4/14/17

i'm thankful to always forget about and so be pleasantly surprised by the spoken coda at the end of "doo wop (that thing)" (i'm thankful to be in awe of jenna). i'm thankful for the sweetness of the voices and for the way that background music gently creeps in, a bow wrapped around the present. i'm thankful for "got til' it's gone" by janet jackson, which has a strange joni mitchell sample. i'm thankful for the silliness of "if u seek amy," which always makes me laugh in the chorus because i feel like it doesn't really make sense even if it technically does. i'm thankful for "come on a cone" by nicki minaj. i'm thankful that the other day pierce reminded me of how much i love american water by the silver jews, especially in the summer. i'm thankful that though david berman's singing voice is not that great, the songs on that album suit it perfectly. i'm thankful to be respectfully annoyed that it's not on spotify and am thankful to be able to listen to it on youtube. 

i'm thankful to remember the sharpied burned MP3 CD i had with it on it in college, which i listened to on my translucent orange discman, which i held to even though most of my friends had switched to ipods because a) i didn't have the money for an ipod and b) i really liked the discman, even though it sometimes skipped. i'm thankful to remember bringing the discman to korea with me and it being viewed as some kind of museum piece, which led me to eventually replace it with a samsung mp3 player the size of a pack of gum. i'm thankful to remember sadly throwing away by binder of burned CDs when i moved back to the USA because i didn't have space in my suitcase.

i'm thankful to know that it's so basic and obvi to fetishize the physical objects of my youth, but i'm thankful for how the MP3 CD seemed to me at the time to be the perfect format—limited enough that you had to curate what was on it and think about themes and vibes and what albums would go well with other albums and yet capacious enough that you could fit a bunch of albums on one of them. i'm thankful to remember saturday afternoons spent at my school computer lab trawling obscure MP3 blogs for albums i'd seen mentioned in a review or heard talked about by a friend of a friend and downloading them from rapidshare and burning them to MP3s. 

i'm thankful for how much of the internet then (and the world, too, but especially the internet) was for me about discovery. i'm thankful that the internet felt infinite and yet at the same time also in some way finite, like if i looked hard and long enough i could reach the edges of the map (i'm thankful to know that this wasn't true, but i'm thankful that it felt true and i don't know that it would have felt true if there was no truth to it at all. i'm thankful to think about how in contrast now, i run in very tight loops through my content stations and the idea of actually seeing even a tiny percentage of the great wide mass of everything that is always expanding every moment seems totally impossible. 

i'm thankful to still be pleasantly surprised by things sometimes though. i'm thankful for this video of a golden retriever puppy comforting an older dog who's having a nightmare. i'm thankful for mira gonzalez's wonderful weirdness (and for her dog). i'm thankful for this comparison, which has called into question a deeply held core value of mine. i'm thankful to be shaken by this news about tea. i'm thankful for this "really beautiful video of james baldwin getting out of bed in his underpants and having a smoke." i'm thankful for this image's accurate depiction of my spirituality. i'm thankful to really just prefer butter for a number of reasons.