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Thanksgiving is my father’s favorite holiday. This is why I make a concerted effort to travel to wherever my folks are living every year for Thanksgiving. Back when my parents still lived in the glorious Bay Area of California, it was a great reward to get to travel back from college to my homeland and to see my family for the holidays. But then, in what I’ve come to call “The Great Swindle of 2001”, my parents traded in our beautiful East Bay home for a huge lot and a rather large home, in Fairfield, Iowa.

My parents have always lived in cities; between the two of them, they’ve lived in Boston, Tampa, New York City, and San Francisco for almost all of their lives. So after years of ‘big city life’ my parents decided to settle down in a quiet, rural area, to escape the so-called hectic mayhem that is life in an American metropolis. The only problem is that they chose to move to a farm that borders on a community of peaceful meditators in the middle of nowhere! But despite my bitterness for The Great Swindle, I’ve still visited them in Iowa every year for Thanksgiving, with the exception of the one year that they met my brother and I in Boston to dine with our relatives.

So alas, another eleven months have passed me by, graying my hair, and bringing death just that much closer to my doorstep. And with another year gone by, I find myself with a ticket to fly back to Iowa, yet again. But Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday, a time where you are supposed to remember what you are thankful for, and a time when you are supposed to celebrate your family. And as bitter as I may seem to some of my readers, believe it or not, I do have a lot to be thankful for. But if you want to read about what I’m thankful for, then you probably shouldn’t be reading “It Sucks To Be You,” and you should probably instead be subscribing to some hippie-dippie new age newsletter full of heartwarming stories concerning spiritual quests or watching an E True Hollywood story celebrating some celebrity’s latest victory over an eating disorder or pain killers.

So if you’re still reading this column, then let me reward you with my first ever list of all that I’m not thankful for, otherwise known as my “No Thanks List” for 2006.

I don’t really have an order for all that I’m not thankful for in life, but I think the easiest thing to begin my not thanking with is my arch-nemesis; the cigarette. Oh cigarettes, you tantalizing, life killing beautiful succubus of death, why do you torment me so? Like Lady MacBeth, I know that you are bad for me, and I know that no matter how much you tempt me, you will never actually satiate the impossible-to-fill desire that you create in me, and yet no matter how much my intellect and my friends warn me of your evil ways, I come back to you, repeatedly, the same way all these washed up actors are now dancing and singing on some stupid reality shows just to get back in the limelight; for shame!

No thanks to my generation and our attention deficits that have put a cessation to my favorite art; the art of good conversation. For the most part, people my age seem to be obsessed with ‘doing things,’ and these ‘things’ happen to cost a lot of money. In order to have a good time, a lot of people in my generation feel the need to go out to the movies, go out to dinner, go out to bars, and go out to clubs. I wish I grew up in the 1800’s, when people were satisfied to stay in, drink whiskey, play cards, and talk all night—of course I probably would have been shot dead for defending the Indians with my bleeding heart. But I mean it when I claim that talking is doing, and great conversation is an art in itself! Thank you to those of you who do enjoy good conversation, and all the mystery and beauty that blossom out of a night spent talking.

No thank you to diaries. I began keeping my first ‘diary’ of sorts at the age of twelve. My father gave it to me before a family vacation to Greece and Turkey, and being the sports and music freak that I always was—and still am, I used the damn thing to write top ten music lists, come up with band names for future bands I would play in, bitch about school, and, here’s the kicker, I kept a statistical journal of all of my P.E. Softball stats for the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. Re-read that, and then laugh as loud as you want to, because lord knows that I did when I came across it this past week, during a fit of nostalgia. I mean, liking sports is one thing, but keeping track of ball and strike counts for a month long period of Physical Education classes is downright creepy. And the worst part about it all is that I clearly sucked. I batted less than .250 on average! What a waste of my time, and what a damaging blow to my ego it is to read old passages from my own diary, only to realize that I haven’t grown up that much at all; I still keep track of every event in my life, and organize my successes and failures by statistics. I’m OCD.

Mom, I’m sorry to bring you out on trial, in front of all of my peers, but I’m still incredibly NOT thankful for the time you did not let me see Guns n’ Roses live, because they happened to be playing on a school night. Not only was the line up that evening awesome (Faith No More opened, and Metallica played second), but I think you were overreacting, since I was eleven years old, and one day of school in which I was too tired to learn would have been well worth it. The worst part of the whole ordeal is that the band broke up less than a year later, and I would never have the opportunity, ever again, to see G N’ R live with the full, original line up. Not to mention the fact that if you only knew how many times I would sacrifice my educational duties during college to do far less valuable things with my time, into the wee hours of the night, I think you would have changed your approach to parenting. I hope I can someday forgive you for this.

I am not thankful for all of the various customers, over all of the various years, who ask for samples of the soup with no intention of purchasing said soup. I see these same people sampling almonds and cashews and grapes in super markets, with no intention of purchasing them either, and I think that this behavior is pretty pathetic. Do you pull up to gas stations and ask to sample fuel?

No thanks to any and all former roommates who have taken a shower, refused to towel off in the shower, and then stepped on the bath mat, only to soak it with the water that is dripping off of your body. When I get up in the morning, and step into the bathroom with my socks on, because of your poor etiquette, I suddenly experience what my friend Jay calls “soggy sock,” and on cold mornings, soggy sock can be quite painful.

No thanks to all of my friends, over the years, who have depended on me to make and set up all of our plans for hanging out. My life is already fairly busy, and when you depend on me to make plans, it stresses me out, and then I feel responsible for ensuring that you are having a good time. I’m obsessed with order, and I realize that because I stress to run all my weekly errands, and to get through my personal routines in order to show up to my plans on time, you have dubbed me “A Planner.” I plan out everything, and most of my friends rely on my planning skills to coordinate nights out on the town. This isn’t okay with me anymore, because when you have a bad time, I think that it’s out of line to then blame me, since I made the plans. So since I’m incapable of not planning things, I’m just going to stop telling people what my plans are, and I’m sure this will turn out to give me something else incredibly inane to complain about. And this last rant reminded me of something else that I’m not thankful for: The fact that I am a pathetic whiner.

No thanks to the inventor of the hot tub. They are disgusting, I hate them, and I don’t want to get in one unless I own it, and I know who has been in it. They are over chlorinated, hurt my skin, make my eyes sting, and to quote my Boss, the venerable Eugene Gray, public hot tubs are “human bouillabaisses,” meaning that when you use public hot tubs, you are basically bathing in a giant moldy human stew. Think about how disgusting that is. It reminds me of my column on Japan, in which I discovered that entire apartments and houses share bathwater until everyone has bathed. If you thought that was disgusting, but like hot tubs, then you are a hypocrite!

And second to last, I’m not thankful to anyone who suddenly changes plans that have been set for longer than a week. It really screws up my sense of anal retentiveness and order! I have a gig with my band tonight, and I was told for the last month to be there at eight o’clock. As I write this, it is six forty, and I just got a call telling me that I have to be there at seven o’clock. This means that I do not have time to eat before the show, nor do I have time to finish this column appropriately.

Due to these sudden changes of plans, I’m going to do two things with this column that I have never done before. The first thing that I am going to do is to send it out without even reediting it one time, which is extremely unprofessional. The second thing that I am going to do is to condense all of my no thanks that I haven’t had time to write about into one long run-on sentence with no explanations for the reason or reasons behind why I am not thankful for the items on this list. But alas, this lack of control, in the long run, is probably good for me, so, in conclusion, I am not thankful for Barbeque sauce, items on menus that say no substitutions, the entire season that is “Winter”, airport security lines, highway patrolmen, overly arduous officials who refuse to break or bend a rule ‘because it is a rule’, people who don’t complain about things because they ‘don’t want to make a scene’, anyone who has ever tried to convince me that I will enjoy a musical “if I only give it a chance,” and last but most certainly not least, No thanks to O.J. Simpson; I think that your current project with FOX is one of the most morally reprehensible acts that any public figure has ever committed to doing in order to earn a quick pay check. Thanks to all of my family, my friends, and the strangers who read this column, and especially to those of you who occasionally give me feedback. Believe it or not, each of you affects my life in a way that I never could have imagined possible, and I feel truly touched.