6/23
i'm thankful for my unlucky shirt, which is a gray t-shirt in my closet that i think i bought on sale from the gap years ago. i'm thankful that the unlucky shirt has a black and white photograph of an elephant on the front, with a red vintage LIFE magazine logo surrounded by the white text "live in the wild", which in retrospect is kind of colonialist and offensive in a way that i did not consider when i bought the shirt or really up until writing this sentence. i'm thankful that though i don't think the shirt is a particularly attractive shirt and i would not normally wear it outside the house, i work from home and so i don't really have to think on a daily basis about whether the shirt i put on is attractive.
i'm thankful (i guess) though, that what i do think about when choosing what to wear is whether a shirt feels like bad luck. i'm thankful to vaguely remember one day picking up the shirt to wear for the course of the morning or use as a sweat towel when running and my brain said "this shirt feels like bad luck." i'm thankful (i guess, but not really) that since childhood i have had various self created internal bits of superstition and magical thinking. i'm thankful, talking to d about this last night, to have explained how i think this is one reason i'm resistant to astrology and tarot except in the jokey form i get them in from astro poets and twitter, is that i already have all of these weird little omens in my own mind and i don't need more external portent to ponder.
i'm thankful that the first time i picked up the shirt and decided it felt like bad luck, i didn't think much of it, but then a few days later, low on laundry, i went to choose it again and thought "no, this shirt feels like bad luck still," and that happened again and again such that i have not worn this shirt in probably like a year and maybe more, despite it being a relatively frequent object of fixation in my mind.
i'm thankful that yesterday at lunch, feeling bad and needing clothes to put on after having taken a shower, i had this moment of just being like "honestly, fuck it, how much worse could this stupid shirt make feel" and defiantly putting on the shirt that i had convinced myself was bad luck. i'm thankful that i then had a perfectly good afternoon, where i finished a self assessment for my performance review and submitted it, unlocking my manager's assessment, which was positive and mostly matched with mine; fixed a bug that i had been chasing in a project for a week and which turned out to be caused by a single bad object property in a utility function; got a call from my doctor's office authorizing me to go back on prozac with my new medication, took that medication and felt more positive. i'm thankful that yesterday evening, still wearing the unlucky shirt, i watched two excellent episodes of mad men with d (we are starting a rewatch) and then we had a nice long conversation about the show and a lot of other things.
i'm thankful that the shirt is still ugly and will never be my favorite shirt, but i'm thankful it just feels like a shirt to me now.
Don't miss what's next. Subscribe to thank you notes: