Gratitude and Joy: The Bookternet and The Moon

Gratitude and Joy: Day 1

I am grateful for:

The Bookterweb
As an eighties kid, I kind of grew up along with the internet. It started out for me as a thing you got on to do a specific thing, like check your email or read a fannish bulletin board. It remained a novelty for quite a while, a thing I sometimes did (not so much used) just for the sake of doing it. Hey! I'm internetting! How cool is this? It's morphed by now, of course, into an ever-present entity, a thing I kind of can't really get through my day without and which I find myself doing brain hacks to lessen my reliance on. My relationship with it has soured, in other words. But there's one piece of it that invariably improves my life, and that's the bookterweb.

I've always been a bookish person, and for long years my desire to be a part of the book world was satisfied by being a college student and later a graduate student in English. Book people everywhere! But those days are behind me now, and I miss having bookish people wherever I turn. But the bookish parts of the internet do an excellent job standing in for a large circle of book-friendly acquaintances. (Sometimes it's better than a large circle of book-friendly acquaintances. The bookterweb will always be more diverse and cater to more niches than any group of humans gathered in one place can hope to be.) It's only been in the last four years or so that I've really sunk elbow-deep in bookish places online, and I've realized lately just how much all of those places add to my intellectual and emotional life. I'm not exaggerating in the slightest when I saw that a day does not go by where I am not brought happiness by bookish websites, forums, podcasts, or Youtube videos that I would not find anywhere else. They say the internet makes it easier for people to find their tribe. I've found mine, even if I might like to interact face-to-face more than the internet allows for, and seriously, how cool is that?

I feel joyful around:

The Moon
The moon is just a sliver shy of full tonight, and as I was walking the dog, trying to hurry her along a bit to get us inside the nice, lit-up house and out of the dark road, I caught sight of the moon through the bare branches of a tree in our yard. And it stopped me cold. It often does. I glance up and it catches me, hanging there in all its certainty and improbability. I'm not the first person to feel small gazing up at it or the first person to get kind of warm in the chest and break out in a grin at the sight of it either, I'm sure. It takes me a minute sometimes to identify that feeling I get, because it's so big, and tinged with something just a bit fearsome, but it is joy. Hanging right there in the sky.