the official embarrassment of being represented abroad by short people
i'm thankful that e, who i have deep spiritual overlap with in so many respects, pointed out a new york fascination era that is absolutely central to my dream canon but forgot to include yesterday, which was:
every 90s sitcom my family watched that took place in NYC (friends, seinfeld, the single guy, mad about you, caroline in the city, spin city, will & grace, newsradio, herman's head—so many omg)
i'm thankful for newsradio, probably the sitcom from that list i feel most fondly about, even if it's responsible for making joe rogan a thing, since it also gave us dave foley and maura tierney (their fucked up screwball relationship was absolutely #goals for teenage me), and phil hartman (truly a god of comedy).(i'm thankful to note other new york fascinations that did not make it in yesterday, including the daily hegemony of The Today Show during my childhood (i'm thankful, while looking up something for the next paragraph, to have found this weird video i made in 2008 about how deeply TV was baked into my consciousness) and 2009 Tumblr (which i was lumping in with roughly contemporaneous Gawker era but deserves its own line item)
i'm thankful that the trailer for the streaming debut of the mean girls musical came on as the bumper for the episode of the real world: new orleans that we were watching and i saw lindsay lohan who looks old (not in a bad way, just in the sense that my mental image of her is like eternally 22) and we looked up her age and she's older than deborah but not as old as me (which makes me think about ). i'm thankful for two of my favorite short stories i wrote when i wrote short stories which are about lindsay lohan:"lindsay lohan and samantha ronson, subway, new york"(2008) (the images are gone but it was paparazzi photos of the two of them on a subway platform) and "exquisite corpse"(2011). (i'm thankful that the difficulty of finding the first story in the absence of adequate site search reminds me i need to archive this old wordpress blog locally before it rots into nothing).
i'm thankful for the great short story "Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole" by isabel j. kim, which is a response to the ursula le guin story "the ones who walked away from omelas" (wiki, text) and which k shared in our group chat. i'm thankful for this incredibly fucked up yet not fictional new yorker article by shane bauer about israeli settlers and for pankaj mishra on "the shoah after gaza". i'm thankful from this incredibly fucked up yet not fictional new yorker article about north korean forced labor in china there was this darkly funny line that "North Korean authorities even select for height; the country's population is chronically malnourished and the state prefers candidates who are taller than five feet one to avoid the official embarrassment of being represented abroad by short people" which made me laugh because deborah has always been very self-conscious about being short ("the official embarrassment").
i'm thankful that so far i have not been laid off in the latest rounds of layoffs at work which appear to be continuing/accelerating today (and which i am of course not thankful for). i'm thankful as someone who commits very hard to both the work i am doing and the people i am doing it with to try to productively use shitty things happening at work to give myself perspective about how much energy i give it, even if i am, in deborah's assessment (which i don't fully agree with but also can't really dispute grimace emoji), a workaholic and have trouble giving myself perspective in this way. i'm thankful that things are not dire enough for me to make a linkedin profile, which i have managed to avoid up to this point in my life, and am thankful that i asked chatGPT if it was possible to make a linkedin profile without notifying every single person i have ever met in my life that i have one and it appears to be so.
i'm thankful for the libby app, which is so well done. i'm thankful i checked out and started rereading i remember by joe brainard (a source text for this newsletter) for the first time in years last night and it's still so wonderful. i'm thankful for this fragment that i highlighted before falling asleep:
I remember a backdrop of a brick wall I painted for a play. I painted each red brick in by hand. Afterwards it occurred to me that I could have just painted the whole thing red and put in the white lines.