7/9/17

i'm thankful for the walk d and i took yesterday. i'm thankful that unlike most of our walks, which are too long, this one was just right. i'm thankful rather than going south or east as we usually do, we went north, which was quieter and offered more shade. i'm thankful for the raspberry soda we shared, which had been sitting in the fridge for a long time and was blessedly cold. i'm thankful for our discussions of work, which are valuable, and for our discussion of what people at d's company (and my former company) would be what game of thrones characters. i'm thankful for exercises like this, for the way that these external frameworks, applied out of context, can help us to see the familiar in new ways.

i'm thankful for this amazingly me AP correction. i'm thankful to flash back literally a decade to the beginning of my blogging "career", where everything i wrote was in some way related to the reality television show the hills, including this post about one of my favorite albums, lauryn hill's unplugged. i'm thankful that the album and my writing about it doesn't really have much to do with the show, but i'm thankful that at the time i found the device of always writing about the show and viewing things through the lens of it to be useful and rewarding. 

i'm thankful for the breakdown i experienced after a long time doing this, when i suddenly found the lens limiting (since it felt like the things i wrote, because they depended on this external context, weren't really mine) and decided to try to do different things. i'm thankful to empathize with this person for that reason and to wonder if someday i will come to feel this way about writing my thank you notes, that the form is too limiting or repetitive or that i just can't do it anymore. i'm thankful to hope not, that this is different, and i'm thankful that this feels different, that the limitations here are freeing, that i feel like in this space i can do whatever i want to do (but without the fear of not knowing how to do that, since i always know how each sentence will start, which means the ball is always rolling and i am just following it).

i'm thankful, appropriately, that we finished watching the current season of keeping up with the kardashians on friday night. i'm thankful, since the finale was built around rob kardashian's thirtieth birthday party, for my sudden horrified realization that i am older than rob kardashian. i'm thankful that the season's theme of motherhood reached its real apotheosis with kim's evisceration of catelyn's memoir and its portrayal of kris as a mother and wife and its ridiculous apotheosis when khloe talked about wanting to get pregnant not (primarily) because she wanted a child but because she wanted to do a line of maternity jeans at good american. i'm thankful to have learned that kendall has a tracy emin neon sculpture above her bed, which is by far the most interesting thing i have ever learned about kendall. i'm thankful for the final montage where, over slow motion montages of the season, the characters voice-overed about their feelings, which could have been cheezy but thanks to being soundtracked by kanye's "waves" was actually kind of moving, like yearbook signatures they're leaving for you before everyone goes away for the summer.

i'm thankful for a moment i thought of when d and i were walking yesterday and drinking the raspberry soda, which was in a glass bottle with a cap that didn't twist and required a bottle opener. i'm thankful to have suddenly flashed back to my senior year of high school in florida, where upperclassmen had the privilege of leaving school at lunch. i'm thankful that though i didn't have any friends, i was still grateful for this, since it meant that instead of sitting in the quad or lunchroom by myself and feeling ugly and alone, i could go on a walk by myself and feel peaceful solitude. i'm thankful that i tried to find side streets where none of my classmates would see me and was mostly successful. i'm thankful that the halfway point of my walks was a convenience store called eight till late where i would buy a soda or a candy bar for "lunch" on my walk home. 

i'm thankful that one day, trying to treat myself after a morning in which i didn't have too many panic attacks, i bought one of those jarritos mexican sodas in the glass bottles from the refrigerated case in the back of the store. i'm thankful that when i brought it to the cashier and bought it, she asked if i'd like for her to open it for me. i'm thankful that awkward and not understanding, i said no, that i was fine (which was always my answer to any question about how i was, that i was fine, even though i was often very not fine). 

i'm thankful, fifteen seconds after leaving the store and starting back to school, to have realized that the reason she had offered to open the bottle is because it didn't twist off and so i couldn't get it open. i'm thankful to know that while now i would just have gone back to the store and asked for it to be opened, that felt, like so many things in life, impossible. i'm thankful that what i instead decided was that perhaps i could get the bottle opened by knocking the top of it against the concrete back wall of the strip mall the convenience store was in. i'm thankful that of course this was a dumb idea and left me with a jagged edge around the neck of the broken bottle, my hands covered with sticky green liquid. i'm thankful that, desperate to salvage this situation but knowing i couldn't touch my lips to the broken bottle. i tried to stick out my tongue and pour the soda onto it from a "safe" distance before realizing this was futile and leaving the broken bottle in the scraggly grass and heading back to school, thirsty.

i'm thankful to have recalled this story on a beautiful saturday morning as i walked with a person who loves me and who i love down shady quiet streets, past people working in their gardens and children playing aimlessly. i'm thankful that i told her the story and we laughed and then kept walking into the future.