5/22/17
i'm thankful for those mondays where you wake up and you don't feel that "oh god it's monday again" feeling of dread crashing wavelike onto you in bed. i'm thankful to ponder how the calendar is something we think of as immutable and essential and yet that's just a product of its reification, that actually monday is just a concept that someone created a long time ago and that we all continue to agree to. i'm thankful that reading the mieville book about the russian revolution, in which an entire society imagined the unimaginable and then made that their reality, makes me have thoughts like that.
i'm thankful to have learned about how important the use of language was to the strikes that led to the revolution, how one of the things that kicked off the 1905 revolution was a strike from telegraph operators who wanted to be paid for punctuation (but were only paid for letters) and how one of the main points that the military made to the soviet in 1917 when pledging their support regarded officers addressing enlisted men with condescending informal pronouns and the effect of this on their self respect. i'm thankful for the book, which is not a perfect book and at times feels a bit too, for lack of a better term, fanboy-ish, but which is still a very interesting granular view of an important moment i don't know enough about.
i'm thankful that i had a really nice long run yesterday afternoon. i'm thankful that i went in the afternoon instead of the morning since it rained unexpectedly in the morning. i'm thankful that the puddles on the trail weren't too bad and i took a nice alternate route to keep from getting my shoes muddy. i'm thankful that i have returned to daily foam rolling and jamming a lacrosse ball into the side of each hip and lying on that on the floor, both of which seem to have really upped my stamina and reduced my aches and tightness. i'm thankful that though it is peak allergy season for me i am doubling up my medication and that mostly does what i need it to.
i'm thankful that on my run i saw several slabs of rock and they reminded me of similar slabs in zelda, which in that game you can attach to balloons made from the corpses of water monsters and which inflate and pull them into the air. i'm thankful after having felt lost and a bit disenchanted with zelda to have found my way (to enjoyment) again. i'm thankful to have discovered that i should have gone north from the beginning instead of south. i'm thankful for the shrine puzzles, which are hard enough to challenge my mind pleasantly but not so hard that they hurt it. i'm thankful for the little marimba-y riff that plays when you cook food in the game.
i'm thankful for this story about video game pet rabbits dying without DRM food and for this similar story from metafilter. i'm thankful to get to read this series about video games in cuba. i'm thankful for this dusky twilight album by nite jewel. i'm thankful for online. i'm thankful that i am trying to become a person who just eats a bit of dark chocolate for dessert, even though that is against my nature. i'm thankful at lunch yesterday to have had the first pb&j that i have had in a long time and to have really enjoyed it. i'm thankful to remember how at work i ate that sandwich every day for literally years. i'm thankful that now i get to work from home, where all our food is.
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