thank you notes 3/25
i'm thankful that when i sat down after checking in at the hospital, there was a family gathered around the fish tank in the waiting room, gleefully discussing whether a fish was dead. i'm thankful for the way that the fish's (possible) death momentarily distracted them from whatever unpleasantness had brought them to the hospital (which i hope wasn't related to or won't result in death). i'm thankful to think about how if you cosmic zoom out from the narrative of your life, your own death can be seen as a less momentous event than that of the fish in the tank (though i'm also thankful to hope that the fish was not dead, only resting). i'm thankful for the moment later when the mom of the family ruffled the angular hair of the teenage girl, which shone with a faint aura of manic panic, and, smiling, said, "this washed out in like 5 washes."
i'm thankful always to smile at people but thankful for how particularly important it feels to smile at people at the hospital, since you never know what they're going through and never know whether your smile might be the last smile they ever remember. i'm thankful to know that this is always true of smiles and everything else, since there are cars that crash and hearts that stop, but thankful for the way that being reminded of the frailty of life in a clean well-lit corridor makes it seem urgent to express kindness to other people in small ways if you have the ability. i'm thankful in particular to smile at old people, especially old women, who seem more receptive to it and more open to connection with the world and the people around them than most old men do in my experience. i'm thankful to hope that by the time we are old men and women, the iron maidens and straightjackets of gender roles will have been more chipped away and we'll be more free to always be ourselves as we feel inside.
i'm thankful for jenny slate, who is a great actress but more importantly is a great human. i'm thankful for obvious child and thankful for this podcast, where she passionately expresses the feeling that her name is meant to be susan instead of jenny, that she has always wanted to be a susan and that in the inside of her she knows there is a susan trying to get out. i'm thankful for her tweets, which remind me of e.e. cummings poems (her use of ampersands) and zen koans and which never fail to bring light to the shade of my days. i'm thankful for her continuous embrace of joy and the way she catches that feeling in the butterfly net of language. i'm thankful, in particular, for these three tweets from last night:
(1) "As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain&more precious, I feel less afraid that someone else will erase me by denying me love"
(2) "Everybody everybody everybody has insecurities.Expressing them is proof of being hopeful. Asking for help&clarity from yr loved ones is bold"
(3) "The main thing I want to do is to use my brain in the most graceful way"
i'm thankful for the nurses who prepared me for and guided me through my procedure. i'm thankful for r and s, who i remembered from last time and who remembered me too—i'm thankful i told them about details i remembered from our conversations last time (which i'm thankful i remembered because i wrote them here, or at least thought about doing it) and that sparked their memories, so that we were together in the room both in the present and the past at the same time. i'm thankful for the funny conversation i had with r about how both the men she's been married to have been hard of hearing. i'm thankful for the story she told me of how the first one lost hearing in one ear when they were on a camping trip in their twenties and a bug flew in his air and lodged there and did not work itself out for years. i'm thankful for the nurse after r, who put in my IV and talked a mile a minute about the importance of exercise and waste in health care billing and how doctors over-order urine. i'm thankful that she commiserated with me about acid reflux, described how she eats six small meals a day, and complained about a dinner party that she went to recently that was supposed to start at six but didn't until seven because people were late and how even though she was hungry, she just ate a few boiled shrimp without cocktail sauce because eating more wouldn't have been worth the pain of later in the evening.
i'm thankful that when r whisked me back to my room, i asked her how her day was going. i'm thankful to imagine how hard it must be to be a nurse, since you're always working with people who are sick or afraid or unhappy or confused or all of the above. i'm thankful to hope that there is a satisfaction in it, though, that for the massive amounts of emotional labor that nurses put in, they at least sometimes get out some measure of emotional payment, too (in addition to money, which they should of course get more of). i'm thankful for the way the graceful practiced motions of the nurses as they took my vitals and hooked me up to tubes and machines made me think of the sequences and rhythms of my own customer service job and how the repeated interactions that i have with people aren't numbing or depressing (at least not most of the time), but are actually reassuring, both in the comfort of the routine and in the game of refining my technique, the idea that this time that i do this thing i've done a thousand times, i could do it 3% better, not for the sake of the efficiency overlords but because that might make the moment 3% better for me and/or the person i'm helping. i'm thankful for the generosity of spare change.
i'm thankful for the copy of yoga journal i brought with me to read after they took my phone away. i'm thankful that even though it wasn't a very good magazine, i did learn one useful thing that seems obvious but that i had never thought of, which is that when you're buying citrus fruit, you should buy the fruit that feels heaviest for its size because that heaviness means it will be the juiciest.
i'm thankful, since the magazine wasn't very good, that for the hour and a half i lay in my little darkened room under the hospital blanket with cold saline solution pumping into my arm, e was showing reruns of sex and the city. i'm thankful for the theme song of sex and the city, which is perhaps the most comforting tv theme song i know. i'm thankful for how happy i felt at the break of every half hour when i heard the music come in again, signifying that there was another episode. i'm thankful for the episodes i watched, which were during the period where carrie is dating aidan but then starts cheating with big, while at the same time charlotte is about to get married to trey and samantha gets scared she has aids and miranda gets street harassed by a man in a blimpie sandwich costume. i'm thankful for how much i enjoyed watching the show, even though the feel of it is a little schticky and dated compared to the tv i watch now. i'm thankful that samantha didn't have aids and thankful that the syndication schedule for yesterday wasn't from the season where she has cancer, which would have been harder to watch. i'm thankful to be a miranda and to have always been a miranda, though i sometimes fantasize about being a carrie.
i'm thankful for when i was in the operating room and they had me turn on my side as the anaesthesia was starting to enter my bloodstream and it was like they were slowly turning off the dimmer switch of my consciousness and then suddenly it was the future and i was awake. i'm thankful, as an insomniac, for the magic of how easy that feels, to imagine it's what sleep could be like someday. i'm thankful that i felt woozier when i woke up than last time because they used a different anaesthetic and how when i smiled and said, in response to their inquiries as to how i was doing, i said, "i feel so great—they gave me the fun anaesthetic this time," they laughed in surprise.
i'm thankful to express pleasure openly when i feel it, because i think to do so is such a weird fucked up taboo in our culture, where people are always complaining about their aches and pains, which are valorized and sanctified, but so rarely talk about things and moments that feel great. i'm thankful to hope that this isn't because people are only in pain and discomfort constantly (even though i know they are in pain and discomfort constantly, which makes me sad) and don't ever feel joy, but that it's (at least partially) because we don't make enough spaces in our language world to represent happiness and that, because we don't spin language out of it, it doesn't exist as visibly in the world and so feels absent even if it doesn't have to be. i'm thankful for that even though it's bad because it's easier to change your perception and expression of a thing than it is to change the thing itself. i'm thankful that i think this poverty of pleasure language is one reason why it's valuable to have ostensibly nothing conversations about the weather or what we eat for breakfast, because to talk about warmth or sunlight or a blue sky or a ripe clementine or crisp apple or fresh baked baguette is a kind of coded way to say "right now it feels nice to be in my body, i am pleased that i am a living human in the world, i want to keep going."
Don't miss what's next. Subscribe to thank you notes: