rk(3)

i'm thankful justin still sends these thank you notes, even on days when it's maybe a challenge.

i'm thankful for the way my mother always made tomato melts, which is the way i also now make them, with too much mayonnaise, and how the bread always still gets kind of soggy no matter what i try to prevent it but that even with this inevitable flaw making and eating a tomato melt is the only way sometimes to satiate the particular craving of having something just the way my mother used to make it. i'm thankful for my mother, and i'm thankful that though some interactions with her may be difficult they are never impossible. i'm thankful that, when so few people ever really seem to get to experience unconditional love, my mother never gave me reason to question hers.

i'm thankful for the weekend i gave myself, quiet and full of errands and small household tasks and solitude, even though i had harbored some aspirations of going out and existing in public. i'm thankful to find that i enjoyed spending time with myself, in the same way that you find yourself surprised and thankful for unexpectedly having fun on plans with an acquaintance that you had come close to canceling because you anticipated it kind of sucking.

i'm thankful for this talk by tara brach: https://www.tarabrach.com/part-3-freedom-othering/ about what she calls "bad selfing," or how committed we are to narratives of our own badness. i'm thankful that while listening to those sorts of things doesn't always help me, today it felt like it did when i listened to it while i straightened the kitchen. i'm thankful to have found what might finally be my ideal spotify experience, the radio station based off of sky ferreira's album "night time, my time." 

i'm thankful for this time in my life although parts of it are difficult, and feel difficult. i'm thankful to have some sense of trusting that the difficult parts have meaning, too, and that while i don't have to enjoy them i don't have to reject them, either. i'm thankful for the slight soreness i have from shoveling snow today, and how it will probably be more than slight tomorrow, and for how when it isn't debilitating, pain can bring a kind of awareness that i'm grateful for, saying look here, look here, are you paying attention.

- rk (2/18/18).