thank you notes 3/28

i'm thankful i didn't have much time to write notes at work today because i was doing actual work. i'm thankful that i usually have time at work to write notes, which allows me to devote my leisure time to other things. i'm thankful for the way being busy makes the day go by quickly, though i am also thankful in a different way for the days when i'm not busy.

i'm thankful that our house and d's car weren't damaged by the insane surprise hailstorm that descended on our neighborhood yesterday evening. i'm thankful for the hail, which was beautiful, if frightening, while falling and littering our yard afterward (i'm thankful to describe it as gumball size). i'm thankful that the storm was last night when i was inside the house rather than this morning while i was biking to work.

i'm thankful i got to go by the hospital and return the ph monitor receiver i've been using for the past few days to log my meals, stomach symptoms, and when i sleep or am otherwise "supine." i'm thankful that the machine worked this time. i'm thankful that the paper form i logged a duplicate copy of my data in was labeled "my diary." i'm thankful to hope that my doctor can learn things about my body from "my diary" in the way that i learn things about myself from my diary. 

i'm thankful how i was "happy" when i slept poorly the other night because i kept waking up because my stomach was burning because i knew that unlike in my regular life, my discomfort had a "purpose" and that my discomfort was being recorded by the machine and in "my diary." i'm thankful that i learned from "my diary" that on average, i eat a meal in 11 minutes, though i'm thankful that our dinner was 23 minutes on saturday because i boiled shrimp and so we had to peel as we ate.

i'm thankful for the dark forest, the sequel to the three body problem, which i spent a lot of yesterday on the couch reading and is so crazy and fascinating. i'm thankful for the inventiveness of the author's imagination. i'm thankful for the ways that the book makes me think about the problem of fighting climate change, which it does much more effectively than kim stanley robinson's science in the capital trilogy, which is explicitly about climate change (i am thankful for his books aurora and the wild shore, which i love).

i'm thankful for finding vivian maier, which we watched on netflix over the weekend. i'm thankful that the movie was worthwhile for getting to see her photographs alone, even if i found the filmmaker's presence in it kind of annoying and rejected his sense of major chord string section triumphalism at the end of the movie. i'm thankful for the prickly antisocial beautiful weirdness of vivian maier and for the way that it is reflected in her photographs and recordings.

i'm thankful, in response to d's inquiry about a new work from fabletics, to have said, "i tend to like abstraction instead of representation in leggings." i'm thankful to remember how in college my friend e taught me that clement greenberg at one point earned a living selling ties in the men's section of a department store. 

i'm thankful i bought a pair of rollerblades, even though when i put them on to go for a ride down the trail with d yesterday, buying them immediately seemed like it had been a terrible mistake. i'm thankful to be reminded that nostalgia blurs out bumps and all kinds of pain. i'm thankful that i bought pads, even though i did not fall, because they made me feel safer. i'm thankful for the high resolution sense you get of every tiny pebble and crack in the road, even if that is also terrifying. i'm thankful that for a few moments of gliding on a smooth section of trail halfway through the ride, i experienced the smooth weightless feeling that i remembered and that made me buy the rollerblades. 

i'm thankful for the concept of beginner mind.