Great question--my family asks this out loud every night before bed. I'm grateful for family, friends, doing what I love for a living, and health. It turns out the basic old cliches are all true after all. Thankful for this site too of course! Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

I’m thankful for friends and family, more now than maybe ever before.

These days I’m also especially thankful for those who defy the Sisyphean boulder and push on, the ones who keep sharing positivity and inspiration in spite of Everything Going On (this includes you, Mr K).

And I’m thankful that, despite the scale of the challenges we face, so many regular people, young people especially, have shown up on the side of human dignity.

This year, I am profoundly grateful for my friends, my family, my dog, my therapist, my home, audiobooks, Aqua Vitea elderberry kombucha, Carly Rae Jepson’s album Emotion, the Green Mountains, and for finally finding a job I love.

My family, my friends, my job, my safety. I am luckier than most.

Right before the inauguration, my wife and I started bi-weekly community dinners with the sole purpose being gathering our friends together regularly for support and joy, and it very quickly turned into a hugely important part of my life. I'm very lucky to have friends who want to come to our house two Wednesdays a week, who feel the same need to support each other during times like this, who I know I can count on.

And I'm thankful that despite how dark the world is right now, there are so many people out there who believe the same things that I do. Reading the blog has made me feel much less alone, and following people like Hank Green, Degenerate Art, Prison, Prose, and Protest, Organizing my Thoughts and countless other writers has given me a lot of hope. I think just about everyone, whether it's deep down or how they live their lives, believes in ideas like justice and equity and diversity and sees how the world is made so much richer for it. 2016 and 2025 shook that belief so hard I thought it might break, but if anything, the things that I've seen most people say and do have solidified it. The arc might be longer than I expected, but it's still bending.

I am grateful for family, friends, neighbors and coworkers who are all great humans. Also for all the wonderful opportunities for accessing nature inside and outside of Minneapolis. And, of course, places like kottke.org and other sites that show what can be great about technology and the web.

I'm thankful that I have a job, that I have a roommate introducing me to rave culture, and my apartment is still affordable. It has been a turbulent year, but with these constants in my life, I can focus on art again.

I am thankful we could spend Thanksgiving at home, as my wife was discharged from the hospital yesterday morning. I am thankful for my children, my family, my friends, my health, and my job.

I'm thankful for all the amazing travel I was able to do this year, for both family and work, particularly to Europe. Also thankful to be part of an incredibly active community that is doing so much to blunt ICE's impact to the residents of Chicago. From CyclingXSolidarity to local politicians actively protesting.

I'm thankful I fell into a new job teaching. It ain't easy, but it's never not interesting. I am also thankful for Costco hard boiled eggs. My sister and I were making deviled eggs for a get together and she turned me onto these as a shortcut. Now I have them for breakfast. They come in a big box but are separated in two packs and somehow keep for a few weeks without any discernible difference in taste. Its made my life that much easier. I'm convinced I could eat a whole box at once but have resisted the temptation.

Thankful for recent potlucks with friends and family, including this Thanksgiving. It's such a great way to distribute the load of a meal and connect.

Also appreciating at this moment: A bit of heavy cream in my coffee (a rare luxury from making corn pudding), a warm shirt, and absolutely no agenda for the day.