On "Thankfulness" and All That

Well, well, fellow B Channelers, it is Thanksgiving time here in Real America, and that means taking the time to reflect on all the things we are extra grateful for, like the fact that we were born after refrigerators were invented, and that it’s so rare to die of bubonic plague these days.

Ken Burns has reminded me this week that we all should be thankful we weren’t born into a starving family in the middle of the Dust Bowl, and reading Sex and the Single Girl over the weekend made me thankful we don’t live in 1962 (when whipping up stuffed lobster tails from scratch for a casual dinner date was apparently considered imperative to proving one's worth as a female).

I am thankful I was born after the invention of writing, thankful I missed (by a mere generation!) the days when women were banned from running marathons, and thankful Mittens of Romneykins, Esq., did not win the presidential election this year.

I'm thankful I'm not that dude.

I’m thankful that I have the most normal, wonderful, and functional immediate family of anyone I have ever met in my entire life (no, really, I do), and also thankful for the hopelessly weird and brilliantly dysfunctional extended family I have in the running community. I’m thankful my mother didn’t die in childbirth, thankful I don’t live in a culture that condones public beheadings, and thankful I wasn’t sacrificed in my adolescence to a pagan god.

I’m thankful I wasn’t born into an oppressive patriarchal society and sold off as a child bride. I’m thankful I never ate lead paint chips. I’m thankful no one left me to die when it turned out I was born a girl. I’m thankful my parents had the money to pay for all three sets of braces, thankful that I live in the era of electricity and tampons and telephones, and very thankful that the biggest worry I have most mornings when I get out of bed is what other people might be worrying about.

I'm thankful I missed out on the influenza pandemic of 1918, thankful I've (so far) dodged history's many genocides, and thankful I'm not dyslexic because I really think that would have set me back in my youth...

I’m thankful that I’m alive and well, and thankful that, out of the estimated one-hundred billion people who have lived and died on this Earth since man arrived on the scene, I was born in the first place.

I’m thankful, then, that, with only a one in one-hundred-billion chance, I was lucky enough to wind up being me.

And on your behalf, I'm going to be thankful that chordates didn't die off during the Cambrian mass extinction (because they totally could have), or else none of us would be here.

But since you are here, I'm thankful you have nothing else to do right now except read my blog about thankfulness.  Thank you.

[beheading picture source]