12/26

i'm thankful that my brother liked the KNEX build your own nerf gun set i got him as a nostalgia present, that his eyes got big in exactly the way i hoped they would. i'm thankful for the soliloquy this prompted from my mom to deborah about how from the age of about 1 1/2, everything my brother and i could get our hands on became a gun: "if they picked up a stick in the yard, the stick was a gun; if they didn't have any objects, their fingers were guns." i'm thankful for one of the first gifts i can really remember wanting, which was a BB gun with a sniper scope. i'm thankful to remember the laser tag sets that my grandparents got us for christmas one year, which we tore through the neighborhood zipping and zapping. i'm thankful that despite all this, my brother and i's very nineties boyish childhood obsession with guns, both of us grew up into vehement nonviolent liberal aesthetes who do not own actual guns.

i'm thankful to have rented dishonored 2 from the redbox at the grocery store on christmas eve. i'm thankful that a few hours later, i retrieved the game from d's tote bag and opened the case and went to pull it out and realized that instead of the game disk, it was just a photocopy of the actual disk on printer paper, sloppily cut out. i'm thankful to have appreciated the ingenuity of the scam (the copy reproduced the qr and bar codes which the machine reads to indicate whether the disk is there) so much that i wasn't even annoyed to not get the game (i'm thankful that i am the one that got the bogus "disc" and not some young kid). i'm thankful for this waypoint article about cheat codes and i'm thankful for the reference on a recent waypoint podcast to deleuze and guattari's book on kafka and i'm thankful for whoever uploaded a PDF of that book here. i'm thankful for the self care game jam, which produced some stuff i want to try.

i'm thankful for terrace house, which we watched a bunch of on christmas even and which i have now gotten d hooked on. i'm thankful that though it first it seemed like the drama of the show would be the absence of drama that no there is actual drama. i'm thankful to be reminded of the hills, the show i obsessively devoted several years of my young adulthood to (i'm thankful to have developed the following taxonomy: "minori=lc; mizuki=(a better) audrina; yuuriko=whitney/lo; makoto=jason waller; uchi=justinbobby; yuki=spencer"). i'm thankful for the opportunity to observe cultural differences within a familiar aesthetic framework, which makes their outlines sharper and clearer. i'm thankful in conversation with a friend to have determined the form of marketing that has the greatest effect on me, which is "gentle lies about increased well-being in a venn diagram of pseudoscience and mysticism."

i'm thankful for fresh orange juice. i'm thankful for guava candies. i'm thankful for the zots that my dad packed into a christmas package. i'm thankful for the tacos i made for dinner last night and that i will make more tacos for dinner tonight. i'm thankful that though the cake d made was underbaked it was still delicious and we called it "christmas pudding." i'm thankful for this virtual christmas stocking by claire donato, which "contains multitudes, e.g. digital objects and artifacts, signs of lived life from this year to the next." i'm thankful when things are not only interesting but are also presented in interesting ways. i'm thankful for a new brainball, which catalogues many important things, including an "alphabet of passive-aggressive and/or heavily subtexty texts + abbreviations." 

i'm thankful for the instagram account of people who have a pet fox that d follows. i'm thankful for the vocalizations of the fox, which are not what i had expected them to be. i'm thankful to have learned from one of the instagram comments that foxes smell incredibly bad all the time and you can't get rid of it, which made me thankful that we were viewing the fox on instagram rather than in real life. i'm thankful for the family of deer that i saw in the park yesterday.