Post Holiday Cranky Thanks Days

The Friday after Thanksgiving Day continues to be one of the best do-nothing days of the year, and so my best intentions for writing this posting yesterday have fallen into Saturday instead.

Not a complete waste of a day, however, as I spent the day contemplating the meaning or meaninglessness of life by thinking about whether there is anything to be thankful for, and if so how to gauge it against all the meaningless violence and retribution that seems to be engulfing life in lots of other places on this shiny blue ball of a planet - not to mention the riots in our very own shopping malls as we continue getting up before dawn in our pursuit of the almighty saving of the dollar and the yearly sport of pushing and elbowing our way past our fellow man to the last item left on sale at our local retailer.

Scary stuff indeed. Made me quite happy to be slouching on my couch, curled up in a ball and just gazing out into the yard watching the maples and the birch and the apricot tree losing their leaves on a crisp fall day.

Then I remembered a brief conversation from dinner on Thursday night, initiated by Justin Hersh, a good friend of the family and superb chef who contributes mightily to the Thanksgiving feast experience, about an article on the new atheism in Wired magazine.

Being a man of the natural world versus the supernatural world, I decided to check it out and it quickly became a day of deep thought about where I stand on the atheism, agnostic, belief in faith scale and I spent the better part of the afternoon both reading the article http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/atheism.html and then doing further research on one of the proponents listed in the article, Richard Dawkins.

Well, this totally made the day for me and for those of you so inclined, there's more on Richard Dawkins at this site http://richarddawkins.net/home. I especially liked the YouTube video of his reading from his recent book, "The God Delusion" to a group of students and others in Lynchburg, Va., of all places, followed up by a video of the Q & A from the same evening. Definitely worth watching.

This all led to a great conversation with Karen (Zukor) and we followed it up by going to see "Little Children", Todd Field's current film about suburban angst and emotional dysfunction, not exactly holiday uplift, but well worth seeing, though we left emotionally drained and had to immediately satiate our emptiness with some excellent Indian food at Khana Peena in Berkeley.

So, in the spirit of the season, my cranky thanks list, in no particular order:

• Thank (no god) that there are people of rational thought left in the world that continue to challenge conventional wisdom and belief and challenge us to think period.
• Thanks to moderate and independent swing voters for giving the President a rebuff and giving the Democrats a chance to screw it all up.
• Thanks to Tom Stoppard for taking on the writing of a three part trilogy play about Russian thinkers in the 19th century - how esoteric can you get.
• Thanks to all of my grandparents for emigrating to the US so that I could be born here and spend my life pursuing all kinds of things not available to a good chunk of the rest of the world, like therapy, for instance.
• Thanks to my corporate employers over the years that have given me the means, and mostly paid for, my being able to travel and see the rest of that world I'm glad I wasn't born into, but still really like learning about anyway.
• And, thanks to family. Gotta love them all. And without them, what would we have to complain about anyway.