3/1/17

i'm thankful for my morning routine, which has changed recently. i'm thankful that though i used to work 10-6, i now work 9:30-5:30. i'm thankful that this is a small change, but one that feels significant. i'm thankful that my alarm is set for 6:42 am (i'm thankful that this is an arbitrary number but there is something i like about it, maybe that it is even, maybe that the minutes add up to the hour). i'm thankful that i kiss d to start her waking up (if the alarm hasn't already done so), then put on my bathrobe and go into the kitchen and pour our bowls of cereal and fetch a multivitamin for each of us. i'm thankful to bring the bowls back to the bedroom, where d has awoken (at least somewhat) and turned on the fairy lights hanging over our bed. i'm thankful that i climb onto the bed on my knees to give her her bowl of cereal, half of a paper towel, and a multivitamin. i'm thankful that i then get back in bed (i'm thankful that my place is still warm from sleeping) and we eat our cereal quietly while reading the internet on our phones, sometimes sending each other a link to something we've read.

i'm thankful that after we've finished eating, i collect the bowls and the paper towel fragments and put them on the floor beside the bed, then take my multivitamin and the rest of the supplements i take in the morning (fish oil, zinc, time release calcium, magnesium), then get back in bed. i'm thankful that i snuggle into d as she opens snapchat on her phone and that we then watch the snap stories that have built up since the previous time we watched. i'm thankful that depending on the length of the stories, by the time we've finished, it is usually 7:05-7:10. i'm thankful that sometimes i read things on the internet on my phone for a few more minutes, then get my laptop from the red chair on the other side of the room and bring it back to bed. i'm thankful that i open it and write these thank you notes. 

i'm thankful that the time it takes to write the notes varies based on how much i have to say and how intensely i feel the need to say it and how well my brain seems to be working on a given morning and a number of other known and unknown factors. i'm thankful to reminisce about the early days of writing these notes when i had a job with lots of downtime where i could spend hours at work writing the notes, but i'm also thankful in my life now to have a deadline of sorts, which is 8:20am, the time at which i used to try to get on the treadmill for my morning run (and which now, since i'm starting work a half hour earlier, i need to get on the treadmill in order to finish a session in time for work). i'm thankful that usually i make this deadline and am able to express most of what i want to express, even though it sometimes would be nice to have more time (i'm thankful to know that if i had more time, i would probably just waste it, even though i'm also thankful to realize that the notion of "wasted" time is yet another conceptual incursion of capitalism into everyday life and something to be resisted).

i'm thankful that i send my notes off to you when they're done (hopefully without typos, though almost inevitably there are typos), then make a tweet of the notes featuring a gif that is related to a sentence for the notes (i'm thankful that this is a process that could be automated but that i like the craft of choosing a particular sentence to represent a given container of words and then finding a moving image that resonates with or against it in some way). i'm thankful then to close up my computer, brush my teeth (i'm thankful that i don't know exactly why i brush my teeth at this part of my morning routine—perhaps to ensure that like the writing, it gets done, since if delays later caused a time crunch i might, like the writing, skip it?), put on my running shorts and a t-shirt (usually the t-shirt i wore throughout the previous day, to save on laundry) and shoes and socks, then get on the treadmill. 

i'm thankful that the room the treadmill is in used to be completely dark because of the blankets i hung over the windows, which added an interesting disembodied quality to the running, but i'm thankful now that i've pulled one of the blankets back to let in the morning light (i'm thankful my eyes hurt less now that i do this). i'm thankful to have found a way to run on the treadmill, even though i don't really like running on treadmills, since even though i don't really like running on treadmills, i prefer them to running in the cold or through the rain, especially early in the morning. 

i'm thankful that after the run, which is usually between 9 and 9:10, i go into the kitchen and, depending on how much i sweated, either have a glass of water or water mixed with electrolyte powder and read through the internet that has happened since i last looked at 7 or so. i'm thankful that when i started work at 10, i had more of a time buffer here, which might provide the opportunity to get in some yoga or qigong or meditation, but i'm thankful to not really miss it that much so far, since often i didn't do those things and just kept reading through the internet on my phone. i'm thankful at around 9:15, i take a short hot shower (i'm thankful for hot showers and thankful that i could stay in one for a very long time (and sometimes do, on the weekend), dry off, put on clothes, take my prozac and l-theanine, refill the quart sized mason jar i use as a water glass, grab a banana or a protein bar or some other snack, and open my computer again to start my work day.

i'm thankful that my second day of work went well, even though we suffered from the AWS outage that broke much of the internet for most of the afternoon and i'm guessing that will likely make today harder than yesterday was. i'm thankful to yesterday, as we waited nervously for a deluge of undelivered support tickets to explode into our inbox, to come to a realization about this kind of work that i have chosen to do, which is that probably there is never going to come a time when the resources that match the demand on our resources, that no matter how fast and often we hire new team members to handle the queue of incoming tickets, the queue of incoming tickets will always scale to exceed it. i'm thankful to imagine as a metaphor putting up a wall of sandbags against an eroding coastline, which you know won't really stop the storm but you know might do something and is something you can do, is the job you still need to do to protect yourself and the people you love, or perhaps a better metaphor is bailing water out of a boat with holes in it, where you can keep the boat afloat by constantly bailing and coordinating your bailing with the other people in the boat and instructing each other on techniques and ideas for better bailing and trying to become more efficient at bailing, but i'm thankful to know that all the bailing in the world, the best bailing, will not fix the fact that there are holes in the boat and that as time goes on, there will be more holes, sometimes small ones, sometimes large ones.

i'm thankful to know that this sounds like a dark thing to realize, but i'm thankful that it is kind of freeing, actually? i'm thankful to know that i am doing my best, which is all that i can do, and i'm thankful to push myself to keep doing my best. i'm thankful that my labor and the labor of the other people on my team makes it possible for us to stay afloat for another day, which seems like a small thing but is actually meaningful and valuable and something to be celebrated, which is an accomplishment in and of itself. i'm thankful to feel valued and respected and cared for here, which were things i didn't really feel at my last job and which is meaningful. i'm thankful that the leadership (the captain of the boat, to torture this metaphor further) cares more about the plight of those bailing out the water in the boat than the leadership at my old job, which is meaningful, and i'm thankful that they are trying to plug holes and to get us more people to bail out the water that gets in through the ones that aren't plugged as fast as they can, which is meaningful. i'm thankful it is now 8:00 am and i will stop here so that i can get in a run before a day of bailing out and staying afloat. i'm thankful today to wish you luck and happiness today with the holes in your boats, to hope that you continue to stay afloat, which seems like a small thing but is something to be celebrated.