my plot memory fades very quickly
i'm thankful that i put miso's little dog bed beside my desk chair and that she sleeps there for large parts of the day (deborah and i say it is her office and i am just allowed to use it) and if i'm careful and don't do it too much i can occasionally even pet her there. i'm thankful that the bed is in the flow of the hot air vent in my office and that despite her general rejection of any stimulus she doesn't understand (i.e. almost any stimulus) she has clearly learned to love being in the flow of the hot air vent. i'm thankful to have her sit near me even if it has nothing much to do with me.
i'm thankful, having had an esophageal spasm near the end of dinner last night, that i do not have esophageal spasms very often anymore and that at least when i have them now i know what they are and generally what triggers them (combo of: eating too fast + alcohol + fatty food) which are factors that i can control if i would have a little more presence of mind. i'm thankful i've never had one while in public, because they're so overwhelming and it's difficult to maintain a pretense of being okay. i'm thankful for the moment when one passes, which is such a feeling of relief.
i'm thankful to have added the previously on: section to these notes, even if adds a little effort to the process. i'm thankful for the API endpoint i made which i call smitten (after smitten kitchen) that uses buttondown's API to query and compile a packet of all the links from previous years and which i'll maybe eventually finish and release (i'm thankful when i build something useful for myself, even if sometimes i just want to then use it rather than polish and finalize it). in the same way that i'm thankful in this most recent stretch of newsletter to have discovered how much satisfaction i get from adding titles to these notes, a practice that i did not do for years and years, i'm thankful that writing short summaries of the old letters and is an interesting opportunity to reconnect with past fragments of myself and others and find resonances and patterns (for example, it seems like something about this particular point in the year makes me want to eat burritos). i'm thankful to read harbingers of spring in the old notes, even if it doesn't feel like spring here yet in the present.
i'm thankful for this season of love is blind (the first one i've watched completely) and that at the end of a long shitty workday there was a finale to watch, even if the finale was pretty weak. i'm thankful to reject the phrase "you're my person" which makes me want to hurl as do most cliches of love. i'm thankful we're only two weeks away from the debut of the TV show of the three body problem, which i really need to be excellent both for my own benefit and to get other people in my life to read the books. i'm thankful i haven't reread the book in a while because i know the TV show is coming and am generally thankful that my plot memory fades very quickly.
Previously on this day:
- 2016 (biked to the store in just shorts and a t-shirt, meditating in the dark, exploding lightbulb)
- 2016 (2) (from l) (spending time alone at home, eclectic request-based radio show, agnès varda)
- 2017 (from c) (to feel lost, conversation in bumper-to-bumper traffic jam, wanting to be a good father)
- 2018 (did optional homework, coworker called me a magician, "part of your world")
- 2018 (2) (living room karaoke with d)
- 2019 ("to remember the time years ago when, having taken a wisdom tooth painkiller on an empty stomach, i was left racked with nausea laying on my side on our bed, so sick i felt unable to move or even turn over, and d drove home early from work to bring me dramamine so i could feel better")