thank you notes 5/31

i'm thankful for three day weekends that include monday. i'm thankful for all three day weekends, but especially for three day weekends that include monday, which feel more freeing, i think because fridays are almost always easier workdays than mondays (what with the excitement for the start of the weekend) and so to have monday off feels like more of a gift, especially because of the way that it speeds up the following week, so it feels like the vacation is touching two weeks rather than one.

i'm thankful for the girlfriend experience, which we started watching this weekend and which is very good so far. i'm thankful for the lead actress, who is cold in a very interesting and complex way. i'm thankful that like willa paskin, the show that it most reminds me of is mr. robot, though i'm thankful to extend that beyond the themes to the visual aesthetic used to explore them: thankful for the sharp edged shadows and blankly luxurious surfaces. i'm thankful to also be reminded of julia leigh's film sleeping beauty, which is powerful and unsettling.

i'm thankful that i finished at the existentialist cafe, which was very good. i'm thankful for the concept of 'inhabited philosophy' that the author offers to describe what she wants her book to do:

"In short, the existentialists inhabited their historical and personal world, as they inhabited their ideas. This notion of 'inhabited philosophy' is one I've borrowed from the English philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who wrote the first full-length book on Sartre and was an early adopter of existentialism (though she later moved away from it). She observed that we need not expect moral philosophers to 'live by' their ideas in a simplistic way, as if they were following a set of rules. But we can expect them to show how their ideas are lived in. We should be able to look in through the windows of a philosophy, as it were, and see how people occupy it, how they move about and how they conduct themselves." 

i'm thankful that i have never really liked much self help writing or agony aunt columns, but thankful to posit that maybe what i'm writing in these notes is 'inhabited self help.' i'm thankful that since finishing that book, i've been dipping into an edition of simone de beauvoir's letters to sartre, which are lovely, and her novel (from life) the mandarins, which is interesting so far. i'm thankful to learn from the letters that she always refers to sartre in affectionate diminuitives ("my little man") and that his pet name for her is "beaver" (i'm thankful that she often signs her letters "your charming beaver").

i'm thankful, after having always used and seen the word "frisson" used in the context of the aesthetic (i'm thankful for my youthful overuse of the phrase "the frisson of the real' to rhapsodize about reality television) to learn that the actual definition has to do with bodily sensation. i'm thankful to have noticed the phrase "that violate some level of musical expectation" in the wiki sentence: "typical stimuli include loud passages of music and passages that violate some level of musical expectation." i'm thankful that "violate" seems like the wrong word and i would suggest "push beyond," "rub up against," or "scratch the itch of." i'm thankful for the discovery algorithm that led me to the song "semi-charmed life," which i have rediscovered as an adult at the gym, and which always is good for a touch of frisson during a hard workout, especially during the frenzied frat rap of the third verse breakdown/build up/breakdown that goes:

i'm thankful to live a mostly-charmed life.