thank you notes (L)(6)

I'm thankful for starting back at work after the summer.  I'm  thankful that I am teaching so much more this year, not only for financial reasons but also because it stops me feeling quite so much like an interloper at work. Now I'm not a grad student who teaches on the side, now teaching is actually my job. I'm thankful for the process of forcing myself to stop thinking like a grad student, to stop thinking that somehow these teenagers who just started university will catch me out and are all silently sitting judging me. I'm thankful that this process still feels like a physical sensation, as I wrench my brain out of one box and into a new one every Monday morning.  I'm thankful for this new mindset which will hopefully help me become less attached to old routines and to find new ones.

I'm thankful to have finally got rid of most of my stuff from my parents’ house, particularly the cupboard of doom which I have been throwing stuff in for nearly 20 years and never really looking at again. I'm thankful to finally get rid of clothes which I will never wear again,  not because I've changed as a person but because those clothes were never really me in the first place,  rather teenage me wearing what I thought I deserved, what I thought was ‘appropriate’ for dumpy, fat teens, and not what I liked. I'm thankful to throw all the stuff my ex gave me straight into bin bags without a second thought, only occasionally pausing to laugh at how clear it was when he was trying to impress me (custom printed mix cds!) and when he decided he had to educate me into being a more cultured person instead. I'm thankful to throw out the complete collection of Led Zeppelin and Frank Zappa CDRs that have been cluttering up my space for almost 10 years, that I never really wanted in the first place. I'm thankful to remember the misogyny that would come out of his mouth so easily, never about me but about other women and how somehow this seemed less bad.  I'm thankful older me would never stand for that bullshit now, thankful my revulsion grows every time our paths cross these days. I'm thankful to realise now that he always lumped me in with the other women he scorned anyway, that he always thought I was a piece of shit, deep down. I'm thankful he taught me what I don't want.

I'm thankful for how clearing out reminds me of how I moved to Spain with one suitcase (and one pair of shoes) and how freeing living with almost no stuff was.  I'm thankful to thought hard about what I actually use and need,  which in reality is pretty much limited to clothes,  a few pairs of Dr Martens,  books and my CD collection. I'm thankful I don't really buy CDs any more, so that my nightmare scenario of having to find more of the discontinued IKEA CD towers I had, so that everything matched, and CD towers gradually taking over all available space in my bedroom, never materialised. I’m thankful to have kept my LP-buying habit more in check.

I’m thankful to have finally started watching Your Cheatin’ Heart. I’m thankful to see how John Byrne was (subconsciously?) trying to replicate the feel of Tutti Frutti: two improbably middle-class-accented red-haired waitress protagonists (I’m pretty certain in the same restaurant set) seems more than coincidence. I’m thankful to read that reception outside Scotland was mixed, mainly because critics thought the Glaswegian dialect was unintelligible. I’m thankful to laugh at this, since the language used is mildly different from standard British English, at most. I’m thankful for how John Gordon Sinclair’s character sounds like G and how the familiar phrases make me feel at home. I’m thankful to realise that over 6 years with G his speech patterns, some of which I had never heard before despite us growing up within 10 miles of each other, have bled into mine, and so I now also sound a bit like John Gordon Sinclair’s character. I’m  thankful for the complicated feelings the series brought up about the value judgements people  (wrongly)  make about language. I'm thankful to spend way too much of my time getting mildly angry about value judgements and received wisdom about ‘regional’ language varieties. I'm thankful to laugh remembering the fairly lively discussion I had with someone at this summer’s Big Scary Conference about whether Scots was a language or not.

I’m thankful for the giant Belle & Sebastian playlist I’m listening to as I write these notes. I’m thankful for the last verse of ‘The Model’ and for how the strings and orchestra spin away until the end of the song.

- L (10/08/2016).

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