thank you notes 7/22

food on franklin

                            July 22, 2016

                thank you notes 7/22

                        i'm thankful for how my new job is changing my relationship with the internet. i'm thankful for the weird paradox of how, unlike my old job, my new job is done entirely through the internet and yet, because for me the internet at work has always been associated with digression and dilly-dallying, with creating a space of play and inquiry and chatter to fill the time at a boring job, i feel like i'm not actually "on the internet" now in the way that i used to always be. i'm thankful for the strangeness of not constantly obsessively passing through my stations of internet, to pick up my phone at the end of the day and to see email or twitter notifications from hours earlier that i hadn't realized happened. i'm thankful for the strangeness of that, which, even though it feels hard, i don't think is necessarily a bad thing, per se.

i'm thankful that the customers i was working with who needed my help at the end of the day yesterday only required me to stay an additional hour after my shift ended, as the lovely dinner that d had prepared sat cooling on the table in front of me. i'm thankful, even though staying an additional hour felt outrageous and draining and made me so angry, that it was only an additional hour, since it very well could have taken even longer to bring their tickets to an appropriate resolution (i'm thankful for my teammate who helped me do so, without whom i would've been utterly lost and sad). i'm thankful that though one of the customers asked some difficult things of me, she was really nice and appreciative.
i'm thankful, even though i don't want to rock the boat too much as a new employee, to hopefully be able to talk about how to handle situations like this in the future, since it seems unfair and like it kind of makes my teammate and i second class citizens at our company to have to put ourselves into situations like this. i'm thankful to work at a technology company which doesn't subscribe to the angry confrontational amazon model. i'm thankful that my supervisor is supportive and good and that my teammates are all good, nice, funny, helpful people who i really like. i'm thankful my new work computer came in the mail, even though i was so busy actually doing my job that i didn't get to set it up.

i'm thankful, very thankful, that it's friday. i'm thankful that last night d didn't wait to eat her portion of the lovely dinner she'd made us, since i didn't want her to wait. i'm thankful for ground pork and grated ginger and chili bean paste. i'm thankful that ginger seems to be doing better and thankful that we had a nice facetime session with my parents last night gossiping about drama in our extended family. i'm thankful that my parents love spending time with d and love her and that d loves them and loves spending time with them. i'm thankful to have heard that because of his pokemon go habit, my brother has walked more in the past week than ever before in his life. i'm thankful that there is a new episode of food on franklin, my favorite podcast.

i'm thankful for the new headphones i bought, which are the nicest headphones i've ever owned and which do all of the audiophile things they're supposed to do. i'm thankful, even though it sounds like generic marketing copy, to be able to hear things in recordings i've listened to hundreds of times that i hadn't heard before. i'm thankful for "really love," which is the first song i listened to on the new headphones. i'm thankful for the way the lush cinematic strings and cryptic sampled vocals of the drumless opening section pass across a bed of flamenco guitar and through a field of harp arpeggios cascading into the bouncing plucky groove of the verse, his heavenly falsetto pirouetting over everything. i'm thankful for black messiah, which is the most beautifully engineered album of the decade, thankful for the obvious care that's taken with each little bit of sound that flits in and out of and across the mix. i'm thankful to be able to appreciate that care even more now than in the past.

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