12/17/15
i'm thankful for a thought i had while writing yesterday's thank you notes, but forgot to include, which has to do with the increments of time we use to remember and evaluate our experience of our lives. i'm thankful that, though i felt bad the other day and though as the day went on, the veil of that bad feeling draped over everything, so that, in my mind in bed at the end of the day, it seemed incontrovertibly true that i had had a bad day, actually, when i reexamined the day not as this over-arching macro abstraction of "bad day," but as a series of concrete instants of experience, my perception of it changed. i'm thankful for the perspective to see that on this "bad day," lots of nice things happened to me and there were a plethora of small slices of time when i was perfectly content. i'm thankful for the presence of mind to recognize nice moments in the course of my day and set down traces of them in notes to be able to remind myself later that my life is usually okay (and often wonderful) even when, because of unfortunate reactions in my brain chemistry, it feels like it isn't.
i'm thankful to be reminded of the moment near the end of infinite jest where gately is undergoing constant, unimaginable pain in his hospital bed and realizes that the only way to bear it without painkillers is to subdivide time into smaller and smaller segments, to avoid losing himself in a hope-destroying droste effect future spiral but instead to stay with the present, to focus on each second of survival of the pain of being alive as an accomplishment, to think "this pain is so terrible, but i bore it for this second and i'm still here, and now another second of this terrible pain has gone by and i'm still here, and now another second of the pain has gone by" and so on. i'm thankful for my mom for buying me the paperback of that book before i went to live alone in an apartment in korea for a year and i'm thankful for the opportunity i had, in my last semester of grad school, to reread it carefully and annotate it for a class. i'm thankful for the british doctoral student who seemed to be the only other person besides me and the professor who enjoyed the book and wanted to talk about it. i'm thankful for her enthusiasm, which made me feel like less of an outcast for my enthusiasm, even as, when it came time to fill out our evaluations, another student compared our shared affection for the professor to stockholm syndrome.
i'm thankful that it's almost christmas vacation. i'm thankful to remember this time of year last year, when d was in california and i was stuck here in a deserted town feeling terribly alone and depressed, eating mediocre fish tacos and binge-watching generation kill. i'm thankful for generation kill, which handles the passage of time in a more interesting way than maybe any television show i have ever seen and which dealt with war and bureaucracy and politics and what it means to be an american with a level of complexity that is extremely rare. i'm thankful for the eternal nordic dreaminess of alexander skarsgard. i'm thankful that d isn't going anywhere this christmas and and i'm not going anywhere this christmas and we'll be together in our house for a week and a half instead of having to go through airports or down freeways. i'm thankful to imagine all the fun that we'll have. i'm thankful for d, who after days of struggling to roll the perfect snowman in her animal crossing town, has finally succeeded.
i'm thankful for the professor who told me about how the actress responsible for the voice of siri randomly followed him on twitter. i'm thankful for motion sensor lights, and for my memory of running staircases in the winter in my highrise apartment building in korea, the lights lagging at each landing slightly behind my pace. i'm thankful that i taught the word "hijinks" and its meaning to one of the visiting lecturers. i'm thankful for the shared glance of bemusement that i had with an IT person as she dealt with a difficult client. i'm thankful for my new short hair, especially after i take showers at the gym at lunch. i'm thankful, though they are dangerously for my self-discipline and diet, for the cornucopia of delicious baked goods that continue to arrive at the office. i'm thankful for the enormous tub of caramel corn that d gave me as an early christmas present. i'm thankful that even though i scorched the brown rice again, we had enough cauliflower for me to grate to go with our leftover bibimbap and it was actually maybe even better than the brown rice would have been. i'm thankful that though i stupidly left the leftovers of the leftover bibimbap on the counter for several hours after dinner "to cool," there wasn't that much of it left to spoil and we have pasta to eat. i'm thankful that the blinking red light on the back of my bike, which i keep forgetting to turn off when i lock it up in the morning, has not died. i'm thankful for the opportunity to stop writing this email to go turn it off now.