5/18/17

i'm thankful that yesterday at work was better than tuesday which was better than monday. i'm thankful to know that though my performance metrics will be worse than last week and perhaps worse than the week before too, i did the very best i could. i'm thankful that i am still doing well relative to the fact that i have only worked here for 3 months, even if my numbers are down. i'm thankful for fun conversations i had in slack with my coworkers about punctuation preferences and am thankful that there's always at least one exchange in our channel every day that makes me laugh out loud (and usually multiple ones). i'm thankful for the most part that our conversations feel like genuine conversations between actual individual humans full of imperfect feelings and expressions and not robot performances of how we should act and feel and believe we should be behave to impress our superiors and advance our careers. i'm thankful that sometimes uncharitably i think the latter of certain of my coworkers based on things they type and i'm thankful that while i could be "right" about this, it could also just be (and probably is) that they are genuinely much nicer and generous people than i am, the kind of people who actually really do love our customers and helping them even when they are acting like assholes and (HORROR MOVIE TWIST) i am the one wearing the mask, covering up my essential core misanthropy with an impression of a better person.

i'm thankful for a letter i got last night from tyler which is about therapy and repressed memories that come rushing back from the past in intense detail and how so much of life is like group projects you do in high school and the futility of comparing yourself to other people but also how knowing that that's futile doesn't always help you stop yourself from doing it. i'm thankful to believe self knowledge is good even if we can't always override our emotional reflexes to act on it when we want to—i'm thankful to hope

i'm thankful that i have band practice tonight after we had to skip it last week because the keyboardist was out of town. i'm thankful that though it's starting later than i would choose for it to be and in the past i would have probably bailed for that reason, i'm thankful that the joy of playing with them is > my need to go to bed at a decent hour and practice perfect sleep hygiene. i'm thankful also that the fact that it's starting later means d and i will have time to watch the americans before i go, since it would normally have to wait until tomorrow. i'm thankful that though i haven't written a real song in a long time i was practicing the other night and came up with some bass lines for a song that we can try tonight (i'm thankful that i think the verse progression sounds like some nirvana song i can't identify so i don't know if it's a total ripoff or just artful homage). i'm thankful that everybody was happy that i brought oreos last time and so maybe i'll stop on my way and get some of the new oreos that have pop rocks in them. i'm thankful that if i do that, i will leave the bag of oreos at the keyboardist's house and only eat a few of them during our break, since d and i have been trying to cut back on dessert and have been surprisingly successful at this. i'm thankful, in this way, to eat my cake (oreos) and have it too.