thank you notes 9/3

i'm thankful for the sandwiches we had for dinner this week. i'm thankful that d, delighted by my sandwich artistry, said that she would marry me all over again for my sandwiches. i'm thankful for my college friend j, whose father owned a chain of south florida subways and who taught me the importance of folding meat to give a sandwich volume, for the way that the air between the folds is texture made flavor.

i'm thankful to have shared excitement about a book with a friend. i'm thankful that dana now has a tinyletter for her always wonderful thank you notes (i'm thankful you can read today's letter right here). i'm thankful to have listened to abbey road and the alabama shakes' sound and color last night in the darkened living room with with d while we each worked separately on projects. i'm thankful for charlie parker with strings. i'm thankful for john coltrane's ballads. i'm thankful for "accessible music" made by "difficult" artists. i'm thankful for scare quotes, which don't scare me.

i'm thankful that this week at work continued to be very hard but thankful that i do feel like even if it continues to be hard, i am getting better at my job. i'm thankful for how every week is a notch on my belt. i'm thankful that though it's hard to be so engaged all day, it's nice that the day seems to go by very quickly, whereas my old job was a constant struggle of waiting out the clock. i'm thankful to break the puzzles of my customers' problems down and to use my communication skills to help understand them and help them understand me and the product. i'm thankful for chrome's developer tools.

i'm thankful for this article about echoes by navneet alang, and for this passage: "The rhetoric around social networks has always been, depending on your proclivities, either about connection and socialization, or less charitably, narcissism and presenting a falsely idealized version of yourself to the world. But perhaps it isn’t practical communication or an idealized self that drives much of what we do online as much as it is the abstract idea of the unsullied connection. So much of human communication is wrapped up this desire: our inarticulate, inevitably futile wish to have another person understand us exactly as we understand ourselves. Alas, that person doesn’t exist. The aching chasm between one person and another is exactly what generates so much misunderstanding, but also drives everything from making art to talking over coffee for hours, the very gap itself making those rare moments of connection feel like such ecstatic relief. What we want is to be seen in our entirety, and we are always striving to inch closer to that impossible goal.

Perhaps, then, that Instagram shot or confessional tweet isn’t always meant to evoke some mythical, pretend version of ourselves, but instead seeks to invoke the imagined perfect audience—the non-existent people who will see us exactly as we want to be seen. We are not curating an ideal self, but rather, an ideal Other, a fantasy in which our struggle to become ourselves is met with the utmost empathy."

i'm thankful for you.