thank you notes 7/21
i'm thankful that when my family's first dog, spec, died, i was at college (fall semester, my freshman year) and so didn't have to really experience her death. i'm thankful that the night she died, i had gone with my friends to see a concert on a revival tour by the 60s act the zombies. i'm thankful that the concert was okay and that they played the songs i wanted to hear (i'm thankful, always, for "care of cell 44" and "this will be our year"), but that it was strange that the band were so old and thankful that my friends and i found this funny, the idea that people so old could play music that was about being young. i'm thankful to remember calling my parents outside in the dark after the concert and them telling me that she had died and me not really caring about the death because i wasn't forced to confront it in the flesh, because it was just a concept to me, relayed through words over the telephone. i'm thankful to remember when my parents got spec when she was a puppy and my mom picked me up from 5th grade one day and had me open the back door of the car and she was there in the seat, tiny enough to be held in my mom's hands.
i'm thankful that after spec died while i was at college, by the time i came back home that winter, my parents had gotten us a new dog, ginger, who looked like spec, so, even though they were a bit different in their temperaments, i didn't feel the lack or the loss the way i might have if she hadn't been there. i'm thankful when i was facetiming with my parents last night, my dad relayed how ginger has had nosebleeds recently and how when they took her to the vet, he said it might just be caused by something she'd aspirated or might be the sign of a tumor or a polyp. i'm thankful she has medicine to take and thankful that my father relayed the story of coming home to find that she'd sprayed one of the bedrooms in their apartment with blood so that it looked like a murder scene with humor, even though i could tell it made him feel sad. i'm thankful that apparently she's not bleeding through her nose any more. that my parents have been spoiling ginger with food that she loves (i'm thankful for her love of scrambled eggs). i'm thankful to hope that this is a benign thing and will pass but thankful to hope that if she dies soon, it is quick and not too painful. i'm thankful for all the nice times i've gotten to spend with her in my life.
i'm thankful that after spec died while i was at college, by the time i came back home that winter, my parents had gotten us a new dog, ginger, who looked like spec, so, even though they were a bit different in their temperaments, i didn't feel the lack or the loss the way i might have if she hadn't been there. i'm thankful when i was facetiming with my parents last night, my dad relayed how ginger has had nosebleeds recently and how when they took her to the vet, he said it might just be caused by something she'd aspirated or might be the sign of a tumor or a polyp. i'm thankful she has medicine to take and thankful that my father relayed the story of coming home to find that she'd sprayed one of the bedrooms in their apartment with blood so that it looked like a murder scene with humor, even though i could tell it made him feel sad. i'm thankful that apparently she's not bleeding through her nose any more. that my parents have been spoiling ginger with food that she loves (i'm thankful for her love of scrambled eggs). i'm thankful to hope that this is a benign thing and will pass but thankful to hope that if she dies soon, it is quick and not too painful. i'm thankful for all the nice times i've gotten to spend with her in my life.
i'm thankful that i've never found death very sad. i'm thankful that maybe this is a reflection of privilege, that no one i've ever really deeply cared about has died. i'm thankful for that privilege and thankful to pray that i retain it for a while longer, even though i know that all things must pass. i'm thankful that i loved my grandparents, but that their deaths mostly just made me feel sad for my parents rather than me feeling sad directly about the deaths. i'm thankful that i've always been afraid of my own death, but thankful (i guess) that this is mostly a fear of a) the pain or suffering that would be associated with death and b) that, because of the country i live in, that in addition to dying i could bankrupt the people who love me if i suffered from some condition that required expensive treatment but that i still died from. i'm thankful that in my family, we have a dark joke about "the shovel," that if my dad starts to suffer from dementia like his mother does, he wants us to kill him with the shovel, or that if ginger is suffering and near death, we should put her out of her misery with the shovel. i'm thankful we don't actually own a shovel and would never kill dogs or humans with a shovel, but thankful that this conversational motif gives us a release valve for talking about the fear of death and reflects a shared feeling about how the ends of our lives should be handled. i'm thankful that we all want to be cremated and that my dad would like to have his ashes scattered at his favorite clothing optional beach, which, even though thinking of his death is hard, always makes me grin to imagine, my mom and my brother and i walking naked down the shore one morning scattering him to the wind.
i'm thankful that in contrast to my intense fear of expensive pain, the idea of death itself doesn't seem as scary, whether there is an afterlife or not. i'm thankful to remember talking with jk about my fear of a painful or expensive death and thankful that she talked about how she had been afraid of her own death in the past but that what scared her most now was the death of her husband. i'm thankful that this was early in my relationship with d and also when i was a more selfish person and so i didn't totally understand it, but thankful (i guess) that i understand it now, that the thing that is most frightening to me in the world is the idea that something could happen to d and that when i can i do small superstitious rituals like walking on the outside of the sidewalk so that i'm closer to traffic or holding her hand when it's icy out.
i'm thankful for this article about the japanese prefectural bear character kumamon. i'm thankful for these results, which i find interesting: "Experiments have demonstrated that viewing cute faces improves concentration and hones fine motor skills – useful modifications for handling an infant. A pair of Yale studies suggest that when people say they want to ‘eat up’ babies, it’s prompted by overwhelming emotions – caused, one researcher has speculated, by frustration at not being able to care for the cute thing, channelled into aggressiveness." i'm thankful to think of cute overload as a concept. i'm thankful to recommend the snapchat of jiffpom, a tiny dog that looks like a toy engineered for maximum cuteness and which is always a nice story to watch.
i'm thankful for this article about the japanese prefectural bear character kumamon. i'm thankful for these results, which i find interesting: "Experiments have demonstrated that viewing cute faces improves concentration and hones fine motor skills – useful modifications for handling an infant. A pair of Yale studies suggest that when people say they want to ‘eat up’ babies, it’s prompted by overwhelming emotions – caused, one researcher has speculated, by frustration at not being able to care for the cute thing, channelled into aggressiveness." i'm thankful to think of cute overload as a concept. i'm thankful to recommend the snapchat of jiffpom, a tiny dog that looks like a toy engineered for maximum cuteness and which is always a nice story to watch.
i'm thankful for the bbc's chips with everything podcast and especially thankful for the most recent episode, which is a panel on artificial intelligence and the future of games. i'm thankful that one panelist suggests, nodding to plato, that maybe the uncanny valley is not something we're ever really going to be able to get over, that maybe the distinction between representation and the real is hardcoded into our brains and no matter how good we get at simulating things, the chasm will be impossible to cross without actually changing our brains themselves. i'm thankful to have heard the story of how a neural network that a military project was trying to train to recognize images of tanks actually, because all of the images it was fed were of tanks on sunny days, learned to recognize sunny days instead.
i'm thankful for the concept of a "generational storyteller," the idea that you could have an AI companion in a game who you shared moments and experiences and conversations and stories with and that, after you died, that AI companion could live on and share a deep sense of who you were with your children and grandchildren. i'm thankful for the designer who, talking about procedural generation and the boast that no man's sky will contain 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique planets to explore, argued that while that's impressive, the real goal for games should be to create one planet that's so unique and interesting and full of (virtual) life that you don't visit any other planets because all you want is to not leave the one you're living in, to stay there as long as you can.
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