I'm grateful for you gorgeous knuckleheads

This scientific article on what kind of journaling you should do based on your enneagram type suggested that I keep a gratitude journal. And today I received a lovely post from Ben Miller’s Substack, Mental, reminding me that gratitude is good for me, so I can do it even if I don’t care about other people. And my son’s elementary school principal suggested in this week’s “Cheetah Chatter Newsletter” that we should even express gratitude more than once a year.

Here we go.

I have considered myself a writer since I penned my first Newsies fan fic story in 1992. But even though that fan fic story would have been huge if I’d had the right platform, I didn’t start regularly publishing things for other people to read until 2020. Today, I am so fucking grateful for the people who read my writing here and the other places that have been kind enough to publish me (also grateful for my Romper editor Meaghan O’Connell).

Thank you for being present and opening your emails and sending me kind words and commenting (even to the person who commented about how 5G is coming to get us all, thank you) and sharing with your coworkers and not pointing out my typos (and thank you to my one friend who does point them out but in a helpful way) and navigating substack’s interface to “recommend me” and emailing me with ridiculously sweet love notes like “when is your book coming out???!!” (answer: when I create a more organized clone who remembers to take her ADHD meds and can write and pitch a book proposal).

Thank you for being you. Especially the version of you that reads this newsletter.

And as a show of thanks, I leave you with three things you can doh to avoid your family today:

1. Dick around on Donorschoose and find a classroom project to support. How about getting headphones so these newcomer Oakland middle-schoolers can listen to math lessons, helping high schoolers in Staten Island design a better school uniform or building a calm-down corner for these Brooklyn third-graders???

2. Read this long-ass, 100% delicious article by the unmatched Hanif Abduraqqib on the magic of summer league basketball. It is just long enough to have people stop knocking on the bathroom door because, you know what, whatever’s happening in there, they don’t want to be next.

3. Watch the first episode of the best television show ever, Is It Cake? on Netflix. Can also be done in bathroom, but if you audibly gasp when you realize things you thought were not cake are, in fact, cake, people will start asking questions.

4. Start thinking of names for the new penguin chicks at the California Academy of Sciences. Naming contest begins in January! Leading suggestions in our house are right now are Slothy and Peeky. This can be a family activity, if you’re ready for it, though best to leave the bathroom for that. I hear couches are nice. This is actually the chicks. They already have a GIF, so you know they’re gonna be big.

XOXO. Enjoy your pie.