs in the spacecraft...The whole world had turned against them." There was no one particular thing that had to be fixed. "You just sort of wade into it," Hello said. "It's like a gigantic piece of cheese—you've got to start biting somewhere."
i'm thankful that i asked an engineer at work for help figuring out why a function i had spent hours tweaking and piddling with and bashing my head against and not getting to work wasn't working and he showed me that the problem that had driven me so mad all that time was the presence of two additional unnecessary curly brackets. i'm thankful that though i accidentally forgot i was supposed to have a call with the head of the department and thus was fifteen minutes late, he was kind and understanding and we had a really great and encouraging conversation about my future at the company. i'm thankful to have filled in to help train a new employee yesterday afternoon and that we had a nice rapport and i hopefully helped him feel a little more comfortable about his new job and how challenging it can be but how the best way to handle it is just pick a part of the gigantic piece of cheese and start biting somewhere.
i'm thankful for this found poem. i'm thankful that jenny slate and chris evans are back together and that jenny slate is going to write a book of feminist fables. i'm thankful for this thread of clips of the CD compilation commercials of my youth. i'm thankful for this hilarious picture of john hamm in good omens, which was one of my very favorite books when i was young (i'm thankful to remember reading it at my grandparents' house and my grandmother looking at the cover and thinking approvingly that it was like chicken soup for the soul and me being grinning demon emoji knowing that i knew something she didn't). i'm thankful that yesterday when i was musing about how much i miss terrace house, mg let me know that there is a site where some wonderful group of people is posting the early seasons of terrace house with English fan subs, which made me so incredibly happy. i'm thankful that d and i watched the first two episodes of the first season and they were wonderful (i'm thankful the first episode used "i'm waiting for the man" to soundtrack a scene of a character at art school, which is extremely Me content). i'm thankful to remember being in the lobby of my dorm my freshman year of college badly playing pool with new friends and having a silly argument about some lyric in that song, though i don't remember what lyric anymore.
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