9/14/17
i'm thankful that it is already thursday. i'm thankful to wonder whether when i am old and not working anymore, if i get the opportunity to be old and not working anymore (which feels doubtful for any number of reasons, but i try to be a hopeful person) whether i will look back at my desire to push through the week to the weekend as something foolish, this waste of a (relative) youth left running on fast forward. i'm thankful for the strangeness of our changing perceptions of time as we age—i'm thankful to remember how endless a single summer day could feel when i was a child, whereas on the weekends or vacations now, it feels like the hours peel away like the petals of time lapse flowers. i'm thankful to hope that maybe if i get the opportunity to be old and not work anymore, my perception of time will start to slow down again. i'm thankful for now to try to meditate every day (i'm thankful i meditated yesterday, if not the day before) in the hope that will help at least press pause for a moment on the passage.
i'm thankful for the episode of chef's table we watched last night starring jeong kwan, a buddhist nun for whom cooking is a form of meditation. i'm thankful for the green mountain beauty of the monastery where she lives and for the exquisite dishes she prepared. i'm thankful in particular for one scene in which she puts the bulb of an unbloomed lotus flower into a bowl of cold water and, using chopsticks, carefully opens each thin petal down until it rests on the surface of the water. i'm thankful that she does this silently for all the petals. and then pours the water the flower has unfolded in into cups to be drunk. i'm thankful for the new york times food critic, who described the strangeness of this "tea," which was "almost water, but definitely not just water—something else." i'm thankful for the idea of that, the idea that your ability to focus on the flavor becomes a kind of ingredient; how if you guzzled it without knowing or paying attention, it would just be water, but if you are patient and attentive you get access to its beautiful secret.
i'm thankful, though, that i am not a buddhist monk and can have garlic and onion and meat and dairy. i'm thankful that d ordered us jeni's ice cream as a treat and it came in a box with dry ice. i'm thankful last night to have eaten sweet cream biscuit with peach jam flavor. i'm thankful that it tasted just like that description and also reminded me of the peach ice cream that my grandfather made when i was a child, which i've mentioned her before. i'm thankful for lunch yesterday i had some crackers and grapes and a bunch of blue cheese left over from when we had people over on tuesday night. i'm thankful that when i googled "blue cheese," as i almost always do when writing it because i'm sure that i'm spelling it wrong, the first three results are the wikipedia page, a link to a 2 chainz song, and the description of the weed strain called "blue cheese" on leafly.
i'm thankful for fiona, on her birthday and always. i'm thankful for "boredom" by tyler the creator, which was on the last episode of insecure and which is a sophisticated suite of a song. i'm thankful for this fox loaf. i'm thankful for kitty and lily allen talking about overwatch on twitter while i watch. i'm thankful for this piece about how rappers feel about their white audience members using the n word. i'm thankful for kombucha. i'm thankful for the short but beautiful spotify playlists like this one, even though when i'm searching for playlists, i often look for really big ones, which i think is some kind of weird "value" hangover thing that comes from me being raised in a time of physical media (always wanted an album with more tracks, not less). i'm thankful for tumblr circa 2009. i'm thankful that though the world is shit in so many ways, the world is also so cool in others.
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