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 (somehow even more attractively), 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.

• 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 mess with it.
• Thinking about how my parents met.
• Watching the bicycles as they careen towards me. Careen is a nice word. More people should be named Careen.
• Accepting that I will always pronounce it “Sadnay Night Live.”
• Partaking in anything breakfast or dog-related (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.