Sometimes I forget to do my Gratitudes, and that’s just dumb.
Because when we don’t take the time each day to count our Gratitudes, our Ingratitudes just rush right in and take over. And then we are off to the fucking races, are we not? Life seems to hold nothing but the many unfortunate, heartbreaking, humiliating things that happen to us, sometimes in a single day, our existence merely an accretion of thousands upon thousands of those days, our only prospect an old age in which we are sure to get stranger and more ill-tempered by the minute until we finally die, alone and in diapers, leaving all of our money to two cats named Bosco and Archduke Vladimir von Furstenkitty.
What I’m saying is that we can always find things to be thankful for, even the unluckiest among us. And it only takes a few minutes each day.
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Some of your Gratitudes can be for things that have happened to you that are bad, but that you can “repurpose” into positives. For example, being a “permalancer” for a company that would rather blow itself up than hire you as a real employee. You’re barely making a living wage, that’s true, and you get no health benefits; on the upside—the Gratitude side—you do get to steal pretty much all the office supplies you want, and you’re not invited to the interminable Friday-morning staff meetings where Ron takes up an hour bloviating about his dumb ideas.
Another example: No one except horny4U and hillbillygoat has favorited you on Match.com in, like, a month. Sad, in a way, but turn it around: If you did meet and marry someone, he’d probably turn out to be one of those men with a whole other family in another state. And you would be certain to find this out in some especially sickening way—you’d see a photo in the paper of a Little League team that won the regionals and think, My, that coach looks just like my Steve, or you’d be taking your kids on a little road trip, and you’d run into your husband and his other wife and their four children at a Denny’s, laughing and eating pancakes.
You can also be Grateful that the bad things that have happened to you at least haven’t happened to you again today. Like, I’m Grateful that today a ticket taker at the movie theater didn’t ask me if I was a senior citizen and then, when I said no, say, “Really?” That was last week.
And once you put your Gratitudes thinking cap on, they just come at you, one after the other, like shiny presents on Christmas morning. Take something as simple as your name. Maybe you don’t like your name—it’s bland or hard to pronounce—but at least you didn’t have to grow up with a last name like Butts or Breasted or Hyman or Crotchly, or a first name that rhymes with vagina, such as Genina or Jemima or Regina. Although, if I were named Regina, I would definitely just lie and tell everyone it was pronounced Regeena.
Speaking of names, I’m Grateful every day not to know that I am a distant and yet blood relative of Hermann Göring, Kool-Aid cultist Jim Jones, Tiny Tim, or Rudolph Giuliani. This is because I never go on Ancestry.com, and I urge you to do the same. Going on Ancestry.com is just borrowing trouble, and who needs trouble when we are gathering our Gratitudes?
Apropos my health, I’m Grateful that I don’t suffer from horrific “cluster” headaches, so excruciating they can drive their sufferers to suicide, and instead just have “tension” headaches, even if I have them, like, all day. And though I also suffer from a variety of other (digestive! don’t ask!) ailments, a big shout-out of Health Gratitude for not sending me with a minor cut to the emergency room, there to contract a flesh-eating bacteria from the germ-soaked hospital air, requiring the grafting of skin from my buttocks onto my face. Merci, Gratitude gods, for that!
Okay, I wish I had a bigger apartment—who doesn’t? But at least Robert Durst has not moved in across the hall and sought out my friendship by knocking on my door and asking to borrow one of my “frocks,” right?
Also, since my apartment is a walk-up, there is no chance I will get stuck in a broken elevator for seven hours with a jonesing crystal meth addict and his increasingly peckish dog, a rottweiler/pit bull mix.
Apartment-wise, I’m also Grateful that five firemen didn’t show up at my door just now and order me to evacuate the building because of a gas leak on my floor. I would have had to go outside in what I am wearing, an old chenille bedspread that I have turned into a “sarong” and a T-shirt that I think I used as a cleaning rag for a while, and stand around on the sidewalk while Con Ed fixed the problem. And then some street-fashion photographer would take my picture and publish it in one of those Fashion Do’s and Don’ts columns, as the lead Don’t.
You know what I’m so Grateful for? That I haven’t been purposely tripped by one of those disturbing, mean cartoon characters in Times Square, a Smurf or a Minnie Mouse, sprained my shoulder in my fall, and then had all the cartoon characters gather round to heckle me while I lay sprawled on the street, my last memory before passing out from pain being snickered at by a dirty Ernie and a Teletubby.
As far as other public humiliations go, I am truly Grateful, today and every day, that I am not an unattractive eighth grader at a snobby private girls’ school whose more popular classmates have decided to practice witchcraft on me by sticking pins into a doll they have given my name, and then tweeted about it. Some of the girls would invariably be the daughters of rich and famous parents, and their tweets, and my name, would become an item on Page Six of the New York Post, guaranteeing that I would be known forever as the loser who was tormented by amateur Wiccans.
I think that’s about it for this morning’s Gratitudes—I’ve totally turned around my outlook on the day, ready to face the endless crap that will come my way—except for my closing Gratitude, which I always try to give a Not Dead theme, to remind myself that just being alive is better than dying—or, certainly, dying gruesomely.
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So today I am Grateful that I am not three-quarters of the way up Mount Everest, with a storm brewing at the peak and a cocky guide who, in spite of warnings from our Sherpas, has convinced our entire party that we should go for it. Bad, bad idea. I will spend my last moments on earth stumbling around on my frozen legs through blinding snow until I fall, fatally, into a chasm. It makes dying at home in diapers sound like—well, okay, not fun, but something to be, in a way, totally Grateful for.