3/8/18
i'm thankful to have had two great conversations with smart people on my team yesterday. i'm thankful for l and i's discussion of how labor is represented in our jobs and how our organizational culture should be more pliable and able to be more responsive to individual needs. i'm thankful that k said it was so great to be able to talk to someone else who was thinking about and experiencing the same kind of things as i was; i'm thankful that she and i might get to buddy up and work together on projects in the future, which i think would be something both of us would enjoy and get something out of.
i'm thankful to have biked into town on my lunch break to pick up my sleeping pills. i'm thankful that my favorite pharmacist, m, was working and she showed me pictures on her phone of the 8 week old puppy her family had gotten the day before and for our discussion of how the most important thing about a dog name is that you need to be able to come up with different versions of it. i'm thankful when the transaction is over and we tell each other to have a good day, it feels like we both really mean it.
i'm thankful for this dog struggling in booties. i'm thankful for the latest episode of glowing up with rachel bloom, which had d and i howling with laughter and includes deep thoughts like "the balls are the labia of the [male] butthole." i'm thankful to be near death from happiness at this supergroup of artists having a nice evening together. i'm thankful for miyazaki. i'm thankful that sarah is not dead. i'm thankful for this moving essay about a pair of sweatpants, especially the section about the lives of the community of people in the amazon comments:
The top-ranked sweatpants on Amazon in January of 2016 were Champion Men’s Open Bottom Eco Fleece Sweatpant in Granite Heather. The ones with open bottoms, not elasticated cuffs, for ease of putting on and taking off. On the day that I opened up Amazon on my laptop to buy sweatpants, 2,099 people had taken the time to write reviews of those sweatpants. They were people who were serious about sweatpants.
Like me, many of those people were going through challenging times in their lives. Times when they didn’t want to think about getting dressed, when they wanted to feel cozy, when they wanted to wear pants that they could pull on and off without even removing their shoes. There were people who were having surgery and endorsed the sweatpants as perfect for the recovery process. There were people who were going through major life stages — house moves, going to college — for whom clothing needed to be the absolute last thing on their minds. There were people whose bodies were enduring the transformation of pregnancy or weight loss, for whom inexpensive garments with elastic waists were essential. There were people whose reviews made them sound pretty sad. These were the reviews that I liked most of all.
But the 2,099 people who had taken time to review the sweatpants weren’t people who had given up on life, either. They were engaged. They were making the best of things, and they wanted to help their sweatpants brothers and sisters. ‘I want sweatpants for function and comfort *not* fashion,’ one wrote. ‘The pants are easy to slip on and off,’ another wrote. ‘They’re sweatpants, soooooooo’, wrote a third, which was exactly what I wanted to know: that the pants would do what I needed them to do, and nothing more or less. I ordered a size small.
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