¡El Tryptophan!

It doesn't take a giant leap of empathy or insight to be grateful for your family, your health or your job, all the normal garbage we go out of our way to be "thankful" for on this holiday. If you think about it really, what we're really saying is that the best case scenario is the non-interruption of our routine, daily lives, no matter how miserable. This sounds like I'm about to argue with that idea. I am not. "Mundane" is often the best we can do, and I mean that not in the hopeful-conditional sense, but more in the hyperbolically. What garners a stronger sense of settled calm than the ability to predict with any kind of certainty (however falsely arrived at or fleeting) that tomorrow is going to be just as safely uneventful as today was? It's the thing we've been striving for since the days we first banded together as communities, so we could rotate turns taking the night watch and a few of us could sleep in unalarmed peace.

But saying you're grateful for your family, your health, your job, it's kind of... well, you wanna talk about safe and uneventful. Facebook today is a parade of gracious sameness. I think it's safe to assume that you, gentle reader, are grateful for all those things because--and I get that this is a leap, so I apologize if you feel I've made a grievously unsupportable assumption--you are not a sociopath.

OK, we can all stipulate to the basics. Now what ELSE are you grateful for? These are the first things that come to mind for me:

-Nerf guns
-Nutella
-the Shazam app
-Bridges
-Mannequins built roughly to my size
-Gravy
-Books about/featuring wizards
-Those really smooth throwable rocks you only find in rivers or on beaches
-Luxembourg (or really any country so stable and boring we never hear anything about it)
-Pea coats
-The seismology department at Cal Tech
-Aloe vera sunburn therapy gel
-Anything designed specifically to kill rats and/or mice
-The flashlight feature on my iPhone
-OKCupid
-Wheelbarrows
-Kitschy resort-town fudge shops
-Aromatics (culinary)
-Stephen Fry
-Pho
-Day-game seats on the third-base side under the second deck overhang at Angel Stadium
-Zippers
-Settlers of Catan
-Movies featuring spaceships
-Orwell
-Creative ambition
-Mangoes
-Vaccines
-Fluoride
-Chopsticks
-Ontario International Airport
-D chords
-Things that eat spiders
-Molasses
-New socks
-Crab cakes
-Cotton
-Ottomans (furniture, not empire)
-Olive oil
-Chiwetel Ejiofor
-Sweet potato pie

Given the way I feel at the moment, physically I mean, I'm surprised to see that much food on the list. But as everything else that happens on Thanksgiving, you should always end with pie.