Things I Enjoy
Things: they are what we do most of the time. Sometimes, things are not going so great. Other times, things are going as smooth as Spider’s Silk™. Occasionally I will find myself entombed by an extremely attractive brand of self-loathing. To combat this, I have been making a list of nice things that I like. Whenever I find myself enjoying an activity or a thought or a large rhubarb pie, I take a second to write down what I am doing. This way, the next time I am consumed by darkness or despair or a murder of crows, I can look at my list and remind myself that there are nice things in the world. I would like to share my list with you, The Readers, because I think we could all benefit from being angry at me for enjoying myself.
Thank you for reading my list! I hope it inspires you so the next time you enjoy doing something, you will stop and think “wow, that Daniel guy should be on television.”
If you have a list of things that you enjoy and want to share it with me, please keep it to yourself.
- Playing literally any piano.
- Staring into middle-distance. If you are going to stare into a distance, make sure it is middle. I have tried staring into near-distance and long-distance and they are both extremely stressful.
- Imagining that I am doing a slow somersault, but my feet never leave the ground so I just kind of roll into myself like I am my own sleeping bag.
- Realizing that when I was born I was much smaller and, if these trends continue, I will eventually be the biggest thing in the universe.
- Talking to my beautiful buddies.
- Thinking about how there should be more jobs that end with “-naut.”
- Beholding any piece of art that showcases a river or even alludes to one.
- Waiting by a mirror at the furniture store and, when someone looks at the mirror, saying “you should buy this mirror, it has a great person in it.”
- Smiling at a dog and then slowly looking up at the dog’s owner as my smile becomes a look of utter indifference.
- Imagining that the time between inventing gummy technology and deciding to use it to make worms was less than one minute.
- Acknowledging that one day everyone I know will die but it definitely won’t be my fault because it is impossible to get all of them to commit to hanging out.
- Making up a name and then adding “@gmail.com” to it and then sending that person an email saying “I hope this email finds you real.”
- Imagining the spiciest pepper in the world and deciding to never, ever fuck with it.
- Thinking about how my parents met when they crashed their tandem bicycles into each other. The passengers on their tandem bicycles also fell in love with each other but it didn’t last.
- Accepting that I will always pronounce it “Sadnay Night Live.”
- Partaking in anything breakfast or skateboard-related (but never at the same time.)
- Counting the different types of streets there can be: lanes, roads, avenues, drives, dirt, etc.
- Looking at my hands until I am sure I can see them making their own decisions.
- Doing flowers.
- Remembering that one high school teacher who really made a difference in my life and wondering if they think about me more than the once every six years I think about them.
- Learning that there are literally hundreds of books just about cooking: how to do it, why we do it, what the stuff we cook is made out of, etc.
- How nicely “me and you” rhymes with “pee and poo.”
- Pronouncing “bath” like how a British person would say it and then taking one.
- Naming the crows that land on my front lawn until I run out of names and switch to numbers and sounds.
- Fucking, NOT GOLF.
- Playing a recording of the sound a basketball makes when it does a “swish” and pantomiming along to it.
- Yelling at my old answering machine for not giving me any answers, literally the one thing it was designed to do.
- Just gigglin’.
- Hockey. What even is it? I am never going to look it up, but imagining what it could be based on things I have heard through the zeitgeist is fun.
- Naming constellations and then looking up their actual names and seeing if I got the same thing and, if I did, giving myself a dollar.
- Planting a tree in my friend Jeremy’s name.
Thank you for reading my list! I hope it inspires you so the next time you enjoy doing something, you will stop and think “wow, that Daniel guy should be on television.”
If you have a list of things that you enjoy and want to share it with me, please keep it to yourself.