2/27

i'm thankful that n helped d learn more about a new job at her company that d is excited to apply to (i'm thankful to have heard her mechanical keyboard clacking away last night as she worked on a draft of a cover letter) and also suggested, kind and generous as she always is, that i apply for a job there too. i'm thankful, despite the problems i sometimes have, to think i want to stay at the place where i am now. i'm thankful that last week was my one year anniversary here and i was buried in an avalanche of kind words and well wishes, as well as a notification that i'd reached the milestone of having sent 12,000 replies to our customers (1000 a month). i'm thankful that on friday afternoon there was a gif dance party at work, a slack thread where we all listened to the same song and posted gifs of ourselves dancing together, so that, with a little imagination, it was like we were dancing together. i'm thankful that though at previous jobs i likely wouldn't have posted anything and would have pretended it didn't exist, embarrassed, i instead recorded and posted a gif of me dancing, sloppily green-screened by photobooth against stock footage of a rollercoaster and everyone loved it. i'm thankful for something strange here, which is that this is the first job i've had where it feels like there is a possible future for me, room to grow from the place i am now and into another place, which is sometimes hard and makes me break my rules about work/life balance (since it makes it harder to leave work at work, when you know that work you do "outside work" might help you become the thing you want to be, and you're also tempted to do it because that work is actually something that excites you, a fun process of discovery) but also empowering and good. i'm thankful that my manager is excited about the work i'm doing now and on friday described a slack bot i'd built that asks a user to press a button and then updates the message to replace the button with the user's name "badass." i'm thankful that a day doesn't go by where i don't laugh out loud multiple times at things my coworkers have said or memed or gif-ed or reacji-ed. i'm thankful that sometimes i want to talk to my coworkers when i'm not at work, which is not something i could say about jobs i've had in the past. i'm thankful that all of the above doesn't always make it easy to start the day, since my job is a hard job and all of the above doesn't necessarily make it less hard, at the base level, but i'm thankful that every day after i finish these notes i do it anyway, i send this message and close this tab and then open another tab and start sending messages there. i'm thankful to send messages.