thank you notes 9/21

i'm thankful for maureen dowd's hilarious assertion that donald trump would use the word "frisson" or even a coarser word that could be translated to "frisson." i'm thankful that donald trump has been called the reality tv candidate, which is an apt if played take, but am thankful also to think of him as the creative nonfiction candidate with regard to his confabulations and constant mangling of fact. i'm thankful for this transcript of a debate between obama and romney about creative nonfiction and other trendy issues of literary aesthetics that i wrote for our school's literary magazine before the 2012 election, even though it is pretty dated and corny, because i remember having fun writing it and i had lost almost all joy in writing at that time. 

i'm thankful that i now have more of a grasp of the ethical problems of telling a lie and calling it the truth than i did in the past, even though i still think essayists are held to an unfairly higher standard on this than artists straddling the same line in other mediums are. i'm thankful, still, that i don't intentionally misrepresent things for artistic purposes or to contribute to "emotional truth" in my nonfiction anymore, even though i know my memories are still always mutating inside of my brain, reshot and recut every time i try access them. i'm thankful to have found a form for myself where i can share the things of life warts and all (i'm thankful that i don't have literal warts).

i'm thankful for red plenty, which i am still really enjoying and which, as a novel in stories that makes use of real people and real events within a fictional framework, has an interesting strategy for navigating the fact/fiction problem, which is copious and interesting endnotes after every chapter that make clear what that you've just read is true and what's kind of true and what's totally made up and who's a composite character and what event has been moved temporally for the sake of narrative coherence, all of this with copious and enticing citations of other books.

i'm thankful that d and i went into the office yesterday afternoon, where some of our team was gathered in advance of our company's annual retreat, which starts tonight. i'm thankful for the fun gossip and conversation we shared, which was nice and helped make the work i was doing feel a bit less stressful (even if it also made me slower at doing it). i'm thankful to have heard from a coworker about how he has trouble watching a lot of tv shows and movies because he feels they're too emotionally demanding, that he puts himself in the place of the characters too much and that's hard for him. i'm thankful that he mentioned the office (us version) as a show he finds almost impossible to watch, which was very interesting to d and i, since that show has been, since i started my new job, our de-stress comfort food fallback rewatch.