A Title Less Cheesy Than “Daily Gratitude”

I like having little daily projects to build on over the month. I catalogued my outfits in October, I documented each day in November, I continue to track the ongoing development of my little bb lemons, and now here we are, December- What to focus on each day for the last month of the year?

Starting a Daily Gratitude log has been on my list of projects to try for… years. My natural tendency is to hyper-focus on the negatives in my life, which is embarrassing because my life is actually fucking full of amazing fucking people and fucking inspiring accomplishments and lovely fucking details that decorate every nook and cranny of my goddamn fucking existence. The good doesn’t negate the harder stuff, but goddamnit maybe it’s time to really shine a spotlight on the rad stuff this month. Maybe the remainder of this year is the time to reflect on what I am grateful for every day. Maybe it’s time for some DAILY FUCKING GRATITUDE.

After getting back to Portland from my trip in August with Lucy to visit Danielle, I picked up this velvet-patterned photo album from- where else?- Goodwill. I couldn’t have paid more than $5 for it.

I filled up the first half with the photos I took during our ten day trip to the East Coast and figured I’d fill out the second half with some as-yet unplanned future trip elsewhere.

OR I COULD USE IT FOR MY GRATITUDE JOURNAL.

Originally I wanted to print out a photo I took each day this month to use as the image to accompany my gratitude text, but we don’t actually have a photo printer or even a regular color printer. This is a black and white toner printer household, baybee 😎 During the whole Black Friday/Cyber Monday discount dealz ordeal, Matt placed an order for one specifically so I could print out my photos for this project (and also to save money on paying third parties to print my photo log in big, expensive lumps). However, Capitalism Gone Crazy Weekend wrapped up on Monday and December 1st began on Wednesday, plus we were warned there would probably be shipping delays anyway, so there was no way I was gunna get that printer in time to start producing pictures to go with my Daily Gratitude documentation.

What to do, what to do.

Being a cartoonist, the obvious solution would be to just… draw whatever photo I had wanted to print.

Being a burned-out-cartoonist-in-recovery, the last thing I wanted to do was draw more.

So, I returned to my old artistic-personal-expression love from my Space Camp days: COLLAGE.

Until the new printer arrives, I’ll be pawing through my collection of collage-destined magazines, and cutting out the images that most resonate with my daily gratitudes.

Photo possibly by Dan Videtich for Nature Conservancy. Text and dots added with my gold ink pen.

To kick off my first week of gratitude:

December 1: The sun rise and set today were fucked up beautiful. Also grateful for Biz Ladies* with Danielle and Lucy.

Illustration by Martha Iserman for Nautilous Ocean Magazine, Fall/Summer 2021

*Business Ladies is a monthly meetup we do to check in with each other, help each other stay accountable on our responsibilities, share our challenges, and cheer each other on for our accomplishments and successes.

I’m not kidding about the morning and evening sky being fucked-up beautiful, look at this:

Morning in the guestroom:

Evening in the backyard

What the fuck, am I right?

If I had a photo printer, I woulda used one of these pictures to accompany today’s entry, but the magazine illustration gets the idea across, I think,

I’ll tune in at the end of the week with my pages of appreciation.