thank you notes 7/3

spectre

                            July 3, 2016

                thank you notes 7/3

                        i'm thankful for a nice saturday after a long week. i'm thankful that i cleaned the house, even wet swiffering the floor, which i sometimes skip even though i cook enough with open skillets that the kitchen floor gets oily. i'm thankful that we rode our bikes across town for d's eye exam. i'm thankful that it was unexpectedly cool out, so that we didn't get sweaty. i'm thankful that while d was at the eye doctor, i rode my bike aimlessly through neighborhoods over by the mall that i hadn't ridden through before. i'm thankful that riding around them felt like adding data to the invisible map of town that lives inside of my brain; i'm thankful that i gave myself the opportunity to test that and thankful for the satisfaction of eventually coming around a corner or through an intersection and seeing a familiar landmark and suddenly knowing where i was. 

i'm thankful, that said, that when d texted me to let me know her appointment was over, i used google maps because i didn't want to make her wait. i'm thankful that we stopped at the mall and she got some new extra low-cut socks to wear with her keds. i'm thankful that i bought a bag of chips deluxe cookies and d got a bag of reese's flavored chips deluxe (even if the cookies were disappointingly soft rather than crunchy and crispy). i'm thankful that on the way back through campus to downtown, i led us along a street which was recently resurfaced and so was wonderfully smooth. i'm thankful that d got her prescription at cvs and had a coupon which we used to buy probiotics. i'm thankful for the funny coincidence, after we left cvs and rode the five minutes home, to have looked at my phone and seen that i had a five minute old text from cvs telling me that my prescriptions were ready for pickup.

i'm thankful we ordered a pizza for dinner, even if it did exacerbate my acid reflux (i'm thankful it was worth it and thankful to suffer for pizza). i'm thankful we watched spectre, which was often very stupid but an entertaining enough experience. i'm thankful for christoph waltz. i'm thankful that a particularly stupid moment in which a henchman played by a professional wrestler is able to pause and utter the line "oh shit" before he is pulled out of a speeding train by a rope tied around his neck to ponder the binary re: superhero movies of the serious nolan-y grimdark vs. the fizzy semi-ironic action comedy. i'm thankful that even though i think it's the unpopular stance on the approval matrix to prefer the grimdark, i tend to find self-seriousness and antiheroic difficult men less annoying than jokes i don't like, though i don't think this is a particularly superior moral stance and like everyone ("everyone") i think it would be great if there were fewer of these kinds of movies in general.

i'm thankful that it's supposed to rain all day. i'm thankful for rainy days where you don't really have to go anywhere. i'm thankful for the idea of nature enforcing or supporting human laziness. i'm thankful to still be in bed. i'm thankful that i started reading babel-17  by samuel r. delany, which i started the other day and is great so far. i'm thankful that it feels much more accessible than dhalgren, which i have tried and failed to start a number of times (but which i have a new hope i might be able to read sometime because of my affection for this book). i'm thankful that the main character of the book is a famous poet who can use her super-focused powers of observation and language to read people's minds (i'm thankful for the way the book literalizes the anxiety of influence in her fear that she is literally stealing her poems from other people's thoughts) and who is working to decode mysterious transmissions in a cryptic alien language. i'm thankful that to fly spaceships in this universe you need dead (semi-dead? ghost? zombie? not totally sure) people, as well as a trio of navigators who must, in addition to working together, be involved in an emotional and sexual relationship in order to properly, for lack of a better term, jaeger. 
i'm thankful for this defense of difficult art from geoffrey hill. i'm thankful for "Alison brie Larson von trier." i'm thankful for these photos of jack nicholson eating a sandwich on a boat in the mediterranean. i'm thankful for wesley morris always but especially in this hilarious review of the blake lively surfing movie. i'm thankful for this hanya yanagihara essay about swimming across martha's vineyard, which is lovely and surprisingly free of torture. i'm thankful that a prairie home companion, which was always such a crushing folksy disappointment to come across when turning to NPR on a long drive in the days before podcasts, is ending (i'm thankful to ask why anyone would want to leave baltimore). i'm thankful for this danny chau essay about the americanness of sriracha. i'm thankful for this picture of a melancholy dog in gray sweatpants. 

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