Dissatisfaction toys with me. Self-Pity lingers nearby. "Sure you wouldn't like some of this?" No. Go away. I'm fine here, just glum about my travel prospects. I want to go to Wisconsin and New York, really I do. It's okay that I'm not going to Chile, or Japan, or Turkey this year. There'll be other times. Probably. I mean, unless I die suddenly, or lose my job, or a flash flood rushes through and wipes out Palo Alto. It's almost certainly true that there will be another chance at those trips. I'm a big girl, I can face reality.
The truth is I'm bitterly disappointed about not going mostly because there's no one to blame but myself. What I'm really paying for is all those years of spending money I didn't have by using credit cards. Now I'm trying to pay them off, and it's killing me at how much of my substantial paycheck is going towards bills. I spent a long time being unable to resist instant gratification, and not particularly suffering the consequences. No more. I am not going on those trips not because I'm poor, but because I have lived above my means for the better part of 15 years. The winter has come, and the grasshopper is filled with regret. Too bad, so sad. Self-Pity and Dissatisfaction are gonna have to move along, though. I have no patience with whiners, and that includes myself.
Despite provocation I didn't play yesterday's lotto. The lottery is for losers. 80 bazillion dollar jackpots don't tempt me; I'd rather give spare change to the homeless than my hard-earned cash to some clowns in the state government. Everyone else in the office pitched in $10 apiece and bought a bunch of tickets. I declined with a comment about fools and their money being soon parted, then got needled all afternoon about having to mind the office when they went off to Sacramento in a limo to pick up their earnings. We all enjoyed ourselves immensely. I got to feel smug today when they came to work. Some woman in southern California won the money, and the attention of hundreds of schemers not to mention the IRS, while we just went back to selling dreams and counting our pennies.
I'm not totally immune to lotteries and gambling, but I hate losing real money, and I always lose. I haven't got a head for math, I don't enjoy figuring odds, and I can never remember the rules to card games. Nobody plays bridge with me twice, let me tell you. Still, I like playing computer gambling games. I spent a remarkable amount of time last night trying to beat the computer at poker, roulette, and keno. I lost big. When all my points were gone I pulled up a game called Diamonds 3-D which is like playing raquetball in a glass room. Fun, but stuff breaks a lot. It shut out my little companions Self-Pity and Dissatisfaction for awhile, and so was worth losing an hour of sleep over. Of course, I paid for that today at work by drooping over my keyboard all afternoon.
Payback is recursive.
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