Lotto!

This week’s lottery is around two million dollars.  Granted that’s a lot of money, but usually it gets to be up in the eighty-ninety million dollar range.  That got me thinking what I would do with all that money.  Well half of it would go to taxes, which is complete bogus, but unavoidable, and then that would leave me with around forty million dollars.  I think another half of that (at least) would go to charity.  But a good one.  Like helping kids in Africa or Haiti or donations toward research on neglected diseases…not the Jersey Shore Relief From Stupidity Fund, which on second thought might not be such a bad idea…Alright so I have around twenty million dollars left to be spent on a boat for my parents, because they’ve always wanted one, tuition for the college of my choice, travel around the world and…housing for later in life.  Not too frivolous, I don’t think.

Family Ties

I guess I should also say, following up on my previous post, that my life has been by no means bad.  I have nice parents and good friends and a best friend who I love to death and share everything with.  And my extended family is pretty great.  On big holidays, like Christmas and Easter we have big family parties and there’s always amazing food and fun traditions that I treasure with all my heart.  For example, on Christmas Eve, we have a really fancy party at my Aunt Kris’ house and everyone gets dressed up in nice dresses and suits and we have a gift exchange and my Aunt Kris makes roast beef, which I never eat because I hate meat, but the rest of my family really enjoys.  And my Aunt Sherry makes this amazing array of the most fabulous Christmas cookies ever that are quite possibly the most delicious things in the world.  I mean she makes like fifteen different kinds alone and then at least twenty of each kind.  Which is probably a good thing because I have a pretty big family (four sisters and their husbands and then eleven immediate cousins plus more extended family like my deceased uncle’s brother Larry and his wife Cindy and then my cousins’ wives and their kids…so it’s big).  Anyways, even though my life is kind of boring thus far, I still intensely value certain aspects of it.

True Living.

I feel like I haven’t really lived that much.  Granted, I’ve only been alive for seventeen years which is a relatively short time.  But I was thinking about it the other day when I learned that one of the prompts I have to write for a college essay is: evaluate a significant experience in your life and its effect on you.  Well…I don’t know that I’ve really had an super significant experiences.  My life has kind of been the same routine for the past seventeen years repeated over and over.  Which is just really sad because I don’t want to be a boring person.  I wish I had amazing experiences to think about and reflect on, but I just don’t.  I’ve lived in Ohio for the past four and a half years and before that I lived in Michigan since I was born.  Not super exciting stuff.  I’ve never even been out of the country unless you count Canada, which you shouldn’t because it’s not that exciting there either.  I went to New York City for a weekend, but nothing really happened there other than that I realized how expensive everything is and how relatively little money I have.  I don’t exactly want anything bad to happen to me, or anything like that…but maybe just a departure from the mundane that has been my life up until now.  I’d really like to travel.  I’d really like to meet interesting people and learn, hands-on, about cultures other than my own…I think I’d just really like to do SOMETHING.

Religion...

Sometimes I have a hard time with religion.  I want so badly to believe in a higher power, but then logic takes over and science infiltrates my mind to the point that it just doesn’t seem reasonable that all the Bible stories I’ve learned for the past seventeen years of my life are valid.  Proven scientific theories, like evolution, completely contradict the story of Adam and Eve.  And for that matter, are we supposed to literally interpret these stories, or take some sort of subliminal message from them?  And then there’s the whole conspiracy theory that the Bible was made by a bunch of religious officials way after the supposed dates of the actual events.  If you think about it, the whole idea is kind of genius—make everyone believe that there is a higher power that will punish them if they don’t follow a specific set of rules (that the officials could have made up themselves) all so that they could just get everyone to do what they wanted them to do and have an society to their own specifications.  But then things like what just happened to the woman I work for happen.  She should have died in childbirth, but is already back on her feet after hundreds of people prayed for her.  That seems a little too crazy to be a coincidence.

Wondrous. Simply Wondrous.

I just saw Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium and I think I may be in love.  The movie quickly became one of my favorite movies of all time.  The creativity and imagination expressed through it was simply magical.  It transported me back to a time when I believed anything was possible and made me wish that I could live in a place where magic was real and true and beautiful.  Mr. Magorium depicts a fabulous picture of a childlike adult—a total wizard in the realm of imagination and enchantment.  I almost wish that everyone could be like him.  That everyone could just accept things the way he does and live life in such simple belief that the world is a magical place.  Kudos to Dustin Hoffman on a magical performance—I really believed his character and felt a remarkable connection to him, like he was the imaginative child of all our pasts.

Oh Ke$ha

Okay, I know I keep harping on Ke$ha, but I just read an article about her in a magazine.  Apparently, she’s a certified genius whose I.Q. is over 140 and got a 1500 on her SATs.  AND she was in IB.  I can’t decide if that makes me want to respect her or makes me even more disappointed in her.  I can totally appreciate that she’s so involved in her music and everything that she left school to pursue her dreams, but it’s just so…indescribably sad to me that she wastes her time singing about the things she sings about, when she has the potential to really make an impact on the lives of young girls by encouraging them to stay in school, and treat education with the importance it deserves.  Instead, she sings about wild Hollywood parties and glorifies excessive drinking and other illicit activities.  I mean, perhaps I’m a little biased because school is one of the most important things in my life and I’m about as straight-edge as they come, but really.  What Ke$ha should be doing is encouraging young women to respect themselves and using her accomplishments in academics to do so.

Promises, Promises

I think the world would just be a better place if people didn’t make promises.  Because they can rarely keep them.  Take marriage for example—that’s basically a promise that you’re going to stay together forever and love each other and be faithful and whatever.  But at least fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce.  Another example, parents promise stupid things to their children, like gifts or special events, but rarely follow through and claim that they never promised in the first place.  People make promises to their friends that they don’t keep.  Workers make promises to their employers that they don’t keep—but then they often get fired.  Maybe, if people quit making promises that they can’t keep, there would be a lot more disappointment in the world and everyone wouldn’t be so pissed off all the freaking time.  Or maybe, and this is probably a long shot, but maybe if people would get their effing acts together and only make the promises they knew for a fact that they could keep—maybe then people would stop fighting and there could be some semblance of peace among the human race.