I am also thankful for tacky glitter animated gifs.

I have wondered from time to time just what it means for an atheist to be thankful. Exactly whom would I be thanking? I suppose it is just a convenient way of acknowledging that life can be very hard indeed, and it is worth pausing to note those people and things, happy accidents and long-sought accomplishments, that make our lives worthwhile.

I’m most thankful for my family and my health. I’m thankful that I have meaningful work that pays me a living wage and for my home. Expressed like that, those things sound like cliches, banal even. Yet we all know what complex and highly personal emotions and relationships lurk behind simple words like “family” and “work.”

I’m thankful for libraries, the ones that I have worked in and the ones I have used or visited. When I walk into a library’s stacks and start browsing and pulling down books, I still get that sense of “this is so cool” that I have always had.

I’m also thankful for the Internet and the World Wide Web. I’m glad that I am part of the generation who was born into a world where computers were not common household objects, and have lived through the coming of the microcomputer and the household connection to the Internet. There’s no point in pretending that computers and the Internet are uniformly good (any more than “family” or “work” are always fun and easy). But I value the Web for the way it has brought me closer to people all over the country (and to a small degree, all over the world).

Kate Sheehan has a recent post on ALA TechSource entitled Making Friends where she gets at some of the “drama” surrounding making friends online. She mentions some of the fragmentation we have seen in the online community of librarians as blogs have lost some of their gravitational pull and people have put more effort into communicating on sites like Twitter and FriendFeed. We wrestle with keeping things public versus taking them to more private spaces on the Web.

It’s messy. As Kate points out, we don’t go into these sites with “focus and purpose” in mind. People screw up and people’s feelings get hurt, and sometimes we share too much. But the people I have met on the web over the last three years have become my closest friends. Outside of my family, they (you) are the people I look forward to seeing every day, the people who know me best.

And I’m thankful.