thank you notes 7/11
i'm thankful for the korean mother at wendy's the other day who was paying for burgers for her daughters with pennies from a coin purse. i'm thankful for the wendy's employee who counted out 67 pennies from the coin purse as the line got longer and longer behind her. i'm thankful that i could tell the mother was stressed and embarrassed (at delaying the line and paying in change) and the cashier was stressed (at delaying the line and having to count the change) and i'm thankful, once the transaction was done, to have tried to lighten the mood with a smile and breezy conversation about pocket change. i'm thankful afterward to have seen the mother sitting in the booth with her daughters as they gleefully chomped on the sandwiches she had bought them. i'm thankful that i recognized a few words eavesdropping on their conversation and am thankful for d's description of the trouble of managing proper levels of linguistic formality and respect in korean.
i'm thankful for a conversation d and i had about the difference between cocoa pebbles and cocoa krispies w/r/t snapping, crackling, and popping. i'm thankful for our further discussion of the conceptual relationship between the name for the generic cocoa pebbles we bought, "dyno bites," and cocoa pebbles, with d making the case that pebbles carry an aura of the prehistoric (citing as evidence the daughter on the flintstones) and this explains the generic cereal name, even if it's strange since most of the generic cereal names plainly describe the experience of the cereal ("apple cinnamon rings," "cinnamon toast squares," and etc.) rather than trying to conjure an image or mood. i'm thankful for d's explanation of why she preferred dyno bites to cocoa puffs, which has to do with their more powerful effect on the milk that contains them. i'm thankful for the gross-tasting kale/carrot/ginger juice i bought on our walk and thankful that d let me wash it down with her better-tasting fresh orange juice.
i'm thankful for supremacist by david shapiro, which i read on saturday and which is about the author's trip with his friend to every supreme store in the world. i'm thankful for david shapiro, whose blog pitchfork reviews reviews is one of my top 5 all-time favorite blogs. i'm thankful to recommend that you read maybe my favorite post of his, 'how downloading music saved my life,' which because his blog is for some reason walled off inside tumblr now i have reproduced for you here. i'm thankful, if you like it, to recommend that you get a tumblr login or reset the password for an old one (as i just did) in order to be able to read the rest of his posts, which are so lovely and warm and sweet and intense. i'm thankful that you could not really use those words to describe the feeling of supremacist (well, you could call it intense i guess) which when i started reading the book was really unpleasant and alienating for me, so much that i almost stopped reading the book altogether, which is generally my strategy for books i don't like immediately. i'm thankful that i kept reading the book even though it didn't feel very good to read and thankful that over time i grew to appreciate and respect what shapiro was trying to do with the book and was quite thankful to have had the experience of reading it by the time i finished it.
i'm thankful for this reversed video of a tomato being sliced. i'm thankful that i went to the hardware store with d so she could buy cages for her tomato plants i could buy a fifty pound bag of sand. i'm thankful that we were just able to get the tomato cages to fit in her tiny car and thankful for the strange feeling of riding home with the spikes of the cages in between us. i'm thankful that when we got home, even though i was tired, i sorted and binned the recycling so that i won't have to do it after work today, when i probably will be a different kind of tired. i'm thankful that i used the fifty pound bag of sand to fill small black sandbags that i will use to keep my portable standing desk platform from moving. i'm thankful, since i had felt bad about having ordered sandbags from amazon and thus forcing our mailman to carry very heavy packages up our front steps, to have found out upon arrival that of course they were not filled with sand before shipping. i'm thankful for how cheap a 50 pound bag of sand is and for how this made me remember the scene in togetherness when they go to the beach at night to steal sand for their charter school, which was nice but now seems pretty unnecessary.
Don't miss what's next. Subscribe to thank you notes: