If you’re reading this, it’s either because you stumbled across my page by chance, or you consider me a fairly decent blogger. For those of y’all in the latter camp, I have a confession: Most of my blogging skills can be traced to the fact that I’m a good complainer. I complained when I was a kid, I complained as a young man – and now I’m turning into a complaining old geezer. I’m considering having a selection of prerecorded messages installed inside my tombstone so that visitors can push an assortment of buttons and hear me complain even after I’m dead.
But once in a while I like to take a break from complaining. Sometimes it’s nice to stop and smell the flowers, to take a moment and appreciate how good we have it. Even those of us who are miserable in life can enjoy some luxuries that past generations couldn’t even imagine. Just today, for instance, I happened across these two news articles:
1) Microscopic photography contest
2) Hubble Tarantula Nebula photo
What would our ancestors have given for the privilege of seeing such things?
Jewamongyou's Blog 
New Horizons gets to Pluto next July.
I was 12 years old the summer that Voyager 2 got to Neptune, and I remember watching “Neptune All Night” on PBS as long as I could keep myself awake.
Decent individuals have such introspection about complaining.
Your posting reminded me of a photo from a Curb Your Enthusiasm show DVD wherein Larry David is scowling at a glass that is half full…. or does he consider it half empty. It is hilarious and indelibly imprinted in my psyche.
Is complaining and ‘kvetching’ the same thing?
Pretty much.
… appreciate “how good we have it”?
Sounds to me very German. Or Yiddish?
That’s okay. Complaining becomes one of the only interesting forms of conversation as one gets older. Talking politics is cathartic but stressful and so short bursts are best. Work and relationship conversations tend to wear out friendships. Everything else has been discussed a million times. It’s rare that people read the same books. Television and movies are okay as topics but you feel like you’re doing humanity a disservice by focusing on them for too long. My advice is to complain away to someone with whom you share a common view.