The World of Stuff .com

Things I’m thankful for

I have a roof over my head. I have shoes on my feet. I have plenty of clothes. I’m not starving. I’m in good health. I’ve never broken any bones. I’ve never had the measles, polio, or rubella. I’ve never gotten the flu.

I’ve gone to decent schools, where I’ve gotten a good education. I have a great job to pay for my schooling, with the help of scholarships and my parents. In fact, I’m in the black.

I had wonderful experiences in Europe this summer. I got to bond with my travel buddy, and with Esperanto, I met family members I otherwise wouldn’t have known about and made a lot of new friends. And I didn’t get robbed.

There are a lot of things I don’t have to worry about. They make the things I do worry about seem trivial by comparison.

When I had to reinstall my operating system, it went pretty smoothly. My bus ride to and from campus isn’t too long. I don’t have a lab this semester, and I have no classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’ve managed to control my weight. This blog seems to have quite a few readers now. And I have a pool at home.

I have good friends, people I can talk to about anything. You know who you are. I have a good family; they’re always there for me. My parents aren’t divorced, and no one in my family is mentally unstable. And I’m enjoying the company of my family today.

I guess I have it better than most people, and that is something to be thankful for. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

And now, some useful graphs, both via waxy.org:

How safe is the HPV vaccine Gardasil? Is it as dangerous as the disease it aims to prevent? Find out.

The Billion Dollar Gram: It’s hard to visualize billions of dollars, so this graph compares some billion- and trillion-dollar values that are often bandied about.