things i'm thankful for

you should definitely gratitude journal at LEAST once a year

I used to try to do gratitude journaling—it was nice, maybe, but it wasn’t magic. But I think gratitude certainly deserves a place among the holidays, alongside gift-giving, freedom, candy and cosplay and consternation, romance, pranks, rebirth, and Irishness¹¹ Wait, how niche exactly is the tradition of building elaborate leprechaun traps. Do I need to introduce this tradition to my girlfriends?. So, some things I’m thankful for, which I’m trying to remember to explicitly experience emotions of gratitude about instead of just jotting them down and moving on:

• Having an excuse to travel to Seattle for a week so I stop spending all day in my apartment

• Pretty much everyone being entirely chill about my being a girl when I saw a bunch of my dad’s side of the family for the first time in forever last month

• Being in a place in my life where I’m not too busy to spend a month practicing a daily writing habit, and having a girlfriend who’ll put up with that :p

• That I have some talent in some areas even though a lot of my CON²² Conscientiousness subscores are kinda low

• The existence of this wonderful worldwide internetwork where I can learn interesting things and watch funny videos and read really niche works of fiction and meet awesome people and share silly blog posts and so on

• Girls

• r/whatismycookiecutter

• The plant in the bathroom here not actually being dead apparently even though one of the leaves sure looks half rotten

• Modern plumbing

• Blåhajar

• Probability theory

• Trains

• That I get to talk to Claude

• Liberal Democracy

• Leftist theory, or at least the wiser parts of it

• Bad puns snuck into otherwise unassuming sentences, n-fold entendre, and other forms of wordplay

• That wine works for reducing social anxiety at large Thanksgiving dinners full mostly of people like “my girlfriend’s dad’s coworker’s family” or “my girlfriend’s mom’s yoga student” whom I've never met, even if it also makes me feel kind of out of it and maybe gave me a slight headache

• Insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors

• That sleepiness after Thanksgiving dinner is an established phenomenon so I don’t need to feel TOO bad about taking some time to rest in a quiet room

• That someday inshallah my own little family and I will get to host our own Thanksgiving dinner

• The moment of serendipity where when I texted my mom and asked when she and my dad started hosting Thanksgivings, it turned out that they’d just then been talking about that topic over on the East Coast

• Tetraspace wrote that important post about how not to be driven crazy by decision theory

  Tetrablog

  Normal Decision Theory

  Decision theory is the field of study about how to define, precisely and mathematically, what “the best decision” means, when one is uncertain about the world. In modern decision theory, it’s thought that definition of “the best decision” is something of the form…

  Read more

  5 months ago · 💎 Tetraspace

• That my pilgrim ancestors or whoever³³ I know one of my great great grandparents came from Ireland because of the potato famine, but I’m not as sure about the other fifteen of them got to immigrate to America

• That the eggs I eat at my girlfriend’s parents’ house are definitely ethically raised, at least aside from how one of the chickens got eaten alive by one of their dogs

• That there aren’t like five whole dogs at my apartment down in Portland

• That I've had a lot of good conversations with my girlfriend over the past few days, which (i) is just always really nice (ii) seems indicative that our occasional difficulties talking are more due to various circumstantial factors that we can fix than due to some more fundamental incompatibility

• That my girlfriend’s family having celiacs⁴⁴ Apparently the proper term is “celiac” but like, no, I’m not saying that is not a barrier to them making very good Thanksgiving dinners

• That my schooling introduced me to spaghetti and marshmallow towers, which are apparently less ubiquitous than I thought

• That I get to grow up in an age where humanity understands so much more than it once did and has so many more capabilities than it used to, like, just in general, wow

• Awesome movies and books and video games and everything, like, wow, there is so much awesome stuff in the world

• The good parts of Christianity and all the other religions

• All the communities I’m a part of! There is drama sometimes⁵⁵ …maybe this is an understatement. and I do not always get along perfectly with everyone but I know a lot of really great people who I’m lucky to be able to call my friends or at least acquaintances :)

• Bananas

• My metamor has a Switch 2 which means I got to play Donkey Kong at the Rivals tournament yesterday

• bingosync.com

• Wikipedia

• Google (and other search engines)

• YouTube

• Twitch

• Discord

• glowfiction

• Twitter, I guess, maybe

• Substack

• How ridiculously forgiving the renewal policy in the Portland library system is

• My awesome readers :3