5/15

i'm thankful that yesterday i published a report at work about the project i've been doing, one of the first longer pieces of writing i've done for work, and that i was happy with the way it turned out, as was my manager. i'm thankful that by writing these notes i have developed my mental muscle for noticing things that other people don't notice (or maybe have noticed, but on a subconscious, non-verbal level) and articulating them and am thankful to feel that muscle is also useful at my job.

i'm thankful that school is over and the town is quieter now, in college town summer, which is wonderful. i'm thankful to slightly miss how, when i worked at the university, i was in effect living a parallel version of the academic calendar that the students experienced—summer was quiet and easy and relaxing, as were spring and winter and holiday breaks; the ramping up in the early fall and before midterms and finals were intense. i'm thankful, though, that i have a job now that uses my full potential and challenges me to try new things, where i have room to grow, which is preferable to what i had even if i do sometimes miss those idylls.

i'm thankful for glenn branca, who died yesterday and whose "lesson, no. 1," when i first heard it in college, downloaded in the school library from some no wave compilation on a now-dead mp3 blog, blew my mind. i'm thankful for the layers of guitars, for the way they form a kind of machine, but a machine that's also a cloud, a haze, chugging into the future. i'm thankful for the donald barthelme story "the glass mountain" (sadly no longer easily accessible online) which at the time was one of my favorite short stories and which i would read soundtracked by "lesson, no. 1," since i thought the rising shards of sound on that song matched the story.

i'm thankful that though yesterday evening i was tempted to reinstall the twitter app on my phone, i did not, though i did think about some things i wanted to tweet, primary among them being my thought that you could quote tweet most messages, except really sad or serious ones, and add the caption "lol stop playing" and that would, in most cases, be funny, or have a weird resonance, and i think it would be funny and have a weird resonance but it is probably not a loss for the world that i was not able to do it. 

i'm thankful that there was a lot of extra liquid in the bowl where we macerated the cut strawberries with sugar for strawberry shortcake and i had a spoonful of it, a top 10 summer pleasure.