he was like "you were an english major, weren't you"

i'm thankful that as the days have gotten longer and warmer, i've been staying up later. i'm thankful to have more time in the day that is not devoted to labor, after a period during the winter where i was starting work early nad falling asleep early and it felt like there wasn't enough separation. 

i'm thankful to remember when i lived in korea and worked like 3PM - 10PM every day, which at the time felt like the perfect schedule because i'd get out of work and have an evening and then wake up and have a whole day before i even thought about work. i'm thankful to remember how in the summer every day i would get up in the morning and have coffee and an apple and then spend a couple hours walking over a small mountain to an isolated beach, sitting there and listening to music on headphones and looking out at the water, then walking back and having a quick lunch before i would go to work. 

i'm thankful for what a trip it is that that i taught english to students in elementary school through college despite my sense of grammar and usage being almost entirely a "vibes" thing that happens subconsciously from reading ten million books rather than actual conscious knowledge i worked to acquire. i'm thankful to think of that in the context of that job which was that old joke about teaching where you just have to stay one day ahead of the students where my experience was i would go in on a given day and open a textbook to a lesson that i had never read before and repeating that across different classes for a range of ages and i did that day after day rather than actually like preparing and despite all of this i was considered a model teacher (humblebrag)(rip harris wittels). (i'm thankful that i sometimes still do have anxiety dreams where i find myself inexplicably back in korea and struggling to manage that kind of work, but never have those kind of dreams about teaching english comp and creative writing in college)

i'm thankful to think of that because the other day in slack i was watching a discussion of english grammar between a polish engineer and a czech engineer about an incredibly granular point of grammar in a sentence one of them had written. i'm thankful that as another engineer was showing me his code i noticed that instead of naming a variable COLLISION_DETECTION he had named it COLLUSION_DETECTION and when i told him (no collusion!) he was like "you were an english major, weren't you" and i said it was nice when i got to use my degree. i'm thankful that when people thank me for taking notes at meetings i say it's nice to get to dust off my secretary skills. i'm thankful that today i got the reviews i need to probably tomorrow close the door on the thing i have been working on for a while and that there are a bucket of small new things to do next.