It isn’t quite what I thought it would be, and some days it is downright taxing, but I am grateful for my job at the library.  I work with an astounding group of people who have shown me limitless generosity and sympathy.  Some of the interactions with the public have been harrowing, but I enjoy helping people find information, especially when I get to learn something in the process.  We have an amazing collection in a remarkable building, and we serve an incredibly diverse population.  When I am not bogged down by the minutiae of management, I am awed by the intricacies of such a grand institution.

On that note, I realize it is hip now for San Franciscan yuppies to lampoon the homelessness problem as it pertains to the main branch of the public library.  I truly pity those of you who do.  Who do you think will suffer from the degradation of libraries and deprofessionalization of librarians, only people not privileged enough to swaddle themselves in overpaid “new media consultant” jobs?  You might be able to order everything you need from Amazon now, until you realize that there is no 1-Click for consistent cultural community.  When the glittering dust clears from the mashups and meetups, the library will still be here.

(This entry is part of one month of gratitude.)

When I started this exercise, I thought I might have some trouble enumerating all the objects of my gratitude, since I had been so focused on the negative for so long.  Not so!  Today’s entry is another easy one: I am grateful for books.  I love words and stories, paper and ink, the sound of a new book’s spine as it is first opened, the smell of an old book’s pages.  I believe in literacy and libraries, in the power of the written word to inspire and to inflame.  I learned to read when I was 3 years old, and since then it has been my fondest hobby.  It is the greatest luck that I find myself with a career in libraries so I can live my passion every day.

My beloved gave me Iain Banks’ Matter for my birthday, and I have been savoring it in small morsels ever since. Today I am grateful for it keeping me company while I drift in and out of achy sleep.

(This entry is part of one month of gratitude.)

This summer cold has taken away my voice. I went through the day saying almost nothing, whispering when needed.  There were nods and shakes of my head, shrugs, minimal gestures.  Mostly I listened: to other people, to the sounds of children playing next door, to the cats purring, to my own sticky breathing, to my beloved’s quiet singing in the car.

I am always surprised by the sound of my voice on recordings. We sound much lower inside our own heads, which makes perfect acoustic sense but still startles me.  I sound like a little girl; my laugh is bizarre and whooping.  Not-so-secretly I have always wished for a lower, sexier voice, something that prowls around vowels and shudders spines, chuckles that emanate whisky and chocolate.  Today I would just like my own voice back, because I miss it.

One thing I like about my voice is that I sound a lot like my mom. She is a professional actor and voiceover artist, so I don’t sound like her when she’s performing, but many people have told me that they can’t tell our voices apart in casual conversation.  I admire her voice so much that if mine is like hers, it can’t be all bad.

(This entry is part of one month of gratitude.)

No, this is not an entry about Buddhism. I am grateful for my not-so-small and not-so-normal cat, Zen. Zen turned 11 this year, which is hard for me to imagine, as it seemed like just yesterday I was adopting a tiny runt with gigantic headlight eyes.

Zen is having a difficult time with the recent move. She has never lived with another cat before, aside from her litter-mates way back when, and I believe her poor eyesight is adding to her insecurity because she cannot track Torgi’s movements very well.  Regardless, our little family persists, and I am hopeful that in a few more months we will all be adjusted to the new living arrangements.

Zen is round like a little football, and still very strange, and she is devoted to me. When I am sad or lost, she is unfailingly comforting. When I am stressed, I have dreams of Zen escaping from car windows or back doors, and I cannot find her.  These are obviously fabrications of my twitchy mind because when Zen escapes in waking life she just crouches down and sniffs until I grab her and drag her back inside.

On the hardwood floors, her little stomps resonate through the quiet house, and I am comforted just knowing she exists.

(This entry is part of one month of gratitude.)

This morning, I succumbed to the summer cold that’s traipsing around, so it might seem strange to write about being grateful for my health. The fact remains that my health is better than it has been in years, and all because I traced the source of most of my nagging problems to ingesting gluten.  (This is why, for those of you who are starting to read my journal now, I am on a gluten-free diet; it is not a fad diet, but a diet required by an autoimmune disorder of the small intestine called Celiac Disease. Read up on this before lecturing me about how diets are bad for me.)

Despite making such a huge breakthrough recently, I have much more work to go on my health. I need to find a daily exercise regimen that I will stick to, unlike going to the gym or jogging.  I might return to tai chi chuan, as that had the double benefit of improving my fitness as well as my state of mind.

(This entry is part of one month of gratitude.)

Despite my new gluten-free diet, I still love food. Perhaps I love it more than ever now that I have to be more mindful of it. Tonight I am grateful for the importance of food in my life, and I celebrated it with a homemade meal of pasta (brown rice fusilli) with marinara sauce, and blue lake beans sauteed in pancetta, garlic, and extra virgin olive oil infused with lemon. It took less than an hour to prepare everything, and was utterly worth it. Mind you, I won’t stop loving my curry take-out, but there is something inimitably satisfying about a good homemade meal, especially when shared with appreciative loved ones.

Yum. If I weren’t so stuffed, I’d enjoy another helping right now!

(This entry is part of one month of gratitude.)

This topic surprised me. I am trying not to follow any sort of order with these entries, so I sit down at the computer and whatever is top of mind comes out. Yesterday I started playing with the Remote app for my iPhone, which allows me to control iTunes on my iMac over our wireless network. Today I was able to play one of my iTunes playlists in the front-room while entertaining friends. It was such a small but rewarding accomplishment.

I don’t recall being overly interested in music as a child, although I grew up with a father who appreciated classical music and a mother who was a professional vocalist.  There were some piano lessons, drum lessons, and voice lessons, the last of which served to inspire a few different involvements with bands when I was older. I have never had any confidence about my voice, however, despite repeated attempts on my mother’s part to get me to sing along with her.

Regardless of my interest level, there always seemed to be an album or cassette playing in my childhood home.  I was exposed to much more than I knew at the time; the other day I recognized a piece from Satie that could only have been played for me decades ago. Only now do I realize how integral a part of my life music is, how I use it for solace, for refuge, for stimulation, for contemplation.

My favorite band has been They Might Be Giants for many, many years, but I am willing to listen to anything once.  Thankfully, I receive excellent guidance from my music-loving and music-making friends.  One of my favorite things to do with FunkyPlaid is perusing the endless bins at Amoeba, wondering if that next risky purchase is going to contain something that crawls into my brain and stays a while.

While I don’t attend many concerts, I love stumbling upon live music.  Most recently, I heard the Smith Dobson Quartet at the de Young during the Chihuly opening weekend celebrations.  I was utterly transfixed by the melodies, and later purchased a CD online as well as one from Smith’s sister Sasha Dobson, another remarkably talented person.  Since I am horrible at classifying into genres, please take a moment to click their links and listen for yourself.  That reminds me: I always meant to share some of my current favorites via my Muxtape. Perhaps I’ll work on that next!

(This entry is part of one month of gratitude.)

Simply put: I would not be the person I am without the support and love of my friends. I have been blessed my entire life with excellent friendships.  The only thing I struggle with, friendship-wise, is the occasional feeling of being left out or excluded. This feeling is entirely a fabrication of my fear, as I have no evidence to support it.

Aside from my parents, my longest contiguous friendships are with Adam (22 years) and Lara (16 years).  They each live thousands of miles away, but I know we can pick up right where we leave off, whenever that happens to be.  I also know that we know each other very well, and accept each other for exactly what we are.  I can’t ask for more from a friend.

A difficult lesson I am learning is how to cultivate friendships with a limited amount of free time. I will have to work even harder when I am in graduate school and have even less free time.  Lately I have spent more time fiddling with social software than I have actually being social.  Is that a function of the area or the times, or is it just me coddling my own introversion?

(This entry is part of one month of gratitude.)

Today I am grateful for my home, which is why I retreated to it immediately after work tonight.

My relationship with my home is a bit complex.  All of my life I have struggled with the meaning of home and of belonging. Since I was eleven years old, with each parent in a different state, I have felt ties to more than one place. I seem always to be in a state of geographical flux, which may make moving less difficult for me than for other people. I tend not to identify myself with any one place for very long.

All that said, I am falling in love with my current place of residence.  It is starting to feel like home to me, instead of merely a very nice house in which I happen to reside.  I am beginning to learn its creaks and quirks; I know where the light-switches are in the dark.  It is big and quiet and close to the ocean.  It is cozy and comforting, grounding and centering, and somewhere I enjoy sharing with friends as much as I enjoy hoarding it with my beloved.

(This entry is part of one month of gratitude.)

My social software habits have become dreadful. My status updates are usually complaints about work or illness, compiled as an archive of generic distress that makes me cringe. I am not a victim of circumstances, and I want to behave accordingly. To this end, each day this month I will attempt to write about the things in my life for which I am grateful.

Today’s subject is the easiest: I am grateful for FunkyPlaid. Yesterday I felt utterly out of sorts by the time I returned home from work, and he listened to me, talked gently to me, drew me a bath and rubbed my aching, neglected feet. I generally avoid thinking about my feet because they creep me out, but today they creep me out a little less. That’s saying something.

Last night is just an example of how kind and generous he is to me. I could write about only him for the entire month, but it wouldn’t be a challenge. Here’s hoping that the last few days I won’t have to resort to topics like “shampoo” and “sporks made from corn”. (But I really do like them both.)

If you’d like to join me in this month of gratitude, please trackback/pingback so I can read your posts!