i am a happily married straight man!

i'm thankful after a period of mostly one-man banding at work to have recently been reunited with my former PM for a new project. i'm thankful to remember our first conversation, on a project kickoff/team-building trip to new york, when i had been there a couple years but she had just started and the two of us got put together standing in the back of the group waiting in line to get tickets to go to Top of the Rock, which i, a person who is mostly allergic to sightseeing, had no real excitement about but i had gotten lightly stoned and was trying to enjoy and appreciate the excitement of others (i live my gratitude it is not just the newsletter) and that day i was wearing my favorite lana del rey t-shirt shirt (which has become retired after i spilled salsa on it at a taco truck with deborah the following summer) and making conversation while we waited, the PM was asking what my favorite Lana del Rey was and i said ultraviolence and went into some little riff on why and i asked her hers and she paused, made the kind of eye contact with me where the person is clearly assessing you and deciding whether you've passed and then you can see you did and she said "my favorite one is the one where she sings 'my pussy tastes like pepsi cola'" and it was one of those things where i was just like oh this person and i are going to really vibe* if that is the first declarative statement she is saying to me ever at a work event and that turned out to be exactly right. she had a baby last year and we hadn't gotten to talk as much so it's nice to get to officially share time with her mind again and today we had a high level strategy meeting with our designer where in the minutes zoom transcribed her describing a dinner party she had thrown with an après-ski theme as "opera ski".

on a different call earlier in the day with a contractor building a feature who i've been pulled into semi-managing (i prefer to think of it as unblocking) because i have the most context about how some things they're working on work and also people like working with me and also i say yes when asked to help with things and if i am asked to go to a meeting and don't have a good excuse not to i go and they were giving a presentation on how they planned to do something and i'm thankful, i guess, that i have now implemented OAuth enough times that I basically just understand how it works that i was able to point out an issue in the planned implementation just off the top of my head and steer them in the right direction but in a way that i think communicated i trusted them and was sending them good vibes and that having an incorrect detail in a document is not . on a different call later in the day (i'm thankful that every day after today there will be less calls), an HR person and i traded anecdotes about experiences eating at random hot dog places championed by anthony bourdain (my experience bad, his good). i'm thankful that at this point in my life i am really good at talking to people at work, which i think would have baffled my parents, teachers, and earlier versions of myself. when i lived in korea. whenwhat i am most enriched by emotionally is building things but sometimes it seems so weird sometimes that i thought a...short story writer? lmfao.

in basically all the forms and tones and volumes that talking at works happens: public Slack channels, private Slack channels meeting small talk on. it's weird to me that i thought

• (to be clear, totally platonically: she's a happily married lesbian and i am a happily married straight man!)