That Thankfulness Thing 2014 - First of Three Bite-size Pieces

Remember a couple of years ago, when a lot of people spent the month of November sharing via social media one thing per day for which they were thankful?  And remember how I did all 30 of mine at once, via blog post, in 2012, and again (a day late) in 2013?  No?  That's okay.  I don't remember what song my iPod finished playing 22 seconds ago.

Anyway, those posts were way too long for today's short attention spans, so-- hey?  HEY! OVER HERE! (snaps fingers)... Geez.  I'm trying to help!  This year, I'll post my list in three MUCH more reasonably-sized parts, so that you, dear reader, can get back to your pintstergram and skype-chat and whatever this year's Candy Crush is.  See - aren't I nice?  Well, sure I am.  You have a bad attitude, today.  Wait - I didn't mean that.  You're very busy - I know. 

So let's do this!  This year, I find myself especially thankful for...

1.  Hypnotoad.  All glory to the Hypnotoad... And to everyone involved in any aspect of the production of "Futurama."  It was a most skillfully-crafted show, and it was unapologetically nerdy - even before that was trendy. 

All Glory to the Hypnotoad...

2.  Robin Williams.  Versatile, fun, gifted, and flawed - just like the rest of us, only more so.

3.  Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, and Carl Sagan - bridging the gap between us and science.  Dr. Sagan is irreplaceable, of course, but Nye and Tyson are engaging and smart and witty, and they're doing an admirable job, despite the astonishing power of the willful ignorance that stands in their way.

4.  Two words:  Red Stapler.
 

5.  The fact that, as she did in November 2012, my old (snow) car surprised me and the DMV by once again passing her emissions test.

6.  Beach webcams.  Especially THIS ONE.

7.  Game Sevens - especially when the yankees and braves are not involved.  In the sports world, it doesn't get much more dramatic than a game seven.  Unless, of course, it's a best-of-nine series, in which case WOWEE GAME NINE!!

8.  Lizards.  They HATE me, but I still think they're groovy.

9.  My office (cubicle) toy corner...

Oh, the personal history on that shelf.

10.  The Internet Arcade!  Free, old-timey (1980s is old-timey) arcade machine emulator software you can run right in your browser.  I'm wallowing in nostalgia, here!


And with that, Bite #1 is complete.  Will Lionel trains finally make the list, this year?  Tune in on the 20th for Part Two, to find out!  Seriously.  Tune in.  Don't make me beg.  I'll be thankful for not having to beg, maybe...
 

Improved Perspective via The Pull-back Shot

[Fade in.  Interior.  American cubicle-style accounting office.]

Sometimes, the effective execution of my relatively simple job is significantly impeded by errors in the input I receive from others.  I have to stop and waste lots of time and energy tracking down answers to simple questions that shouldn't need to be asked.  This is not unique to my job, and all you need to know about my Monday is that I had a LOT of that, today.

By now you might know that I have coping mechanisms for days like this.  Today, I tried a new one.  While waiting for my myriad answers to questions that shouldn't need to be asked, I looked up and picked out a faraway speck on the National Geographic world map - a freebie that came with one of [Maris]'s multiple 2012 panda calendars.  This part is not new.  I often try to put myself somewhere else.  As Laurie Anderson said, "Paradise is exactly like where you are right now, only much, much better."

As a kid, I would find myself on the first day of school, only days removed from our vacation trip, trying to picture what was happening at that moment in Rehoboth Beach.  Back then, I'm sure not a whole lot was happening in Rehoboth Beach, after Labor Day.  Once I had seen the Caribbean, I could close my eyes and see the  places I'd been - beaches, bars, restaurants, the house in which we stayed.  I knew which places would be quiet, which ones would have a band and a cruise ship crowd, and so on.  When weather.com arrived on the scene, my vision could be even more complete.

Today, the first speck upon which my gaze landed was Israel/Palestine, where the pace of killing-each-other's-children-over-bits-of-dusty-earth-and-so-much-less has recently picked up, again.  I knew that while I sat there in my cloth-covered work box in Maryland, mothers and fathers over there were crying themselves to sleep over the decimation of their lives, as their midnight worked its way toward one in the morning.

Obviously, that made me sad.  I wondered if there was a rule that dictates that all expansions of perspective had to result in melancholy.  So I pictured Rehoboth, cold and quiet, but not as dead as it used to be by November.  I saw St. Thomas, with the first of the week's cruise ships tied to the docks of Charlotte Amalie, their international passengers scattered about the island, muttering at the immeasurable slowness with which the service personnel moved.  I became aware - or at least more aware than usual - of all the activity taking place elsewhere on my planet at that exact moment.  At any given second in time on earth, someone is being murdered, someone is giving birth, someone is losing a baby, someone is drunk, someone is blowing an interview, someone's getting arrested, beaten-up, fired, hired, high, sober, dressed, asked out, inspired, crushed, rewarded, passed by, late, early, startled, fed or - just now - hearing his stomach growl.  All of this and so much more, all over the world.

I pulled my imaginary camera shot back further, and all those activities melted into a din, loud at first, but growing soft and muddy as I backed away, leaving a view of a quietly humming blue-and-white sphere, set as a jewel against the black of space.  I thought, why stop there?  There's a little earth-made robot SUV on Mars - right now - and it's doing something at this very moment.  At sixty-ish million miles, my picture was a little fuzzy - I had to fill in some of the details - but I could see it.  Human-controlled activity, farther away than any human has been from this world - happening right now.

Why stop there, and why stop with human activity?  I always tried to picture who was driving my favorite blue bumper-car at Funland when I was home, who was now living in my first college dorm room, who was sitting at [Maris]'s and my table at Louie's Backyard in Key West, and so on.  What about Jupiter?  Jupiter is spinning in space as I type this.  Stuff is going on, there.  Storms are raging, thousands of years old and larger than our planet.  Somewhere, WAY out there, the Voyager spacecraft are hurtling at inhuman speeds into interstellar space, still calling home. 

I pulled back still farther.  With 200 to 400 billion suns in our galaxy and at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe (possibly many times that figure), I have no doubt that there are, right this very second, other worlds with intelligent life. I'm sure it's unimaginably different from human life, and I have little doubt that any of it is exactly where we are, technologically, but I'll bet somewhere, somebody is close enough to be considered at least a distant cousin.  On that world, as I type this, someone's being born, getting pregnant, stealing something, learning something, fighting over what to others looks like nothing, laughing, sleeping, winning, dying etc..

My perspective was improved, but because I never know when to quit, I took my tracking shot back one last step.  Beyond the lives of beings, nations and planets lie the lives of stars.  Right now, someone's sun is exploding.  Right now, galaxies the size of our own are colliding with each other in multimillion-year spectacles of violence and death on a scale that cannot be expressed in human terms.  Right now, in the Orion nebula and millions of others like it, stars are being born.  

It's taking place very far from here, and incredibly slowly, by our standards, but stuff is happening elsewhere.  Massive stuff.  With my brain struggling to get its feeble paws around that, my spreadsheet with the missing $20 payment became so very manageable.  I, at least, did not have to give birth to any solar systems, today.

[Fade to black]