watching it rise

Tom Chiarella describes a spends a month he spent changing how he says “thank you” in A Little Gratitude:

I don’t really care when people say thanks. Open a door. Thanks. Hand someone a stapler. Thanks. Push a button on an elevator. Thanks. That’s just chatter. Meaningless interaction. Broadly speaking, hearing thanks five dozen times a day might be seen as an anthropological indicator of some sort of social ordering, like cryptic head tilts between sparrows on the lip of a gutter. It’s often an anonymous interaction. I can live with that. I can even participate. That doesn’t mean I have to care when some thirty-one-year-old salesclerk at Restoration Hardware, who didn’t take the time to use hair gel that morning, says “Thanks” as I walk out of the store having bought nothing at all.
– Tom Chiarella