Instead of saying some big things I'm grateful for this Thanksgiving, like family, friends, and life itself, let me give a list of seemingly insignificant things that popped into my head - I wrote them down - that make me smile or just make me think. I think life is amazing because of such a collection of little things, so I thought it'd be fun to list a few.

I'm thankful for the horse, Boxer, in the book Animal Farm by George Orwell, who had the motto "I will work harder" until his very last days. To me there's always been a kind of quiet heroism to the simplicity of that motto in the face of a fundamentally cruel world.

I'm also thankful for love songs that are subtle, that look at the mundane, like Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton. I think a lot of great love songs are kind of over-the-top dramatic, and Wonderful Tonight is not. It's just admiring a moment of someone you love being beautiful once again in ways that have been many times before, and beautiful in a way that, to me, so this is from my perspective, only a woman can be.

Sort of admiring a beautiful dress and how glowing a person looks on a particular night. I'm also thankful for neural networks and deep learning for reigniting the big dream of artificial intelligence for me and I think for much of the world. Neural networks as they are, are probably not enough to achieve super intelligence, but I think the magic that's already there in neural networks, I think will be there in future AGI systems, whatever they end up looking like.

Let's see. I'm also thankful for Granny Smith apples for being a source of happiness for me throughout my life, especially on some of the hard weight cuts I had to do for wrestling, for judo, for Jiu-Jitsu tournaments. And now that I'm on a keto diet, it's a source of rare cheat meals where I just sneak in carbs.

When you're on keto, carbs taste even better, and apples is one of my favorite sources of carbs. I also probably have a bit of a love-hate relationship with apples because I don't know how to moderate them. I don't know how to eat just one apple. Okay, I'm also thankful for regular expressions, for being both powerful and painful, giving my sometimes OCD brain a chance to unlock the secret code behind language, if only for a brief moment of some seemingly insignificant task of parsing a file, a data file of some sort.

I'm also thankful, as I probably said way too many times, for Mr. Fyodor Dostoevsky, and especially for Prince Mishkin, or the main character from The Idiot, which is a book by Dostoevsky. I think in particular what I've learned from Prince Mishkin is that loving the world simply is worth whatever trouble such an approach may, let's say, throw your way.

Okay, this list is all over the place. I'm also thankful for, in general, the research process that's been part of my life for many years, many painful but glorious years. So the idea of going from the initial idea with colleagues to doing the different kinds of experiments, to then writing it up with the elegant typography of LaTeX, submitting it to a conference or a journal, but conference is my favorite, especially in computer science, going through the revisions, and then finally attending the conference and presenting your work and having all the discussions over the work, and then spurring on future ideas that you work on.

I think the entirety of that process is magical, and I've grown a lot from it. I'm truly thankful for having the opportunity to do it, and I still, it's one of the reasons I'm maintaining an affiliation and a position at MIT. I have regular conversations with friends and colleagues there, working on two papers currently still, even with all the things that are going on.

I have so much love for this process and for MIT in general that I can't let it go. It's a big part of me, and MIT is truly a special place. So it's a source of joy, and I don't want to let go easily of things that bring me joy, even though so many things in this world do.

Okay, I'm thankful for Mr. Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, and to be specific, the most memorable for me, there's a lot of great episodes, but the one that really got me was Painfultainment, which is a single standalone episode. It's so dark, it's so truly dark that more than the other episodes, I think it truly changed my view of human nature.

And as is true with dark episodes of that kind, or dark stories or philosophical ideas, it somehow empowered me, gave me more power to forgive my fellow human beings and forgive myself for the flaws that I have. This is a weird one. This list is just terrible. I'm thankful for mathematics and theoretical computer science in general.

Speaking of things that bring me a lot of joy, it's just a constant source of unexpected beauty, both in algorithms or theorems. It's just, I don't know why, maybe it's the way my brain is. Maybe it's just human nature, is something about the elegant beauty that can be only revealed through numbers is a source of happiness, and I'm thankful for having the brain and the opportunity to experience the beauty that's inherent to me in mathematics.

Finally, I'm thankful for vodka, whiskey, and the worst of it, which is tequila, for being a catalyst for some wild adventures. Some that I regretted at the time, but now truly can look back at with a big stupid smile on my face. I think that's 10. I gotta say, I appreciate all the love I've gotten over the past couple years, and I send it right back at you, many more fold.

Happy Thanksgiving. I hope you have a good one. Bye.