Opinion

Maybe it's just my mom's sensibilities being passed on to me, but I'm a firm believer that not only is there a bit of good in everyone, but everyone is good at something. Nobody's stupid or useless.

Maybe that's the reason some recent McDonald's ads have gotten under my skin. If you watch TV regularly (or watched any football on Thanksgiving) you've probably seen the ads I'm talking about. There's one for men and one for women.

When it comes to giving thanks on Thanksgiving, most people I know focus on the big things in their lives.

While I cannot even begin to give enough thanks for all of the wonderful things I have in my life, I have decided that this Thanksgiving I will really try to pay attention to all the little things that make every day worth getting up for.

That's it. I can't go another week without asking. How the hell are we allowing this to happen? Slice by slice, the American pool of taxpayer cash is being doled out to billionaire boardroom sops while those of us not belonging to the wealthiest 1 percent watch gas prices baffled and count up our expenses with increasing worry.

It's getting to be like clockwork - another year, another wave of student fee increases. In these troubled economic times, this year's increase could be over $600 annually per student if the government doesn't close the funding gap.

This Thursday when we sit down to gorge ourselves with turkey feasts and our subsequent food comas conjure thoughts of happy-go-lucky natives breaking bread with jubilant Pilgrims, let's not kid ourselves. Just as modern German and Japanese textbooks downplay the Holocaust and the Rape of Nanking, the U.S. has altered its history through the Thanksgiving story to erase from our collective memories what really happened.

Sometimes, I envy guys. They have a better handle on solving problems dealing with interpersonal relationships among friends of the same sex than girls do.

Take how guys handle cleaning the apartment. When a disagreement about who should vacuum the living room arose between these guys I knew, it escalated to a lot of screaming and finally a physical altercation. All over vacuuming (OK maybe I take it back, boys are lame sometimes)! But six minutes later, everyone apologized to one another, someone ended up vacuuming, Call of Duty was played, and everything went back to normal.

In the closing thoughts of my last column, I predicted that I would receive a deluge of hate mail in response to publicly voicing my opinion of President-elect Barack Obama. As the week went on, and my inbox was slowly filled with commentary referring to me as "a morally despicable, selfish, un-American egotist," it seemed as if things were going exactly as I had expected.

My undyingly dedicated readers (hello mom, dad, big sis in Israel … love you all), might have noticed that last week I spoke about the seventh item on my Cap and Gown List even though last week was week six of my column. Oops.

Imperfection is inevitable. While it might be nice to dream of a world with no accidents, no wrong decisions and excellence as the norm, reality is far less tidy.

Since the entire country has boarded the midnight train to Doom-and-Gloomville, it should come as no surprise that magazines are rocking the Troubled Industry look.

As I've said before in this column and as you are no doubt tired of hearing, print media in general seems to be dying a slow and painful death at the hands of the Internet and a poor economy. Magazines are no exception.

Dude, seriously, I think you've got a problem. I know it's hard to talk about, and I know not many people think this sort of thing is a big deal, but we need to have this conversation for your sake and for the sake of everyone on campus.

As many of you are probably aware by now, this week was national Pitch It to the People Week for Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, or SCCC. The organization is a non-partisan group that supports the right of concealed handgun license holders to carry their weapons on college campuses as a means of protection. SCCC hopes to dispel myths and educate the public about the facts of concealed carry and hopes to eventually make it legal for license holders to carry on campuses such as ours.

There is a profound sense of anticipation, fear even, at the new structure of our world order. This order exhibits a strange, unusual behavior because it has no behavior at all. We have entered a new era of postmodernism - a narrative defined by its absence of a grand ideal, devoid of an overarching meta-theme. In this construct, our truths are provisional, our comprehension transitory.

I feel like I've been running into a lot of pissy people lately. I guess I understand to some extent why this is - the weather's a little less sexy than most would like it to be, there've been these "essay" things that have to get done, and there just aren't enough yogurt joints in Davis to go around. Still, and in light of the fact that Thanksgiving is on its way, we've all got much to be glad about.