So another Thanksgiving has come and gone. I dunno. The annual ritual of engorging myself like a tick has gotten a little old. It was reasonably fun the first 26 times, but it's gotten a bit boring. I guess I shouldn't complain. After all, the intestinal distention I received was a result of free food. So, in the spirit of the holiday, perhaps I should consider some of the things I am thankful for.
Yes, even I am thankful for SOMETHING.
For starters, I'm glad as hell I wasn't born female. Don't interpret that as a knock against chicks, because it isn't. It's just that given the choice of being taller and more muscular in exchange for giving up the unique pleasure of spontaneously hemorrhaging every month until I'm old, I'd take the former any day. I totally lucked out in the gender lottery. Heck, I was only a flip of the coin away from having a high voice and a genetic shoe fetish!
The other thing I'm really thankful for is that I was born in a 1st world country. The odds against that are a bit more staggering. There was only a 10% chance (roughly - do your own damn math) of me being born in North America or Western Europe, and a less than 5% chance of me being born in one of my three 1st tier countries (the U.S., Canada, and Australia). That's not to say that I have anything against those in 2nd and 3rd World countries, but all of the disease, starvation, and political instability I can do without. So as it is, I've got about a 2-3% combined chance of ending up in the preferred gender in the preferred nation.
Then come the murkier variables. I could have ended up the illegitimate child of some trailor-trash crackhead hobag and a big lardy scuz with permanent 5 o'clock shadow and a penchant for burning kittens. Growing up in such an environment, it's unlikely that I would be quite as stunningly cool. On the other hand, I'd probably be a lot more popular with the chicks, if the proclivities of my current female acquaintances are any indication of their inscrutable attraction to the most anti-social spawn of the trailer farm. I'd probably have more tattoos, too.
As it is, my parents weren't too terrible. They let me off my chain in the basement at least a half hour a week to run around in outside, and most days they remembered to throw table scraps down the stairs for me to eat. Heck, they gave me a new dirty sheet every year for my birthday. On Christmas I would hear the caroling upstairs and became filled with holiday cheer.
So what are the odds of me being blessed with a pair of reasonably adequate parents? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that it brings my cumulative odds down to less than 1%. All in all, I guess I lucked out. I've also managed to avoid birth defects, so that's another plus. My life could have definitely been worse. I'm also thankful for Italian food, tarantulas, the History Channel, my sight, South Park, my cavity-free teeth, the fact that I survived cracking my skull when I was four, and hot chicks, even if they DON'T talk to me.
Here is a short list of the things I'm NOT thankful for: Salmonella, eggplant, the Swedes, skunks, communists, influenza, mosquitoes, arthritis, the appendix, lead, fleas, hangnails, the Backstreet Boys, arsenic, mildew, milk that turns to the Dark Side before its "Sell By" date, whiskey, busy signals, Alzheimer's disease, sepsis, the Mafia, myopia, diarrhea, fire ants, dogmatic idiots, farts, skuzzy creepy guys who get all the chicks, politicians, fanatics, SUVs, rabies, AOL, country music, Jehovah's witnesses, bologna, vaginosis, Charles Dickens, and the Qwerty keyboard.
Oh yeah, and brain hemorrhages.
That's about it for the preview of my new seven-volume encyclopedia of things that I'm not thankful for. The movie will be coming out in a year or two.
