i'm a liar i'm not totally crazy
1) i'm thankful that deborah and i are both very much on the same page about not wanting children (and have been for a long time), especially since we love each other so much that if one of us really wanted children the other person would support them but instead that's a bridge we don't have to cross (we get to cross our own other bridges). i'm thankful that this article came out at a resonant time in my life and a bunch of people got mad about it for varying reasons from varying directions, which at the end of the day is one of the things the internet is for.
2) two recent flames emoji casual obliterations from the new yorker: jill lepore on walter isaacson on elon musk and clare malone on hasan minhaj, the latter of which reminds me of an essay i published in thought catalog during grad school with some "emotional truth" details (not just embellishments or exaggerations but straight up things that did not happen!) which my mom read and said on the phone "...you know that's not true, right?" i was like "of course MOM i'm a liar i'm not totally crazy". found an archival take from 2016 thank you notes reflecting on this:
i'm thankful that i now have more of a grasp of the ethical problems of telling a lie and calling it the truth than i did in the past, even though i still think essayists are held to an unfairly higher standard on this than artists straddling the same line in other mediums are. i'm thankful, still, that i don't intentionally misrepresent things for artistic purposes or to contribute to "emotional truth" in my nonfiction anymore, even though i know my memories are still always mutating inside of my brain, reshot and recut every time i try access them. i'm thankful to have found a form for myself where i can share the things of life warts and all (i'm thankful that i don't have literal warts).
i'm thankful in that same letter to have found this sentence (still accurate) about deborah:
i'm thankful for d's "me in three fictional characters," which is peggy olson, pikachu, and puppycat.
3) the song "lexicon" off the new vagabon album which has just a perfect hook and knows it and plays it just the right of times (which is to say as many as it can get away with).