#1: It probably didn't take you 487 swipes with a triple-headed Norelco electric razor for you to get most of the hair off your face this morning.  That's how many swipes it took me.  Really.  Is this typical?  It isn't typical in the commercials - the only place I've ever seen another man shaving.  And yes, I had the razor plugged in.  It's still plugged in.  After 487 swipes, I didn't have any energy left to unplug it.  I barely have the energy to write this, over 12 hours later.  You, on the other hand, actually had enough excess energy in your life to get to this page and read this far.  Now I know how the starving children of Ethiopia feel as they listen to the sounds of us Americans scraping mounds of perfectly good food off our plates on their short-wave radios.

     #2: You almost certainly have better furniture than I do.  For example, I have a Laz-E-Boy chair.  For years I've thought that it refused to talk to me because it was, you know, just lazy.  Imagine my surprise and disappointment when I got the test results this week which revealed that it's actually autistic.  Maybe with a lot of intensive therapy it will one day squeak when I pull on its foot rest lever - maybe.  Depends if I can break it of its total obsession with its lint collection or not.  

     #3:  You probably have a car that you can drive wherever you want.  I don't.  The state of Ohio took my car away from me after I hit the brakes one too many times in public.  It's now with a foster driver who refuses to share with me its maintenance schedule for fear that I'll take to haunting service stations just to catch a glimpse of it.  I can only hope that its service record is good enough to get it into a good college parking lot someday.  Sometimes, late at night, I think I hear it going by slowly out front, slowing down, sometimes even honking, but....  This is getting too sad.  Sorry.  Focus on how much better you have it instead.

     #4:  I'm thinking of starting a band.  The only name for the band that I can think of is "Resurrected Pig Fart."  If you ever start a band, you'll almost certainly do better.  Smile with self-satisfaction - go on.  I'll sleep better tonight knowing there's someone out there with a naming talent.

     #5:  Perhaps you too recently read that elephants are the only animal that doesn't jump.  Perhaps you too felt unbearable sorrow over this fact.  Well, stop.  Be happy instead.  Why?  Because I'm convinced that elephants actually can jump - they just have never been asked.  Sure, it's kinda sad to think of them going to the trouble of renting a tux and hitching a ride to the senior class jump and then standing up against a gym wall watching zebras and gorillas and everyone else having all the fun as the evening slips away - especially if they've gone to the trouble of donning special rubber-soled shoes so as not to mar the floor - but hey: at least it's not as if they can't jump.  They probably jump all the time when no one's looking.  Save your melancholy for the really tragic facts of life, ok?  Start now.

     #6:  Research proves that sucking on a zinc lozenge as you read blather like this can prevent mind aches or greatly reduce their duration.  Writing blather like this, on the other hand, probably means that you already suck as much as a person can.  There's no suck left over for zinc lozenges - or anything else, for that matter.  

     On the other hand, maybe I'm just still too tired from those 487 swipes at my face to suck more right now.  Maybe someone in better physical condition can actually write blather much suckier than this.
     In any case, you still have six reasons to be happy.
     Good thing, too, because changing the title of this entry in my weakened condition just might result in permanent damage to one of my favorite sets of hands.

(Disclaimer: Nobody is paying me to endorse washboards.  And the fact that the last U.S. maker of washboards just happens to be located in my home state of Ohio is purely coincidental.  Any resemblance to a manufacturing facility in your state is strictly surreal.)