thank you notes 8/28

i'm thankful that it started raining but thankful that we were able to stay mostly dry by pressing together under the umbrella. i'm thankful that d told me a story about how in college she had tried to buy the largest umbrella possible but how one time she had been out walking in the rain and seen a woman with an even larger umbrella and the psychodrama that played out in her head when the woman smiled at her, in which she in the moment believed the woman somehow had access to the knowledge that d had taken pride in buying the largest umbrella possible but had been foiled by this woman, which i said was possible but that it was more likely that the woman was just thinking, like, "hey, she's got a big umbrella too, just like me!" or, more simply, "hey, there's a person!" 

(i'm thankful that people are usually not thinking about us as much as we think they are. i'm thankful that if we are people that think about other people a lot, though, sometimes it seems like that. i'm thankful to think about other people, like yesterday when d and i were in an insane line at the grocery store that proceeded back into the greeting card aisle, we surveyed the contents of the cart of the woman in front of us (lunchables, two cans of cinnamon roles, both wonderbread AND kashi fiber bars, store brand pretzels) and tried to understand who she was from them. i'm thankful that the woman who had a seizure in the next aisle over while we were doing this didn't hurt herself when she fell and seemed to be okay. i'm thankful that i purposefully tried not to rubberneck her aisle as we stood waiting in the checkout, since even though i was bored and curious, i knew that me looking at the woman who had the seizure would not improve the situation. i'm thankful that i was mostly successful, though in one moment i turned by reflex to look and then snapped my neck back to avoid looking. i'm thankful to have instead entertained myself by reading tabloid headlines to d)

i'm thankful to remember when i was in film school and we had these big heavy duty flight cases for our camera equipment and i had to get one from my apartment to class with the surly teacher who taught us about crew-ing in heavy rain so I wrapped the case in garbage bags and then covered it in a quilt and wheeled it through the rain to the classroom, where the teacher, who at first was annoyed that i was late, had the class give me a standing ovation for having taken care of the camera so well. i'm thankful to remember getting stuck in another downpour one day on my way home from class, after i had dropped out of film school, and running through the rain in my flip flops, thankful that i didn't fall and hurt myself and for the wet slapping sounds of the heels of the flip flops flying up and down.

i'm thankful that in grad school, people would forget umbrellas in the offices of the literary magazine, so if you needed one, you could get it from there. i'm thankful for the big clear umbrella that d bought from amazon which was bent when we received it but which i still used for years, even though it didn't really work well, since most of the time a bent and broken umbrella is still better than one that's not broken. 

i'm thankful for this blog post which neatly details the parts of an umbrella. i'm thankful, obviously, for the rihanna song "umbrella." i'm thankful for green apple flavored perrier. i'm thankful for katy goodman & greta morgan's take it, it's yours, which is a set of beautifully sweetened duets on punk standards like "pay to cum" and "where eagles dare" and "ever fallen in love" that is lovely sunday morning listening. i'm thankful for this trippy imaginary rollercoaster.