thank you notes 6/15

i'm thankful for how strange it feels that the heat here seems to peak in the evening rather than the early afternoon. i'm thankful, after i resigned myself to not taking any more baths until next fall, to have rediscovered how nice cool and room temperature baths can be. i'm thankful for the first cool bath i can remember taking solace in, which was when i helped move into the house i lived in the senior year of college with my dumb roommate a who had not gotten the electricity turned on for the house we were moving into despite it being florida in august. i'm thankful that d bought me fancy bath salts and incense mentioned in the bloop guide to summer parties. i'm thankful for the bath bombs that d's sister e bought her because they were on her etsy wishlist, not knowing that d doesn't take baths, and how this led to e learning the story of how i picked her engagement ring out from her pinterest, only to find out that it was not actually a ring she wanted.

i'm thankful that even though i had a panic attack in the waiting room at the doctor's office, when the nurse took my blood pressure, it was normal and healthy, which it almost never is at the doctor's office. i'm thankful to have gotten through the ordeal i had to go through to log into my health insurance website yesterday, in which i had to request a temporary password because i had forgotten my real password but then the form you submitted once you logged in with the temporary password to enter a new real password was broken and threw an error message asking me to call customer care when i clicked the submit button. i'm thankful that after sitting on hold with customer care for a while, i got to a person, who, when i told her my issue, made an "oh, honey" sound with her voice and told me i actually needed to talk to tech support and not customer care for that. i'm thankful for the tech support guy, who reset my password administratively and thankful that i only had to have him repeat it like 4 times before i was able to get it right (i'm thankful for the new episode of call chelsea peretti, in which she does several hilarious extended riffs on the particular contemporary anxiety of having to clarify the letters in words over the phone ("a as in aardvark, b as in biscotti")).

i'm thankful that once i did all that to get logged in to the health insurance website, i couldn't find where to submit an appeal a denied claim, which was the whole reason i needed to log in. i'm thankful that i am a rational person, and so i assumed it might be somewhere on the "claims" page, or, if not there, on the "services" page, but it was not. i'm thankful that googling "anthem appeal claim" directed me to a number of pages that mentioned that i could appeal a claim online without actually linking to the page where you appeal the claim. i'm thankful that after an extensive search, i finally found that there was a very small link in the "message center" page to a form where i could file an appeal and that i was able to do so. i'm thankful that d reminded me of the concept of "dark patterns," though i think this might just be an unintentionally "dim" pattern, though maybe that's too charitable. 

i'm thankful that a staff member from another office who found out how hot it is in our office brought over a fan to help us funnel in air from the cooler hallway. i'm thankful that the faculty member with whom i have the closest relationship gave me a treasure chest full of chocolates like the one he keeps on his desk in his office for his coworkers so that i could put it on my desk in my new office to help me make friends with my new coworkers; i'm thankful he signed the attached card "be happy." i'm thankful for how happy my brother was that i could give him our parents' hbo go password so he could watch the latest episode of game of thrones. i'm thankful for the joyful slap echo chugging guitar of the song "leather jacket" by thunderbitch and the al green EQ of the alabama shakes song "guess who."