thank you notes 6/29

i'm thankful that i said "sorry, i just didn't want to disturb you or be creepy" and she said "it's creepier for you to stand behind me" which immediately seemed obvious and true and so i said "sorry, you're right" and stepped forward to stand beside her on the curb. i'm thankful that we stood there in silence for a bit watching cars go by and getting rained on (i'm thankful that in the dream, i couldn't really feel the rain even though i was in it) and eventually i asked "so is he coming?" and she looked at her phone and looked up at the street and then back again and said "he was delayed but he'll be here soon." i'm thankful that i tried to ask her another question, about whether she would have waited for so long out in the rain on the curb for one of her earlier lovers or whether this was a new kind of love for her and she said that it was a new kind of love. i'm thankful that for some reason she was carrying a kind of yearbook with her and gave it to me and had me write my question on the inside cover of the yearbook in a red pencil she gave me. i'm thankful that the act of writing was challenging (mechanically, not because of the rain, which didn't seem to be hitting the book) and that at the end of the question, my writing was just scribbles. i'm thankful that when i gave her back the book, i could see that she was happy because she knew he was coming soon and so i stepped away from her and into the hotel. i'm thankful that dreams aren't real, even if i would like to meet taylor swift, since when i entered the hotel, i was told that my father had just gone blind. 

(i'm thankful for the other fragment of dream i can remember, which involved me sitting on the carpeted floor of an empty room with a large purple crystal in my lap, tilting it and running my hands over its contours in a way that felt healing).

i'm thankful for this week's episode of keeping up with the kardashians, which was another relaxed vacation episode. i'm thankful for a really charged silent moment when they are all riding up the mountain on a gondola and scott reaches over and touches kourtney's face just above her lips, presumably to remove a fleck of grit or something, and it becomes immediately clear from her facial expression that this is way too intimate a thing for him to be doing now that they are separated, which he then clearly picks up on and which is reflected in his facial expression as he sits back, and i'm thankful for the intensity of the feelings emanating out silently from their eyes as the gondola continues to slowly ascend into the sky. i'm thankful that for me scott is the perfect evidence of how this show is not "fake" in the way that some people believe that it is, since if his addiction issues and their marital struggles were simply a storyline crafted in a writers room, that would change and become new—the reality is reflected in the fact that the scott plot is a boring and frustrating narrative loop that we, like kourtney and scott, feel stuck in.

i'm thankful every time kanye smiles, which he does often on the show. i'm thankful that he's more a part of the show now, which seems right since it's important for him to be in kim's art since she's such an important part of his art. i'm thankful to have watched his giddy little dance when, while bowling, he picked up a spare. i'm thankful to watch him play charades (or something similar) with the rest of the family. i'm thankful for the thing tyga says at a tense dinner during the black chyna/rob situation, about how the kardashians are a really solid family in a way that's rare, and thankful for how much kanye seems to be happy to have stepped into the group. i'm thankful for the moment on the private jet where north asks him to watch for a laptop to watch a "girls movie" and how when he tries to pass it to her, she struggles with its bulk and says, cutely, "i need a little help." i'm thankful that, after kim makes a reference to getting a text from her psychic about the black chyna/rob situation after the psychic saw him on a tabloid at the airport, kanye makes a joke about how if he's a psychic, he shouldn't need to see the tabloid to know that there's a situation. i'm thankful to imagine how easy it would be to be a celebrity psychic.

i'm thankful i got through the second day of my new job. i'm thankful, even though it's hard and frightening, to be the person on the team who knows so much less than everybody else, which is the opposite of my old job, where i knew so much more than everybody else. i'm thankful to own that and to feel like i'm really learning more every day. i'm thankful, even though it was hard, that the past two days, i felt bodily afraid before work and would go through a midday panic where i questioned myself and whether this was the right decision and then thankful that i would do some more work in the afternoon and feel better about things. i'm thankful that i don't feel that fear in the same way this morning (or at least not yet) and instead feel excited to try to rise to the challenge of completing the set of training exercises i started yesterday. i'm thankful, after having a job for years which was full of free time and so much about pursuing distractions and digressions, about being bored, for the intensity of being completely focused on complex things that take all of my brain power all day long, even if it leaves me feeling exhausted at the end of the day. i'm thankful that i felt slightly less exhausted at the end of the day yesterday and thankful to hope that i will feel slightly less exhausted than that at the end of the day today. i'm thankful for small and incremental positive change.