thank you notes 1/7

i'm thankful to momentarily distract myself from making a murderer's droning despair by thinking about how people on it remind me of people from other tv shows and movies and imagining that they are those people rather than the people they are. i'm thankful for the way that brendan dassey's terrible public defender reminds me of the bill gates impersonator from nathan for you. i'm thankful for how one of the many crooked police officers reminds me of a fatter version of eric braeden (victor from the young and the restless). i'm thankful to imagine guy fieri playing steven avery in a lifetime movie of the case (i'm thankful to imagine guy fieri frowning, which is something i've never seen). i'm thankful that the show makes me feel like nightcrawler's satire of local tv news might actually have been too subtle, rather than the other way around. i'm thankful, when talking about the show to someone else, that i accidentally called it how to meet a murder and then, during a lull at work, briefly imagined both a multi-camera sitcom called how i met your murderer and a procedural called meat is murderer, in which morrissey would be a lawyer fighting a class action lawsuit against all the world's meat producers who becomes the focus of a media maelstrom when a package of opened bacon is found in his refrigerator.

i'm thankful for silly conversations, when i have them with myself and with others. i'm thankful for the silly conversation that d and i had while getting ready for bed last night, inspired by the use of the term "shed-load" in a vlog we watched, about whether people in the UK use the term "shit-load." i'm thankful for my passionate argument that i have heard people from the UK use the term "shed-load" and "arse-load" and, of course, "shite," but that "shit-load" and "butt-load" are only used in american english and i have never heard anyone use "shite-load," which sounds weird to me. i'm thankful for d's rapid scroll through the timeline of a british person she follows on twitter and her triumphant discovery of the evidence of a tweet in which that person wrote "i don't really give a shit." i'm thankful for my lawyerly defense, in which i argued that a) this british person had been living in america for years and so his queen's english was polluted by the garbage of our slang and b) even if i accepted the premise that british people use "shit" as a word, the issue being discussed is whether they would use it as a modifier for "load." i'm thankful that we resolved the case by forgetting about it while watching the video of the bill gates impersonator from nathan for you. i'm thankful, looking up "shite" in a disambiguation, to learn that it also refers to the principal character in a noh play.

i'm thankful for d, who opened a box we got from amazon and said, "i'm so excited to use our new can opener!" i'm thankful to imagine that this may have been the first time this sentence has ever been uttered. i'm thankful that we got a new can opener. though. i'm thankful for this ask metafilter question about how to deal with the problems that might arise from consuming large quantities of chocolate all day for three days straight. i'm thankful for the concept of a gummy venus de milo.

i'm thankful for the moment yesterday, discussing the complex procedure of assembling a tenure dossier, in which a faculty remember referred to the process as "fraternity hazing." i'm thankful for the sorority standing out in the cold this morning on the front lawn of their house, screaming fight songs en masse.