thank you notes 10/8

i'm thankful for the moment in the letter where she describes an argument she had with her husband about stopping on their errands to pick up a new travel crib when they already had a perfectly good travel crib. i'm thankful for that and for her letter, because, though we don't have children, d participates in similar groups where women buy, sell, and trade their clothes and accessories. i'm thankful to recognize how when i don't understand things, sometimes i'm lazy and, rather than try harder to understand things, let myself stop there and sit in my stupidity, that i make my ignorance willful. i'm thankful that reading her letter allowed me to recognize the ways in which i have been willfully ignorant and closed off to the joy that d receives from these. 

i'm thankful that of course the ways that we spend our time are our own and d doesn't expect her hobbies to be mine in the same way that i don't expect her to care about mine, but i'm thankful to be reminded that i should make more of an effort to understand. i'm thankful to know that she's an adult woman and can spend her time and money doing whatever makes her happiest. i'm thankful, even though i think of myself as a progressive person, to be retrospectively disgusted at the "ladies be shopping" kind of jokes i've made about d's hobby in mixed company (made to my parents this week, multiple times), which are small and not intentionally malicious but are still lazy and dumb and not productive. i'm thankful, in a world of horribly explicit and crude misogyny, to know that just because i'm not a total monster, i still can't let myself off the hook for this subtler form of "soft" misogyny, that it's important to stay aware of the small ways in which i un- or sub-consciously reflect and reify a status quo i think is unjust.

i'm thankful for jia tolentino's essay about "when women signify too much." i'm thankful for this thread. i'm thankful for the interesting thoughts about how gender roles and presentation might evolve in the future in death's end. i'm thankful to have heard "bad to the bone" on classic rock radio in the car the other day and to have wondered sincerely whether there was a time where that song felt like anything else than pure camp. i'm thankful for queen. i'm thankful for the simpsons episode we watched last night where sideshow bob described the impressionists as the "boy bands of the art world" (which d and i both laughed at, though we both love the impressionists). i'm thankful that after the storm passed through, the ocean was calm yesterday and d and i were able to swim together in peace.