thank you notes 2/26

i'm thankful that i know that filling with silent rage is not necessarily a healthy or productive thing and thankful that i could recognize that in the moment even if i couldn't keep it from happening, and i'm thankful that in the past, i would have stewed for a while, the two of them painted in my mind's eye with a faint blood-red aura of anger every time i passed, and then eventually forgotten the whole thing when i got annoyed by something or someone else, and, in forgetting it, let it go. i'm thankful that i have never been good at asking for things i wanted if they feel like even a minor imposition on other people, to the point where i could not ask my own warm and loving grandmother for a glass of water when i was very thirsty as a child, except, you know, i am not really thankful for that because it causes me to suffer for no reason other than my mental makeup. i'm thankful that i don't know why someone saying no to me has always been such a frightening thing and thankful it's not as frightening of a thing as it was when i was younger. i'm thankful for the revelation of reading about "ask" vs. "guess" culture, a conceptual framework which d and i use often to determine why we are annoyed with people.

i'm thankful that this morning, while my coworker and the faculty member were talking about how he was going to bring her some more deer meat next week, but this time grind it first because she is not a very good cook and by her own account butchered (in the other sense of the word) the cooking of the steak he gave her, rather than continue to stew, i suddenly got up and went over to them and said to him, in a joking, yet clearly slightly annoyed voice, "how about some deer meat for the person who is editing your grant proposal?" and he looked surprised and said "absolutely!" and i said "awesome, thanks!" and went back to my desk and that was all it took. i'm thankful that he came over to my desk after he finished talking with my coworker and said that he really appreciated the work i did for him and didn't mean to neglect me but that he "thought [i] was a vegan or something," to which i said, slightly overexcited about for once asking for and getting what i wanted, "fuck no" (though i'm thankful that i eat much less meat than i used to and that we haven't eaten meat all week and i'm thankful for all the people in the world who choose not to eat meat, who i will always admit are superior human beings to me). 

i'm thankful to remember the only other time i have eaten deer meat, which is when my friend cl came over by surprise one day in the summer of my senior year of college and brought venison sausage made from a deer her dad had shot and brown mustard and crusty bread and we sat on the floor and ate the sausage and mustard and bread and some apple i had cut up and watched reruns of sex and the city on demand. i'm thankful for how good that sausage was and for getting to share that nice time with cl, who had briefly dated my dumbass roommate a, who was a jerk to her, and who was a really good friend to me and always down to go lay out and work on her tan at various swimming pools around town, which was an activity i was really into at the time as a way of affecting shallowness in order to make myself seem more complex and well-rounded (i'm thankful how my stupid line about this at parties was to describe myself as both "shallow and deep, just like a swimming pool.") and also just because i liked going to the pool. 

i'm thankful to remember how right after we finished eating the sausage and mustard and bread and apples, we heard a chiming song outside in the distance and realized that it was the ice cream truck, which sometimes toured the neighborhoods near campus in the summer, and thankful that i had a little cash and that we went outside and bought ice cream bars covered with chocolate and strawberry flavored crumbs and ate them right there in the street in the sun.