5/14
i'm thankful that the water fountain halfway through on of my favorite running routes has been turned on, my favorite sign that winter is truly and finally over. i'm thankful for watermelon juice. i'm thankful that pints of blueberries were two for five dollars at the grocery store, so i bought a lot of blueberries. i'm thankful to seed my morning frosted mini wheats with a generous handful. i'm thankful for berry season. i'm thankful that d made strawberry shortcake for her coworkers and that she ended up having to make multiple batches of the cakes because the first few weren't up to her standards, but i'm thankful that they were definitely up to my standards and so i've been happily devouring the excess.
i'm thankful for the bottle of black cherry seltzer that we bought so that d could use it as the base of a paper vase for her artificial flowers. i'm thankful that when it exploded because it had gotten jostled, d apologized solemnly to me as we cleaned it up with towels from the hall closet, not because d needed to apologize, but because her apologizing in that way made me feel bad that my reaction to previous instances like this (spills, a broken glass) made her feel she needed to feel bad and apologize to me for what is really an act of god, they would call it in the insurance industry, which is a sign that i am acting wrong and need to really be kinder in situations like this.
i'm thankful to have deleted the twitter app off my phone for the weekend to curb my compulsive behavior using that app. i'm thankful that this went pretty well and so i am going to try to continue it into this week. i'm thankful for the relationships i have with people on twitter and for the way it introduces me to so many wonderful things that i wouldn't get exposed to any other way, so i don't think i'll leave for good, but i'm thankful to try to put a block into the thing i do where i keep refreshing for new tweets and reading through them and refreshing and i look at the clock and it's been half an hour but feels like no time at all.
i'm thankful to have read about a third of the new rachel kushner book, which like all her work is interesting and has lots of nicely pitched sentences but also kind of confirms my belief that rachel kushner is kind of overrated, her writing is so obsessed with a certain kind of hipster cool, like lana del rey but without the latter's splashes of humor puncturing the self-seriousness, it makes me think of all those burns on didion from barbara grizutti harrison. i'm thankful to realize that maybe this is a thing about my tastes evolving over time, since a lot of what i find annoying about her style now is stuff i used to love about don delillo's when i was younger. i'm thankful that maybe i will finish the book, since it does offer certain pleasures, though i think there should be a critical rule against calling a book "dickensian" when there is no plot for the first third of the book, and so maybe i will not and will read something else.
i'm thankful also to have deleted twitter since it feels like so often recently, these notes are just a compilation of links to things i saw on twitter, which is still valuable, i think, both for you and for me, and something i enjoy doing, but which i think i need to balance with actually writing about my thoughts and feelings and experiences, which is what i will try to do more of this week. i'm thankful that since completely weaning off my snri last week, i have not felt as foggy as i did before, and i'm thankful that the beta blockers i was prescribed to try as something different do seem to help with limiting the flush of my bodily anxiety, that thing that's like the dark twin of the adrenaline rush, where your body floods with a chemical sense that things are wrong. i'm thankful to finish writing these notes and take the first one of the day before work.
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