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i'm thankful for the latest edition of good people (subscriber only, but he will probably resend if you subscribe now). i'm thankful that there was an interesting formal difference to this one—the others are purely occasional, inspired by and located in one specific fragment of a moment in time, whereas this one traced his run-ins over the course of ten years, from a distance, with a person he didn't know but felt acquainted with through proximity. i'm thankful for the solace the writer takes in feeling that this stranger (if stranger is even the right word, it feels too distant) is still alive in the world and doing alright, for the reassurance of "seeing strangers make it through the years...to imagine them thriving, or at least unflagging...doing alright."
i'm thankful that this made me think of ml, who is a person i used to follow and know a little on the internet years ago and who always seemed to be so deeply unhappy living in the city and unable to escape that unhappiness except for small isolated moments with friends and i'm thankful that now d and i follow him on instagram and see from his updates that he lives a happy life with his dog in the desert where he is building a farm to live on and tend and in all his pictures of himself he is smiling in a genuine and un-performed way and he takes pictures of canyons and plateaus and captions them with earnest and unironic appreciations of nature's beauty. i'm thankful that while social media can provide all of these bad feelings to all of us, that sometimes it seems engineered to generate bad feelings (because bad feelings generate content and engagement in the same way that in grad school we learned how tension generates story and attachment), there are still good feelings that it can give us if we find them and are receptive.
i'm thankful to have read this good people after, on my run at lunch, i stopped at the grocery store to buy onions and a knob of ginger (for another batch of pho) and chocolate (for pleasure) and as i was about to enter saw, also entering, a guy we went to grad school with who i have always disliked, even though he is, i think, fundamentally, a good person and probably a better person than me (but a person who, not primarily because of that betterness but probably tbh because of it to some extent in addition to the way he behaved in workshop, which i determined on mushrooms with a friend once was that because he had spent 5 more minutes prepping for workshop than anyone else he thought his opinion was 5 times more authoritative, which i always found very annoying and unpleasant to be around!!!).
i'm thankful that he may have seen me too but that he did not stop (i'm thankful, cringing slightly to myself, to remember that in our last house he lived literally across the street from us for an entire year and we managed to never actually have to speak with him, though that also had to have been a two way street (i'm thankful for literal metaphors) to some extent), whereas i stopped and pretended to be looking at something on my phone in the hopes of avoiding him, but of course as a good person he spent a long time in the produce section testing out various fruits and vegetables while i stood outside in the cold pacing and texting d about the situation with numb fingers before finally getting tired of that and going in and getting the chocolate and the onions, but not being able to find the ginger and having looked around all the "safe" sections of the produce section and not finding it and not wanting to ask someone who worked there about it and have them take me directly to the corner of the produce section where he was standing looking at god knows what sweet potato for so long i just decided fuck it, the ginger is less important to me than the prospect of this awkward conversation with this person.
i'm thankful that i got home and to d, who also disliked this person but without the intensity of dislike that i felt, laughed at hearing the full story, but then we got into a fight because i talked about not having the ginger and thought aloud about whether she could go out and get it in time for me to make a new batch on my lunch break today and she felt i was implying that she needed to do it and then she suggested that we eat the red beans and rice that she had made for her lunch that week, which i rejected because i don't like the taste of red beans and they also give me indigestion and this rejection made her mad and then i made her more mad by, when she offered to go get the ginger after work, telling her that i would be mad if she went out after work to buy the ginger, which i did not think was actually that important to the recipe, and we spent the rest of the afternoon being mad at each other, which sucked. i'm thankful that we made up after work and that if we have to have fights about things, we have fights about small things like whether i will eat some red beans and if we need a knob of ginger.
i'm thankful to have had a good afternoon at work. i'm thankful that i had to give a presentation at the support team meeting and i worked hard to make it both funny and educational and people seemed to feel that it was both those things and to have been happy that i gave it, which made me feel happy too. i'm thankful that d and i had a frozen pizza for dinner while watching kardashians, the plot of which revolved primarily around kris deciding whether she wanted her ashes to be pressed into a lab created diamond for her children to keep forever and also contained an amazing moment where khloe was eating a snack size pouch of almond butter with what may have been a literal silver spoon while driving. i'm thankful that she did not get into a car accident and to hope that i can watch keeping up with the kardashians forever, since i like to know that they are doing alright.
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