Bring me Your Ridiculous, Your Privileged, Your First World Problems

Listen, and I will tell you a story, as it was told to me by a volunteer on leave:

Far far away, in that magical land the US, where clothes are washed by machine and all the roads are paved, there once was a woman, and she had too much pound cake.  And lo!  There was a massive storm, and she was without electricity in her house for several days.  What of her pound cake, which, in the refrigerator that could no longer keep foods cold, might go bad?  Did she eat it?  Well, no, for she could only eat pound cake with strawberries, which she feared to buy in the absence of a powered refrigerator.  Instead then, she gave away all of her pound cake to her neighbors, for she had too much and could not eat it without strawberries.

There are few problems more delightful than those of developed nations.  The inhabitants of such places, they have trouble finding online the precise episodes of television shows they missed on air, they do have uneven coffee table legs, and they have too much pound cake.

The brilliant and wonderful people in the US with whom I converse have this depressing tendency to make self-deprecating comments when they tell me about their first world problems, and indeed, first world problems are first world problems and I have an unfair conversational advantage in that no matter how rough you have it I can probably one-up you, because really, I'm in Tanzania and you aren't.  However, I love first world problems.  They remind us all that civilization is doing something right.

In this is civilization, that we might have too much pound cake and share with our neighbors. Oh Youtube!  Give me me your opera, your flash cartoons, and your animals doing cute things!  And when you are done, I would like a cookie, made in an actual oven with lots of bells and whistles like temperature controls.