9/11/17

i'm thankful for the blasts of warm noise that shoot in over the electric piano in "czech one" by king krule. i'm thankful for the perfectly recorded decays in "hatarrej" by riga tiger, which sounds like if phoenix tried to make a real estate song. i'm thankful for "summer days (roosevelt remix)" by rhye, which is like saturday in the park and "saturday in the park," that feeling of drinking beer on a blanket as the sky turns to night. i'm thankful for "motion sickness" by phoebe bridgers (i'm thankful for the hook, where she sings "i have emotional motion sickness"). i'm thankful for "interstate vision" by lomelda, which reminds me of frankie cosmos in a good way, swinging slowly inside a jungle gym built from acoustic guitars. i'm thankful for this great ambient beat tape, which is full of sounds from another room.

i'm thankful that we had a good band practice on friday night. i'm thankful that though we were quite loose and sloppy during our first set, we pulled together better in the second one. i'm thankful we experimented with playing some songs faster, including a kind of ridiculous pop-punky but kind of better than our more faithful normal cover version of "and she was." i'm thankful that though our singer had to leave early and the guitarist had to leave to take them home, that meant the keyboardist and the drummer and i got to jam for a while—i'm thankful to have gotten to play the electric guitar for a while, which after several hours of playing bass feels like what i must imagine it feels like to switch from driving a city bus to a porsche. i'm thankful that we recorded the practice so i can go back and listen to it when i want to.

i'm thankful that i didn't do any work this weekend. i'm thankful to push back against the anxiety that always tries to flood into my brain on a monday morning. i'm thankful to know that today, like most days, my job will involve a series of questions that i will approach one at a time and that i will know how to answer most of them and that if there are questions i don't know how to answer, i will be able to figure out how to answer most of them with a bit of hard work, and if i can't figure them out, i will be able to get my coworkers to help me figure out most of them, and if we can't figure them out, i will be able to escalate them to an engineer who will be able to figure them out (or at least figure out why we can't figure them out). i'm thankful to know that the worst thing that will happen is i will get frustrated or feel stupid or let the words of an unkind customer pierce my customer service armor. i'm thankful to lay out the possibilities like this, which is reassuring. i'm thankful to clean my glasses and then go to work.