not afraid to be servicey
i'm really sorry to do this to you but i have been living with this inside me for so long and i wonder if in the tradition of email chain letters / curses in horror movies what i need to do to rid myself of it is expose you to it and it's that when i hear (or, much more often, "hear" in my head) the taylor swift song "maroon" and there's the part that goes "in new york / no shoes", my mind ALWAYS completes it, in the same voice "no shirt / and no CELLPHONE SERVICE / maroon" (i'm thankful for "no shoes, no shirt, no cellphone service" which is an old harris wittels joke)
i'm thankful that working as an engineer has made me take an internal position of the thing where when writing a complex sentence including a quotation that has a comma after it, you put the comma inside the quotation marks instead of after it, which is so the opposite of how you use quotation marks in code (the quotation marks are a barrier, a wall, firm and definitive). i'm thankful to remember an earlier era of my life where i had to train myself to stop putting two spaces after a period (thankful to remember c.s. sending back a draft of a piece i sent him where the main initial edits in track changes were removing double spaces after a period and replacing smart quotes with regular quotes (the latter something d had already tried to cure me of and in this vein i have her to thank for finally getting me to learn how to properly type an em dash instead of writing "--" (on mac it's option + shift + hyphen, on windows it's ctrl + alt + numeric minus, so often when sharing information i think about the classic gawker tag/line "not afraid to be servicey")
Previously on this day:
- 2016 (pre-op appointment, d's love of magnolia trees, space heater)
- 2017 (internal tool impressed my teammates, new drake album, brother got a part in a play)
- 2018 (snow falling after the warmest day of the year, saying aloud stress, washing dishes as therapy)
- 2020 (it's so clear that spring is beckoning, "to express my feelings, which always seems to help me, what a novel concept!", snooki)