in no particular order:

• Looking around at the people who are important to me, I am thankful for the good things everybody else has. In 2005’s landmark case, “Ups v. Downs,” Ups won on appeal. People moved into houses, neighborhoods, and/or cities that they really like. People who didn’t move improved the places they already were. Distant people more or less kept in touch. Single people got into relationships with people they really like; dating people got engaged; engaged people got married; married people had babies. Oh, Lord Jesus Above Us, did married people have f***ing babies. So many big round bellies, every party looked like a shoplifting ring at Sports Authority. They look pretty happy, though, so awesome for them. Babies babies babies.
• I am so thankful for the things that have happened to me in 2005, I don’t even know where to begin. Every change a positive change. I am thankful to have had a job for all of 2005, a job that doesn’t follow me home while still enabling me to have one. Kind bosses, simple weddings to understanding wives, and new houses that seem to fall from the sky into neighborhoods where you never thought you’d find a new house. I spent a couple of years subsisting on principled anger and credit, and for most of those years I believed that the kind of life I live every day now was permanently out of my reach. Even if everything came crashing down around my head this afternoon, even if God started filming Job II: The Worsening on location up my ass, I would still be eternally grateful for making it to thirty like this.
• I am also thankful for those things that did not change this year. I didn’t get any fatter. My hair stopped falling out right around the time I quit that crappy job. My car didn’t break down. No cavities. No trips to the ER. Funerals were at a bare minimum. Despite ample cause, nobody stopped speaking to me.
• I am inexpressably thankful for my friends. Let’s be blunt: for the last couple of months, I have found myself to be absolutely unbearable. Like never before, I have gone home from almost every social gathering thinking, “Do you ever just shut the f*** up for three seconds? Do you have anything interesting to contribute other than white noise that gives everyone else time to think of where they’d rather be?” I have been very, very tired of myself. I am over me. I wear reeeeeally thin. That makes it all the more remarkable and valuable to me that I have friends of the quality that I do. Not just friends of convenience who are inoffensive and nearby; really high-caliber, smart, interesting people who actually have lives and nevertheless make room for me in them. I’ve been through times when it felt like that wasn’t the case; there have been distant years when I felt like the man on the moon. So I deeply appreciate everybody who cares. At our wedding, I got every friend I could grab to gather together for one big group picture– the Sgt. Pepper Album Cover– and every day I look at it and laugh at my luck.
• I am thankful to be one of the millions of Americans who has annoying, complicated, barely-functioning health care instead of one of the millions of Americans who has no health care at all. Getting my doctor’s visit paid for involves a series of calls to people who tell me to call other people, but at least I got a doctor to walk by and pause just long enough to make reasonably sure I wasn’t dying. A lot of people can’t even say that. (Thanks, Newt!)
• I am thankful that my family likes my wife and my wife likes my family. I hear a lot of people trash-talking their in-laws; I much prefer this arrangement, where everyone convincingly gets along. When my parents call my house, that call is almost never for me, which makes me happy for at least two reasons.
• I am thankful for the growing proximity and size of my family. After a few years of living in Grateful Dead country, my sister auctioned off her suddenly incredibly valuable Bay area real estate and moved back to town, as all St. Louisans and salmon do when they are about to have babies. (Babies!) Her house is about three miles away now, practically on my street, though hers is on the “always was nice” side instead of the “let’s homestead the s*** out of these crack houses and see what happens” side. Wise with age, she knows just how often to visit and just when to go home. As we speak, she is in her 22nd hour of labor with my first nephew.
• I am thankful that I cannot get pregnant. I am also thankful that, having been adopted, I was not subjected to a “how long I was in labor” story every time my mom felt unappreciated. I am further thankful that my sister remarked in hour 21, “I’ve had hangovers worse than this.”
• I am thankful for eggnog milkshakes, dark chocolate M&Ms, and Reeses Peanut Butter Eggs/Pumpkins/Trees.
• I am thankful that this weekend I read my first article about George W. Bush’s presidential library.
• I am thankful that somebody set aside a turkey leg for me. I’m thankful that this wasn’t one of those years when everybody says, “Oh, with all these Thanksgiving dinners to go to, everyone will be all turkeyed out; I’ll make spaghetti this year instead,” and I end up getting no turkey anywhere. I’m thankful that many of my cousins are now old enough to sit and play cards after dinner instead of running laps around the house. I’m thankful we figured out a way not to have to go to two different dinners in two different cities in one day.
• I am thankful for this fall’s unseasonably pleasant temperatures. Sure, the Gulf is working on Hurricane Epsilon and my old neighborhood just got hit by a late November tornado, but driving home with the windows down and Christmas music on the radio? That’s worth a degree or two of global climate change, isn’t it? It’s not? Oh, sorry.