12 December 2009

If wishes were horses...


Christmas time, and I'm dirt poor. I have a job, which is more than a lot of other folks, but I make a pittance. Not even a livable pittance is it. Christmas presents for the family, or eat? We haven't even turned on the heat yet because nobody wants to pay for it. So what's good?

Well, the lady Toaster is awesome; we've been living together for over a year now, and I couldn't imagine life without her. I love having coffee with her, talking to her, watching her play Xbox, staying up very late so I can wake her up for her obnoxiously early (5:30am!) shifts. Her dog, Eva, came to live with us this past spring, and she's a lovely little beastie. Eva is ten years old, a hair dog not a fur dog, which is good because I'd be sneezing and itching all the time otherwise. She and Prancy, my ten year old cat, have not really learned to get along well, but it's only been a few months and these things take time.

I'm reminded of the Monty Python sketch "Four Yorkshiremen," in which four extremely rich men are sitting around telling stories, each more preposterous than the last , about how poor they were when they were young. "We were happier in those days, though we were poor," the first says. "Because we were poor," says the second.

I am also reminded of something Stephen King wrote, although it may be a bit of pop culture wisdom he picked up somewhere along the way: "You can never be too rich or too thin, and if you don't believe that, you were never really poor or fat." The actual truth of it aside, it speaks to the longing for something more, something better than what you have now, something I can identify with. I don't really want to be rich, I just want to make grown-up money, enough to live on, enough so that I don't have to feel guilty spending 20 bucks on something I really want.

Why does everything have to be so fucking hard?