thank you notes 10/13

are you serious, we are at a party, play literally anything else besides this

                October 13, 2016

            thank you notes 10/13

            i'm thankful that work has been stressful and i haven't been as good at treating myself respectfully and having boundaries as i said i would be after vacation, but i'm thankful to note that to bring it to the forefront of my consciousness and thankful to be doing my best. i'm thankful to have quickly built an internal web app to enable us to dramatically speed up work on a big project that needs to get done quickly while we also deal with all of our regular responsibilities. i'm thankful to have encouraged a coworker who stepped out of her comfort zone with CSS media queries. i'm thankful that d and i were mad at each other for most of the day yesterday. i'm not thankful because of that, which made me feel bad, but because we had a really good hard talk after work and are better again now. i'm thankful, before we made up, to have refused her offer of a ride and to have walked alone in the rain to pick up our dinner and am thankful for how nice of a walk it was and for how the rain stopped in the middle of my walk. i'm thankful to have passed an orange bicycle parking slab where the racks were covered with laminated signs politely asking bikes not to park there so that the owners can paint a mural there. i'm thankful that the leaves are just starting to change.

i'm thankful to be quite annoyed that bob dylan was awarded the nobel prize in literature. i'm thankful to remember at one of the first parties in grad school, a poet was playing a bob dylan song on the stereo and i was like "are you serious, we are at a party, play literally anything else besides this" and he said "this is bob dylan, man." i'm thankful for my favorite bob dylan song, which i think is "love minus zero / no limit," which is pretty and imagistic. i'm thankful for the one bob dylan song i know how to play on guitar, "don't think twice, it's allright," which has a nice melody and fingerpicked chord progression and, in the original, a beautifully intimate close-mic-ed recording, but also has, you know, misogyny, like a lot of bob dylan songs. i'm thankful to be listening to fiona apple on our bluetooth speaker with d now. i'm thankful for "not about love." i'm thankful for the song "dylan" by emmy the great, the chorus of which is 

"And you say Dylan is a sentimentThat you don't want to share,
And you say you looked back in anger
And it rose to meet your stare,
And you say I am not the one
Who puts the bullet to your gun
And makes it flare.
And you say Dylan is a sentiment to you,
And you don't want to share."

and am thankful also for her other songs about listening to music in cars with boys, especially "m.i.a." and for first love more generally, which is an all-time favorite album for me. i'm thankful that everything reminds me of you.

i'm thankful for this story about zadie smith teaching a writing workshop. i'm thankful for claire's story about opening the door of the bathroom stall at school and seeing her writing hero standing in front of her, waiting to use the restroom. i'm thankful for d's stories of the awkwardness of running into a professor from our program on her way to the bathroom and how he made a rude joke about whether she actually did any work or just went to the bathroom all the time. i'm thankful that one of the great benefits of working remotely is that i don't have to use public restrooms anymore, which is a benefit i never thought of until just now but one that i really appreciate. i'm thankful that it's gotten cool enough to wear sweatpants and a hoodie as my work uniform most days. i'm thankful it's cold enough to wear socks all the time and thankful to have socks to wear all the time, though i should probably buy some new ones because they've gotten a bit hole-y and threadbare.

i'm thankful for excellent recent newsletters from mg bradley, emily gould, and the feelings club. i'm thankful to have paused reading disquiet, even though it is short and great, because i've been drained and haven't been able to summon the energy i need to match its emotional intensity (i'm thankful that along with that intensity there is some really terrific dark humor, but still too much). i'm thankful instead to have been reading the new james gleick book about the history of time travel, which i didn't like so much at first but like more now. i'm thankful for the quotation from kingsley amis about science fiction, which is that "one is grateful that we have a form of writing which is interested in the future, which is ready to treat as variables what are usually taken to be constraints." i'm thankful to try to treat constraints as variables, in art and in life.

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