not something i'd experienced in carrot cake before
i'm thankful that it is light out earlier now, that instead of it immediately being time to get up the first moment i open my eyes, i open them and see that it's only 6 and i can slip back under the veil for another 15-45 minutes, occasionally poking my head out again only to be reassured there is still time. i'm thankful for how my body, almost alway a source of multiple discomforts in waking hours, is at its quietest in this state and that even if i have something i'm stressing out about at work, i'm generally not awake enough to actually grasp it in my mind (i'm less thankful that miso's clock has also adjusted to spring and she does not enjoy marinating in this liminal space and instead wants to have breakfast and to very loudly tell us this).
i'm thankful the last work week started quite well. i was working on a challenging project, which was the second stage of migrating an old single page app into our new repo and code standards and architectural specs (the first stage being a design system engineer handling all the visual parts and then passing it off to me to handle the data and do the plumbing), but that, while challenging, the project seemed doable and the work was interesting and a nice change of pace from what i'm usually doing (which is doing everything, not just the plumbing).
i was trying to think about how to describe what it feels like to do this particular work and where i landed was it's like you have the code and the (not great) automated tests, which are like anatomy textbooks for a particular kind of animal, and then you can test out the existing version in production, which is like going to the zoo and watching what happens when you throw peanuts or crackers through the bars of the cage or say different things to the animal, and then having done those two phases of prep work your job is to build a version of the animal with new parts that acts exactly like the other animal does, such that an observer would not be able to tell that under the skin the bones and muscles and and brain and heart are made out of different materials.
i'm thankful, even though it really sucked, that i paused working on this project because everything went to shit on thursday, when some architectural changes to the codebase outside of my control/awareness broke a tool i built that everyone (including me) depends on to work effectively. i'm thankful to have spent the rest of that day flailing my way through diagnosing what had happened and then throwing spaghetti at the wall of solutions to try to fix it before ascertaining that this was just not a problem that was solvable within the parts of the code under my control (i'm thankful that in code there really are definitive answers sometimes) and so instead ended the day writing up a doc describing the situation and asking for help from the people who do control that part of the code.
i'm thankful i got no help with this on friday, even though i wanted help, because i'm also thankful that when other people's priorities do not match my priorities, it enables me to have a certain distance, to get more data about how important my priorities actually are outside my own brain and use that to help shape my emotional response to feeling like i have failed others. i'm thankful for this blog post cassidy linked to in her newsletter about juggling glass balls and plastic balls.
i'm thankful also for the kind words [redacted], who is taking over some responsibilities i used to handle on a previous team, DMed me, asking to pick my brain about things i had done, namely "for example, how? like, how? how did you do it? Do you have a super brain?" which were nice to return to when it felt like everything was broken (i'm thankful to have to have reassured him that he can do it and to have also told him that weeks ago when leadership asked me for insight about the role, i said that if he builds something and it breaks and that causes problems that's a sign he's actually delivering value, which is something i then repeated to myself about my broken thing literally the next day). i'm thankful that friday afternoon, i wrote a draft of a post for the engineering blog they're trying to resurrect at work and enjoyed remembering how good i am at writing and liking the idea of building a professional brand for myself by doing something i am good at and enjoy (writing) rather than things i don't enjoy (social media marketing, job applications).
i'm thankful, having lately been in a state where artistically (outside of work) i feel like i'm just kind of walking on the anhedonic treadmill and not really accomplishing anything much of substance, for the times when i break through that and make something (i'm also thankful to know that this kind of cycle is normal and i've been from peak to trough to peak many times before). i'm thankful to have made an erasure of an article about poets reacting to the new taylor swift album, which you can hear me read here (i also made a jet meme since you know i love those). i'm thankful for getting high and playing electric guitar, which even if it doesn't result in producing a deliverable i can do so very happily for basically any amount of time (i'm thankful for the calluses on my left finger tips and for heavy weight guitar picks and for multi-effects pedals and amps).
i'm thankful for the dry herb vape my parents gave me, which i have been using a lot lately and which i like because it gives me the durational consumption experience i get from smoking a joint/blunt (vs. the immediacy of my old standby of the bong) while being less harsh on my throat than smoking too many joints/blunts (which i also did this weekend since it was a holiday in my religion and that was great too). i'm thankful to have also taken mushrooms over the weekend, even though they didn't hit as hard as i'd wanted (i'm thankful for the stability prozac gives me, even though it means i never trip as hard as i want anymore), and am thankful that [redacted] sent me a picture of the first mushrooms harvested from their home growing operation (and thankful to remember years ago when d did this for us in our grad school apartment, a period of unprecedented psychedelic plenty that eventually led to me having a bad trip and giving up mushrooms for years lol but i have no regrets other than not understanding that i should not take any kind of drugs on an empty stomach).
i'm thankful it was miso's birthday on saturday and we spent it happily with friends. i'm thankful that though it ended up not being as nice outside as we had hoped it would be, we had cleaned the inside of the house and had just enough seating for everyone. i'm thankful that though my current favorite pizza place cancelled our delivery order because they were sold out, my previous favorite pizza place came through. i'm thankful that deborah has been really into making cocktails with fresh juice and delicious syrups lately and thankful for the carrot cake we bought from new seasons, which was moist and had an appropriate frosting/cake ratio and surprised me by having raisins in it, which is not something i'd experienced in carrot cake before but really enjoyed.