a hot summer 10 million years ago

i'm thankful that it was d's birthday last tuesday. i'm thankful every day that d was born. i'm thankful that our relationship is better than it has ever been and seems to get better all the time; i'm thankful, given that the worst time in our marriage started when we first visited portland, that we are happier than ever here. i'm thankful to share this sequence i made of pictures of her looking beautiful throughout the years we've been together (i'm thankful that d is a better archivist than me, since my google photos only goes back to 2015 whereas hers goes back all the way to our first year together, five years before that; i'm thankful to remember how early in our relationship she had a PDF export of all of our text messages from the very first and i'm thankful to remember that probably because i wrote about it in this essay a hot summer 10 million years ago).

i'm thankful that we both had the whole last week off from work and i'm thankful for all the quality time we've had together. i'm thankful for the optimism of how i always start an extended break from work buzzing with excitement and ideas for all of the things i want to accomplish creatively (i have podcast, tiktok, newsletter, chrome extension, and web app concepts that have been waiting for me to explore or push forward, plus i always want to be recording more music) even though often i start subdividing the time and creating structures of permission to postpone doing it ("okay, you should definitely take a weekend first of just not doing anything at all and then do all that stuff later...okay maybe wait until mid-week...okay there's still a weekend") and often do nothing at all.

i'm thankful i've had a more potent excuse this vacation to do nothing at all than "don't make your leisure another form of labor even though you are not alienated from that labor and it brings you satisfaction and happiness" (not that that's not an entirely valid excuse) which is it's been just so incredibly fucking hot all the time in oregon over the past week and just the act of remaining conscious and watching TV or playing video games feels like really accomplishing something; reading a book, which i would normally values code as "positive activity for your brain and emotions so go for it and feel proud but you should feel some guilt if you're using it as an excuse not to do creative work because it's 'easier'" feels like a huge accomplishment (i'm thankful for the distnacing experience of writing down the weird rules in my head and seeing them laid out in front of me as arbitrary constructed things).

i'm thankful for the school for good mothers by jessamine chan, which is a dystopian novel i couldn't put down (and for thrust by lydia yuknavitch, even though i have been able to put that one down and am not sure the degree to which i'll pick it back up). i'm thankful for the book in my non-fiction slot right now, which is meet me by the fountain by alexandra lange, a history/design critique of shopping malls. i'm thankful to have learned from that about victor gruen, the auteur of the mid-century american mall, and for the term named after him, the "gruen transfer" which refers to the point at which your trip to a mall shifts from a specific focused instrumental purpose ("i need to buy new running shoes") to a more diffuse and indirect experience where you might do/try/be different htings (i'm thankful to recognize my bias in that i initially saw this as a kind of beautiful idea that i wanted to apply to my own UX work but it's actually bad because Capitalism is bad and gruen came to feel it had been perverted by profit!), i'm also a person who wants to believe the end of kafka's amerika is uplifting even though i know it's not). i'm thankful for the part i just read about how important air conditioning was to the initial popularity of malls, that they were some of the first large public air conditioned places.

i'm thankful that after wondering whether i would even fall asleep last night because of the heat (we decamped to the living room and slept on the couch), i did fall asleep (after putting on the dark night rises, a movie that never fails to put me to sleep at some point,  with the sound off and subtitles on) and feel rested (i'm thankful, since non-bed sleeping always feels like a risk for waking up with a crick in my neck or shoulder, that i managed to avoid that and di did too), and i'm thankful that this morning we cleaned the filters on the window unit air conditioner, which we probably should have done months or even years ago but the AC seemed "fine" for the levels of heat we had then. i'm thankful for the satisfaction of washing all the gunk and dust and dog hair out of the filter, even if it doesn't end up making a huge difference in terms of cooling.

i'm thankful that when i was out cutting weeds in the front yard after lunch yesterday because our landlords have decided they don't want any trees or bushes touching the siding of the house, a man walking his dog down the sidewalk interrupted me to say hello (i'm not thankful for that necessarily even though many people would be honestly i would rather just not be perceived!) and i'm thankful that he told me he and his wife's name (dan and becca), which i wrote down in my phone immediately after ending the conversation, a thing i always mean to do when meeting neighbors but rarely actually do (i'm thankful that i do not feel bad for not having written down or remembering the name of his dog).

i'm thankful that before the heat wave hit i had a nice evening out with my good-not-best friend who i started this most recent run of emails angsting about. i'm thankful that through meditation (i'm thankful for the little buzzer things that d has for EMDR) and journaling and being more intentional about nourishing other relationships and also finding other ways of getting attention and validation (hi!), i'm in a much better place to appreciate our friendship for what it is right now rather than measuring how it isn't exactly what i want it to be or what it used to be. i'm thankful that hanging out was a kind of reset and that things feel mostly "normal" between us again, which was something i had missed and i think she had too.

i'm thankful for love island uk and how the experience of watching it and talking about it every day of the week with d and my friends feels like maybe the closest i will get to understanding the appeal of sports. i'm thankful for the newest episode of the rehearsal, which is just a show where i am constantly screaming at the TV "HOLY SHIT" during. i'm thankful that last night we started watching the first episode of the last movie stars, a documentary miniseries about paul newman and joanne woodward directed by ethan hawke). i'm thankful for the high concept premise (newman and people in his circle recorded hours and hours of tapes for a memoir, but then he burned them all up before he died, but somebody had them all transcribed first and so hawke has gotten actors to read the transcripts over historic footage, with george clooney as newman and laura linney as woodward) and i'm thankful that though i think i would prefer a version that was just the texture of a collage of clips of their movies overlaid with the actors rather than that but also some of the time zoom recordings of hawke and the actors quarantined in their houses and genuflecting, which is dorky and inelegant compared to the rest but at the same time has a kind of charm of seeing what their zoom vibe is like. i'm thankful for the form of the film/video essay, how i will probably never watch most of these movies but i get glimspes into these aesthetic worlds that are satisfying nonetheless (wow joanne woodward, who i had never heard of, is an incredible actress). i'm thankful for the gray men on netflix, which has not been well reviewed but i found to be very enjoyable popcorn without all the suffocating canonical weight of the marvel bullshit

i'm thankful it is lunch time and i am going to make us cold sandwiches; i'm thankful always for cold sandwiches and i'm thankful also for the heat being an excuse not to really cook (i'm thankful that once our avocados soften a bit, i will make this. i'm thankful that we still have some ice in the freezer and for that GOAT first sentence of a novel: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." i'm thankful to recently have learned the rumor (who cares if it's true) that a coupe glass is modelled on the size and shape of marie antoinette's breast. i'm thankful for ka's insta stories when she was at versailles last week and i'm thankful to eat cake.