thank you notes 7/27

i'm thankful i helped another coworker with CSS and thankful for the thread where we all looked at a picture of another coworker's cat perched on her toilet which she almost accidentally sent to a customer. i'm thankful that d and i got several varieties of single serving cheeses at the grocery store, which have been good quick snacks during the day. i'm thankful that a depressing thing about getting into the groove of my technology job is that at a certain point, hungry but feeling like i didn't have to do even minimal prep work, that i for the first time understood the appeal of soylent. i'm thankful that last night looking at my subscriptions in youtube, i saw that report of the week had just reviewed soylent. i'm thankful that like all the drinks he reviews, he poured it into an oversized wine glass. i'm thankful that we were supposed to have chicken tacos for dinner this week, but thankful that when we had oven issues preventing the chicken from cooking and also because it's so hot that even if the oven did work properly, it would do intolerable things to the house, so thankful that i froze the chicken thighs i bought a whole roasted chicken from the deli at kroger, which i then shredded for the tacos. i'm thankful to have discovered putting strips of american cheese in the center of each tortilla, which adds a lovely gooey mouthfeel.

i'm thankful to have decided, even though i know it is probably an incorrect opinion, that i like moondance better than astral weeks. i'm thankful for the crazy number of alternate takes and early versions on the deluxe version. i'm thankful for the first track of the second disc, in which van morrison asks the engineer if he has any pencil directional microphones and when the engineer says no, why, he says, "because i could take one of them and stick one up my ass and hambone [?] naked, unbelievable effect, i'm serious." i'm thankful that several times yesterday, i thought of the song "wishes for kisses" by the rosebuds and that then d was singing it to herself yesterday evening. i'm thankful for the arrangment rostam's "wood." 

i'm thankful for the version of "love theme from spartacus" on bill evans' conversations with myself, which i listened to last night while forcing myself to try to meditate. i'm thankful for the challenge of trying to follow the interplay of the different voices spread across the stereo field. i'm thankful that sometimes when i don't want to meditate, i listen to solo or small group jazz ballads to give my brain something to hold onto. i'm thankful that though i kept thinking about work, for a few periods during the twenty minutes of my meditation, i was able to turn that off and just pay attention to my body. i'm thankful to know that even if meditation is hard sometimes, it is good for me and i should keep doing it. i'm thankful that i have an idea for some guided meditations i want to make to help myself and you, if you're interested, and that maybe this weekend i'll have enough energy to do them.

i'm thankful that lately i have been unwinding in the evenings by playing the building/crafting/exploring game terraria on ps4. i'm thankful, if you've never played the game, to describe it as a 2d minecraft, but thankful to expand on what makes terraria different, which is the inclusion of lore in the form of a panoply of unique items and weapons and charms and potions that you can find in your journeys through the world. i'm thankful that the mystery of this makes the game a lot more enjoyable than minecraft, which i could never really get into. i'm thankful that i originally played terraria a couple years ago on my iphone and i'm thankful that while that was very enjoyable, it's better to have a controller. i'm thankful for the soothing repetition of mining and building in the game and for the (mostly) easy, gentle combat, which never involves killing other people. i'm thankful that the last few evenings, i've been constructing a mine shaft from the surface of the world to the very bottom of the map, a device which players refer to as a "hellevator."

i'm thankful that since there is no spoken dialogue in the game, i can listen to music or a podcast while i play. i'm thankful for the episode of weird adults with little esther that i listened to last night. i'm thankful that she said she makes the kind of podcast she wants to listen to, which are just people having a conversation, so that, if you're listening to it in your car, you might imagine that the two people are in the back seat talking and you're just listening in. i'm thankful that's the kind of podcast i like too. i'm thankful for the intimacy of her podcast, especially for the episodes where she doesn't have an official guest but just talks to her boyfriend in their apartment. i'm thankful for the moment in the episode last night where she and her guest were talking about turning their phones off for the movies (she doesn't) and on airplanes and about the strange phenomenon of when you tell yourself that you're going to be virtuous and not look at your phone for a few hours and then when you come back to it, there are no texts or emails or notifications and you feel disappointed in a strange way. i'm thankful for strange disappointment, which is better than ordinary disappointment.