4/30/17

i'm thankful that yesterday, though it was supposed to rain all day, it didn't rain in the afternoon and i was able to get in a bike ride. i'm thankful to have gotten to the route i normally take to get to the lake and to have gotten turned around at a road block by a man in an orange vest with a santa claus beard. i'm thankful that though i found this quite annoying, it led me to go down a country road i'd never been down before which was quite a pleasant place to ride. i'm thankful that though the route was a bit shorter than i had intended, i still got a good workout. i'm thankful that it got up to almost 80 degrees and by the time i got home, i was caked in salty sweat. i'm thankful for the apple pie lara bar i ate while sitting on the floor of the kitchen drinking cold water out of a large mason jar.

i'm thankful that yesterday evening, d and i watched the movie your name, which i found often confusing and sometimes imperfect but often incredibly beautiful. i'm thankful for this profile of the director, who talks about "pay[ing] attention to the things that nobody else is looking at. In daily or everyday life, I am so impressed with tiny details, like when I look up at a street lamp falling on the street, it seems to have meaning or so much information in it. The world has created everything perfectly.” i'm thankful that this spirit comes across in the film; i'm thankful for the play of light and for the richness and complexity of the textures (pencil strokes, pastel washes), which deepen the flatness that usually turns me off animation.

i'm thankful to have had a strange dream last night that involved me being at a beach where life guards periodically came around and forced me to put on a shirt, even though it was very hot outside. i'm thankful that a skunk sprayed outside during the night and we smelled it when we woke up this morning. i'm thankful to remember my friend n from grad school, who really loved the robert lowell poem "skunk hour." i'm thankful to vividly remember one of the first times we spent together, sitting side by side in a large group at a bad irish pub, and how she asked me whether she smelled because she said she had eaten long john silver's in her lap in her car at lunch and she was worried that the crotch of her pants smelled like fried things. i'm thankful to have reassured her that she did not smell like fried things.

i'm thankful to have been playing zelda: breath of the wild, which is very lovely. i'm thankful that while obviously informed by various open world games, it doesn't employ some of the tropes of those games that i'm most tired of: namely, "marking" enemies so that a UI arrow or flag hangs above them tracking where they are and using some sort of sixth sense ("witcher vision") to uncover a path to follow. i'm thankful that i was able to turn off the HUD and minimap to increase the naturalism of the game and i'm thankful that unlike in horizon zero dawn, another game where i tried to do that, it feels eminently possible to do so here without making the game much more difficult and frustrating. i'm thankful to have asked a character for directions and, instead of him updating my quest log and putting an icon on my overlay of the screen, he and the camera turned and pointed me in the right direction. i'm thankful that last night before i stopped playing i caught a wild horse and, as it bucked and weaved in directions i wasn't driving it, leaned forward and soothed it, perfuming the air with hearts symbolizing care.