1/30/17
i'm thankful for the powdered sugar dusting of snow that fell yesterday. i'm thankful to remember when i was a kid and my mom made snow cream from snow my brother and i had collected from the yard. i'm thankful to find that kind of gross in retrospect but also to think of it fondly. i'm thankful for the experience of trying to remember how things in the distant past tasted, for how i know so much of it is a construction and a projection. i'm thankful for the coffee and almond ice cream bar i had for dessert yesterday. i'm thankful for salt and vinegar potato chips.
"I believe in the power of storytelling, of art -- "obviously," as Sherlock says (please imagine Benedict Cumberbatch's delivery while doing so). But it is only now, writing this, remembering the emotional experience of watching The OA, of reading my favorite books, that I feel it feel it. That I know it. "You don't really know something until your body knows it," Prairie says. Steve, one of the people Prairie befriends in the attic, asks her how she survived in captivity for so long. "I survived because I wasn't alone," she says."
i'm thankful for fleabag, which d and i finished watching last night. i'm thankful that it was so good. i'm thankful (maybe) that i don't really have a tendency to mourn deaths, that once people are dead to me, they're gone, and that whenever i see representations of people mourning in movies and TV shows, there is some part of me inside that is going "okay, get over it" (i'm thankful to know that this is probably at least partially a result of the privilege of never having lost someone i really love. i'm thankful that fleabag made mourning feel so real to me in a way that it hadn't before, made me feel a shard of the pain of what it might feel like to have lost someone you loved.
i'm thankful for the beautiful moment in fleabag where the titular character is breaking down and says "either everyone feels like this at least a little bit or i am completely fucking alone." i'm thankful for the difference between knowing intellectually that art is important and powerful and that it can do real things and actually experiencing that power in your body, in your soul:
"I believe in the power of storytelling, of art -- "obviously," as Sherlock says (please imagine Benedict Cumberbatch's delivery while doing so). But it is only now, writing this, remembering the emotional experience of watching The OA, of reading my favorite books, that I feel it feel it. That I know it. "You don't really know something until your body knows it," Prairie says. Steve, one of the people Prairie befriends in the attic, asks her how she survived in captivity for so long. "I survived because I wasn't alone," she says."
i'm thankful to have another show by phoebe waller-bridge to watch on netflix now that we've finished fleabag. i'm thankful for kim k. tweeting statistics; i'm thankful to be reminded of the fact that of course the kardashians themselves are the descendants of refugees. i'm thankful for rihanna. i'm thankful for carina's illustrated journals. i'm thankful for this cleaning tip from d. i'm thankful that i found my chapstick, which i thought i had lost, under my bed. i'm thankful that after today, i only have one more monday at this job.
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