thank you notes 9/10

i'm thankful that i had a short glass of whiskey with dinner last night in the hopes that it would make me feel different than the way i was feeling. i'm thankful to try to remember the first time i had whiskey, which i think was my freshman year of college, jack daniels, mixed with black cherry soda from a glass bottle. i'm thankful for the special kind of taste and burn of whiskey, which i have fantasized about often during my sobriety, and thankful that the real taste was satisfying but not as satisfying as what i had imagined it to be when i couldn't have it. i'm thankful to have allowed myself the drink, but am also thankful to have stopped well short of any kind of actual drunkenness. i'm thankful that the alcohol loosened the limbs of my tightened body.

i'm thankful, since i wasn't able to take a work break to clean the house like i usually do on fridays, that i cleaned it after dinner yesterday. i'm thankful always to have a clean house for the weekend. i'm thankful for how the absence of clutter has a real effect on my mental health and how the process of getting the house to that clean state, while sometimes something i'm not in the mood for, always makes me feel good too. i'm thankful when things are hard to remember that there are things that make me feel good and thankful to be able to find the time and space to do them in. 

i'm thankful that d was able (we think) to preorder her new iphone even though there were many problems with sprint's website. i'm thankful, now that i work at a website where there are sometimes problems, to feel more empathy, to know that there are people like me behind the scenes feeling very stressed out and overwhelmed because of the problems with the website and their effect on customers. i'm thankful to hope that maybe describing this will also put that in your mind when there are problems with a website you're using, though i also know that there's a limit to how much that empathy can help and that these problems can be very frustrating. 

i'm thankful, when things are broken, to be able to reflect on the wonder that things aren't broken most of the time, that we scroll the page and type the text and click the button and all the metaphorical gears turn, their teeth interlocked behind the scenes, and the thing works, it does what we want it to. i'm thankful for this, for all the complicated hidden machinery that allows us to experience something as simple.