thank you notes 2/9
i'm thankful for the antiquated frankenstein of a building i work in. i'm thankful that whether it will be sweltering or freezing inside our offices on any given day is unpredictable and does not seem to be tied to shifts in the weather outside or to the manipulation of the office thermostats, which i increasingly suspect are there to function psychologically rather than actually. i'm thankful for my proposal, at the water fountain yesterday while we discussed the snow, that we needed to have a weather forecaster for inside the building as well as out.
i'm thankful for the section in the center of the building which used to be an open-air courtyard before it was developed into office space in an expansion years ago. i'm thankful, in a gesture that confuses everyone trying to find anywhere there, rooms in that space have a "C" prefix attached to them in memory of the courtyard. i'm thankful that as i explained all this to entertain a visitor who i was helping to find a room in the basement below the C level, which is accessed by a single hidden staircase, she made a punny joke about how we were going "below C level." i'm thankful at how happy she was at my laughter at this silly pun and i'm thankful how now i think of the pun every time i walk down the hidden staircase.
i'm thankful that lately d has been absentmindedly singing "higher," which i have decided is my favorite song from anti, around the house, even if i sometimes tease her about how it sounds like she's singing "higher" by creed, which is not my favorite anything. i'm thankful for jia tolentino's description of the "bluesy, ragged, winsome roar" of "higher," "a no i.d. production that, in two minutes, builds a saloon and floods it with wildly romantic desperation. over a single drunk violin, rihanna sings like the water’s rising, obliterated and almighty, hoarse and sublime." i'm thankful when a really good song is only two minutes long because of the way that enables compulsive repeated consumption on loop, an experience which is like digging through a bag of fun-size candy bars and making confetti of the wrappers.
i'm thankful for the text a friend sent this morning about a dream he had about a crazy person we knew in grad school taking over the publication of his book and fucking it up so bad that the publisher decided that all of the copies had to be burned. i'm thankful for d's theory this morning, as she mused about why i'm almost always absent from her dreams, that maybe it's because her subconscious mind knows that i'm asleep beside her in bed and so believes that i cannot also be "inside" her dream. i'm thankful for this drawing of a smile, in which a boat is the mouth and its sail is the nose and the eyes are a bird and the sun and the hair is a rainbow between two clouds.
i'm thankful we are being lazy this week for dinner and just having pasta and kale salads rather than anything new or overly ambitious. i'm thankful that d didn't used to like the lazy dinners of big bowls of pasta and parmesan and salt and pepper that were my favorite meal growing up but that then i discovered that if i add some jarred pasta sauce to her bowl, she's all in and then some (i'm thankful for the name of her favorite jarred pasta sauce, which is "super chunky mushroom"). i'm thankful for how good i think kale salads taste and how easy they are to make and and how well kale keeps in the fridge and how they feel like they make me feel healthy, even if much of that feeling of healthiness is probably largely if not completely a cultural/social construction. i'm thankful to wonder if in ten years we will look back at all our contemporary kale salads the way we look back now at the sad failed health food of the 90s. i'm thankful for this animated gif of orechiette being formed by a machine.
i'm thankful i watched some of snowpiercer on netflix on the treadmill while running the other day. i'm thankful that it's a good movie to watch on the treadmill while running, and i'm thankful to fantasize about being able to watch mad max: fury road and magic mike xxl on the treadmill while running in the future. i'm thankful that i saw that gaspar noé's newest movie love (the 3d one about sex!) is now on netflix. i'm thankful for his last movie, enter the void, which i don't know if i think is actually a good movie and which was exhausting but which, at the same time, left me shaken and breathless and near tears when it ended. i'm thankful for sianne ngai's theory of the stuplime, "the aesthetic experience in which astonishment is paradoxically united with boredom."
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