Except for a couple isolated incidents, the last few months haven't really been the best. Nothing to thank any kind of god for. If anything, we should be blaming something or someone up high for the amount of hell unleashed on the world in the last half of 2001.

I am thankful for one thing in particular this week: Thanksgiving marks the beginning of the holiday season. I like the holiday season for one reason: time off work. Everything else pretty much blows, but being able to be off work for a few extra days (paid!) is something to thank whoever I'm supposed to thank.

Of course, I don't work in retail. I know that the holiday season is not the favorite of those who have to deal with customers off work with lots of cash blow. In honor of those workers (who, I assume, have another time of year when they don't have to go to work so much), I will try to stay out of the consumertoriums as much as possible.

Last week, Vice President Cheney's wife released a report with the names of hundreds of professors of U.S. universities who are not, according to her personal standard, being patriotic enough. Since I'm pretty sure she hasn't been attending classes of these professors, I'm sure all of her information comes from newspaper clippings of the things professors say to their students or to reporters in response to things they said to their students. Not that the professors are being badly quoted about anything, but doesn't it seem a little bit unpatriotic, on the V.P.'s wife's part, to dismiss the First Amendment entirely because some American citizens died at the hands of suicide bombers? Shouldn't she be writing a report about the movie Pearl Harbor, which basically disgraces anyone actually involved in that historic tragedy?

And what about those poor students--whom Newsweek now proclaims have had their innocence stripped away in the wake of the September 11th attacks--the unpatriotic professors are lecturing to. Apparently Newsweek forgot that it said the same thing because of Columbine a few years ago--about the same group of students. How many life-changing events does one generation need? My generation only got one: Kurt Cobain's suicide. And because of that, my entire generation has been written off as shiftless and ungrateful. We didn't even get to look sober and mournful on the cover of a national news magazine.

So maybe I am a little shiftless and ungrateful, but it's been a shitty last few months. I can't say I am uplifted by seeing the American Flag on everything from coffee mugs to the butts of 15-year-old high schoolers. Overkill is what usually comes to mind. I can't wait for the time my car gets vandalized because it's the only one in the parking lot without a red, white and blue sticker. We flaunt the easy symbol, but forget what it means. Quickly.

I have to keep my mouth shut--or at least speak in low tones. It's not that I am not a hundred percent American, because I am. I've only been out of this country for about ten hours in my entire life. But the things I love about this country are not the same as the majority of the people, apparently. And I don't want to drape myself in the colors. My favorite part of the Star-Spangled Banner, when I played it over and over through seven years of public school band, was being able to crash the cymbals together really loud. This occurs in the last fifteen or so seconds of the song. Usually when the crowd stops being reverent and begins hootin', hollerin' an' clappin' 'cause the song is almost over and the football game is about to begin.

So what can I really be thankful for later this week? One of my closest friends died two weeks ago. My girlfriend breaks up with me every couple of days. TV sucks, and I'm not all bent out of shape to see Harry Potter. My university football and basketball teams both lost on Saturday. There's not much to say about the war, except that everyone seems to be ready to proclaim that it's all over (it's not all over). And because I'm not trying to spend every extra cent I have to keep the country out of a recession (we're already in it, folks), or praising our Prez because he might have actually won in Florida and uses the lovely metaphor "tightening the noose" to talk about the military in Afghanistan, I'm not a real American citizen.

So thanks for nothing. The score must be even by now.

Matt Worley will do his traditional "hide from the masses of credit card toting patriotic spenders" on the day after Thanksgiving.