It’s Thanksgiving, as you probably know. And I am of course thankful for all the awesome things I should be thankful for: My friends and family, my job, the food I’m about to eat, shelter, indoor plumbing, football, etc.

But in addition to those staples, here are three things I’m thankful for this year:

Change I can believe in: Fans are understandably down on the Mets. They’re coming off their third straight losing season, their owners are mired in a very public financial mess, and they might be on the brink of losing to free agency one of the brightest stars the franchise has produced in decades. And that all sucks.

But it’s comforting to know — or to be able to believe, at least — that the Mets’ current front office seems both capable of and dedicated to making the best possible baseball decisions to turn the club into a regular winner. It’s going to take time, of course. And I understand if you don’t believe me — the current front office has been so hamstrung by the decisions of the last one that it hasn’t yet had a lot of flexibility to show what it will do with what should be a big-market payroll. That’s a discussion for another day, though.

Point is, I haven’t yet lost faith in Sandy Alderson and the SABRos, and for that I’m thankful. Maybe there’s some blinders-on optimism in play here, but that’s fine by me: It’s nice to enjoy a sunny outlook about your favorite team’s future for once, and I’ll seize this opportunity as long as I can. If and when they start making short-sighted, reactionary, terrible moves, I’ll lament them. For now, I’m going to celebrate that somewhere in the eye of the ferocious hellstorm of nonsense whirling around the team stand (or appear to stand) a couple of calm, reasonable dudes making shrewd decisions geared toward building a perennial contender.

Banh mi sandwiches: How great are banh mi sandwiches? I’ve had three since I moved back to the city. They’re not readily available in Westchester — or at least not that I could find. So I’ve set out on a quest to find a Hall of Fame-caliber banh mi, and I’m not going to stop until you read that glowing review here on this site.

There’s a combination of flavors and textures in the banh mi that’s not found in most sandwiches traditionally produced by Western cultures. It’s the exquisite product of cultural interchange: Southeast Asian flavors with delicious, crusty French bread, and you just know if you trace back the history there’s all sorts of unspeakable colonial awfulness involved (kind of like Thanksgiving, really) but if you’re staring at the sandwich you can overlook it all for a second and revel in the years-later byproduct of imperialism.

Whoa, that got heavy. I want to go back to talking about the sandwich: The taste of a good banh mi floats around your mouth like a spicy, vinegary butterfly. It’s eminently filling, but somehow refreshing — a big, delicious sandwich that leaves you feeling like maybe you ate something healthy for once. I think that’s the cilantro. We should brush our teeth with cilantro. I’m also thankful for cilantro in general.

Beavis and Butthead: This is kind of a two-part thankfulness item. I’m thankful that Beavis and Butthead are back on TV because Beavis and Butthead are hilarious. I don’t know if you’ve caught any of the new episodes, but I find myself laughing nearly as hard and as often as I did when they ran the first time, back when I shared an age and general mindset with the show’s heroes.

I guess the thing is that Beavis and Butthead are kind of timeless: A couple of lazy dudes who love explosions and rock and hot women and who enjoy making fun of stuff that sucks. I hear that. And the new version of the show does a really good job sending up the various reality-TV fare airing on MTV these days, which makes sense: How could Beavis and Butthead watch music videos all day today if music videos almost never air anymore? Today’s version of the characters would be (and are) watching Jersey Shore, making fun of it as almost everyone who watches Jersey Shore does.

And that the show has remained funny upon its return gives me hope for the forthcoming fourth season of Arrested Development, which was announced last week. Since the first three-season run of that show was as close to perfect as anything I’ve ever seen on television, I’ve been a little nervous that the long-rumored movie or this newly announced fourth season could sully (in my opinion, at least) the show’s legacy. But if Mike Judge could pull off what appears to be a successful return, maybe Mitch Hurwitz and the folks responsible for Arrested Development will too.