12/6

i'm thankful that it snowed on sunday, the first snow i've seen this season, even though it was the worst kind of snow, the kind that falls even though the temperature is a few degrees above freezing, which means that it melts on contact, making you very soggy. i'm thankful, even though it was kind of unpleasant, to have been able to walk through it. i'm thankful for the way that inclement weather turns down some of the noise of the city—everyone recedes into themselves a bit. i'm thankful that at the end of our soggy walk, we ate deep rich warm bowls of tonkotsu ramen, which made the walk worth it.

i'm thankful for the museum of contemporary art, which we have always passed over in favor of the art institute but which we had a gap to see this time. i'm thankful for the andrew yang exhibition, thankful for the dark room dedicated to carl sagan and filled with seven tons of sand, one grain for every star in the milky way. i'm thankful for his strange exhibition table of curios, which melded the organic (rocks, crystals, fossilized lava) and manmade (crumpled cardboard, dryer lint, pennies), which reminded me of martian poetry, and for the diptych video work that d and i watched, which combined astral projections with audio of (for d) the artist talking to his mother about what space meant to her and (for me) the artist having the same conversation with an astrophysicist.

i'm thankful for the projected video installations by diana thater. i'm thankful especially for the one filmed in the monet gardens in giverny where she separated the images into three different colors displayed by three different projectors which then recombined them. i'm thankful for the trompe l'oeil temple she made, where monkeys streaked across parapets and into crevasses. i'm thankful for the 360 degree video collage taken in a decaying theater in chernobyl. i'm thankful for the long hall where the ghost of an owl moved along the way from one planet to another. i'm thankful for alfredo jaar's "the sound of silence," which is very intense and sad and takes place in a kind of crypt, dark inside but covered on the outside with blinding fluorescent lights. i'm thankful for fritz lang.

 i'm thankful that the coat check person refused my tip, even though i had gone out of my way in the snow/rain earlier in the day to break a $20 to have money for the tip. i'm thankful to have given some of the money to a person who needed it. i'm thankful that we moved into the airbnb studio apartment where we're staying for the rest of our trip. i'm thankful it is on the 34th floor of a building, which i think is the highest up i have ever stayed. i'm thankful for the view out the large window onto the city and am thankful at night for the opportunities for voyeurism this provides. i'm thankful to look out of the window not just out, but down, to get hit by the small thrill of vertigo. i'm thankful for this mesmerizing video of water transfer printing.

i'm thankful that i don't want to have to work tomorrow, but i'm thankful to hope that it will be an okay day. i'm thankful that though i forgot my work gmail password and left the hidden notebook i have it written on at home that maybe i can get by without email for two days and that if i can't, i will just have to go through the embarrassment of having to ask the information security team to reset it for me, which i will survive. i'm thankful that after eating way too many large heavy meals, we had pre-packaged salads from trader joe's for dinner last night. i'm thankful for red wine bought from a drugstore and for angostura bitters. i'm thankful for rafaellos, for the satisfying crunch and then the creamy interior. i'm thankful i do not have to eat hungry man dinners.

i'm thankful to have recognized that d and i seem to have an emotional cycle that we go through on every vacation, which begins with the initial excitment of being in a new place and being able to do things, then trends, usually with a walk that is too long and/or in the wrong direction, into annoyance and frustration, a sense of "why did we go here on vocation," which then, usually after some wine, bleeds back into a new kind of happiness, one which is informed by the earlier unhappiness, which makes it feel like something to press towards and hold onto, and which then eventually, usually before it is time to go home, the desire to go home and the wish that we were home already. i'm thankful to hope to stretch out the second happiness stage, which i think we are in now, most of the time, for as long as we can. i'm thankful to wonder whether i have ever been this happy.