4/4/17

i'm thankful on "tuesday" for the swirly looped organ, for the meter of the hook, the pauses after "club going up" which feel like bungee cords stretching to their full extension and then flinging you toward "tuesday." i'm thankful for the remix with drake, which, along with "fucking problems," was one of the first drake performances i learned to love after an early resistance to drake because i don't really like sad music and all his songs were so fucking emo, in lyrical content and (worse, since i can handle sad lyrics on happy songs okay) in musical form (i'm thankful that while respecting 40 as a producer i could never really get into his chosen aesthetic modality).

i'm thankful for the moment on "fucking problems" where he messes up (maybe on purpose) and stops and giggles, which i found adorable. i'm thankful for "hotline bling", for the sauciness of its cha cha and for his impossibly silly dancing in the video, which, once you've seen it, exists as another layer in your mind whenever you hear the song without the video afterward. i'm thankful to still be loving more life and am thankful for the idea that drake called it a playlist because he feels like his "album" voice is too solipsistic and he wanted a playlist because a playlist is something that's made for people's lives, an aural enhancement of their everyday. 

i'm thankful for "passionfruit" and i'm thankful for giggs exuberantly capping off a verse by singing "batman, da-na-na-da-na," which always makes me stop and giggle. i'm thankful for this outtake of kim and nori. i'm thankful there is a tumblr devoted to comparing pictures of david bowie to pictures of sea slugs. i'm thankful for this letter about love and mutton. i'm thankful that there are other people who feel jealous of others all the time, which is something that i feel all the time and i'm thankful to remind myself that the people i feel jealous of probably don't feel proud of themselves either and probably feel jealous of other people.

i'm thankful that monday at work went pretty well, though i felt a bit off. i'm thankful that my project to automate reply template selection and creation and prefill it into the editor window to save time is working well and i'm thankful for some ideas i have about making it more complex by doing basic analysis of sentiments and problem areas in message text which i can hopefully implement this week. i'm thankful for this library, which i eventually gave in and used after wrestling for too long with my handling of mutation observers and which allowed me to focus on the things i actually want to focus on.

i'm thankful for this incisive article about robots, gender, and the extent to which emotional labor can or can't be automated. i'm thankful to hope that the project i'm working on is one that helps make lives (both of me and my team members and of our customers) and interactions richer and better and more supportive rather than as a way to abstract away feelings and treat people as data points. i'm thankful for one of the values statements of the company where i work, which is "build the robot, don't be the robot." i'm thankful to know that often values statements are bullshit and to know that maybe this one is too and i have blinders on but i'm thankful to believe in it and to believe the other people i work with do too.

i'm thankful that after an interminable period of trying to pair my wireless keyboard and trackpad to my work laptop i eventually followed the steps in this article and was able to get them to pair. i'm thankful for people who write guides like that online when they've learned how to fix a frustrating and opaque problem and am thankful to see it as a reminder that i should try doing the same thing when i fight for and find solutions. i'm thankful that reading about a character in the wanderers doing the breath of fire as a way to physically refresh herself despite being confined to a mars rover and by that to have been reminded that i should go back to doing it on a regular basis. i'm thankful for hegel exercises.