I Won the Powerball!!!!

I won the Powerball!!!  Not the $550 million jackpot, but I am $4 richer this morning.  Yay!

Seriously though, I know why I bought Powerball tickets.  It was probably 20% peer pressure, 30% dreaming, 30% for thrills, and the remaining 20% because I can’t add.  Did I have my hopes up?  No.  I’ve played the lottery and gambled enough times to know better.  But despite all the websites and articles talking about better chances of other things occurring, like being drafted in the NBA or becoming the President of the USA, I always figure that someone has to win it.  And two lucky people, one in Arizona and the other in Missouri, did.

Lucky?  Yeah, I guess.  As much talk as there was about the infinitesimal odds of winning, equally the idea of winning the lottery being a curse was discussed.  Apparently all of these past lottery winners were interviewed, and none of them were any happier now than they were prior to winning.  Most were substantially less happy.  Because, as the adage reminds us, money doesn’t buy happiness.

As I've stated in previous posts, I’m not a material possessions kind of guy.  I never go out and buy something because it’s new or fancy or cool.  OK, maybe cool, especially if they are toys for my kid, but that’s about it.  Both of my vehicles were pre-owned upon purchase.  We don’t have fancy furniture or tons of valuable jewelry.  My house is on the smaller side of most residential dwellings.  And I’m fine with that.  Someday I’ll need newer stuff.  I’ll almost definitely need a bigger house.  And when those times come, I’ll shop around and make some purchases.  But until then, I’m happy with what I have.

In my office at work I have a Zen calendar with a thoughtful proverb for each day of the year, and I’ve taped some of the more meaningful ones to my monitors.  These are just two of them:

The one on the left is rather obvious.  And my home is a prime example.  If someone broke in while I was away on vacation, they’d be very disappointed.  Even if they brought a U-Haul, I doubt they’d have much more than a few thousand dollars worth of stuff.    Definitely not worth the time and effort and risk of setting off my deadly booby traps.

As for the proverb on the right, I think of the Sphero toy I bought for myself a year or so ago.  I was so excited to get this thing—basically a ball that you can remotely control from your phone or tablet.  The video demos of it seemed so neat, and I pictured myself having days or weeks or months of fun with this thing.  And then, after spending the $130 for it, I played with it for maybe an hour.  Then a few days later I turned it on and played with it for fifteen minutes.  I chased my son around the house with it a couple of times.  It was neat, but not as thrilling as I expected.  And then, well, I think it has sat on my dresser for the past eight months.  It may be fun to play with if you had cats.  A dog would probably eat it though.  Other than that, eh.  Nothing special.

Sometimes expensive things are worth the money.  For a year or so, we had a very crappy Dodge Caliber.  The transmission in it was like a wind-up toy, and it was cramped and cheap inside.  We purchased it because we wanted a four-door AWD vehicle for when my son was born, and we regretted it soon after.  Yes, it got us around in the snow, but the gas mileage was horrible.  So after putting up with it for about a year, we bought a GMC Acadia.  Substantially more expensive, yes, but we immediately knew we had made a smart decision.  Aside from the superfluous XM radio (albeit great for listening to Penguins, Penn State, and Steelers games while travelling back and forth from Harrisburg), we loved some of the other features of this car.  Heating and A/C controls in the back to keep the little guy warm (and Daddy cool).  A rearview backup camera and alert system—which let me tell you is totally worth it, because backing my truck up is a P-IN-THE-A now that I’ve been spoiled by this thing in the Acadia.  And the automatic rear lift gate is great when carrying a wheelchair with both hands.  So yeah, spending a little money is sometimes worth it.

But most times, I think it’s probably not.  At the park where I go running during my lunch hour, I often see this lady there walking her toy poodle.  She drives a white BMW 740Li, and she walks around with her nose in the air wearing these gaudy track suits.  Her ankle-biter also wears a track suit and holds its nose in the air as well.  She has this attitude about her—like she expects park traffic and other walkers/joggers to move out of HER way when she walks, and she doesn’t even clean up after her animal (and I’ve almost stepped in it several times).  But her silly $70,000 car is what causes me to shake my head, especially as she bounces it over the speed bumps and pot holes in the park.  I’ve ridden in a few BMWs, Mercedes, a Dodge Viper, and even a Bentley once.  Nice cars, but so impractical and not worth it.  I suppose if you are into cars, owning one of them would be fine—I’m thinking people who are into racing and restoring classic cars and that sort of thing.  I’m personally not high on collecting or working on cars, but everyone has to have a hobby.  But I doubt this lady at the park collects cars, and that BMW she drives is probably nothing more than a status symbol.  Look at me, I’m rich.  Hey lady, you’re not impressing me one bit with your vehicle.

So if I’m so against material possessions, why on earth did I play the lottery?  Well, if I won, I probably would go on a mini spending spree.  I mean, what else would I do with all that money?  I’d probably upgrade my housing situation to accommodate our new little bundle of joy arriving in a few weeks.  Something slightly larger with a rec room (man cave), another bedroom or two over what we have now, and definitely two or three more bathrooms--a house can never have enough bathrooms.  I repeat, a house can never have enough bathrooms.  But I’d also want a big yard with some woods and a cleared area well away from the road that we could blacktop for basketball, hockey, skateboarding, or whatever.  And after our housing upgrade, I’d pay off all of our debts (crazy that I’m 35 and still haven’t quite fully paid off my college loans--guess that's what I get for transferring schools and switching majors).  Other than that, I may buy a new wardrobe, and I’d definitely buy my wife twenty or so pairs of new shoes and some purses/handbags/clutches to match because she likes that kid of stuff.  Some people collect cars.  My wife collects shoes and purses.  To each their own!  And lastly I’d probably get myself on the season ticket list for the Steelers and Penguins (if the NHL ever comes back).  Seeing my favorite teams play live substantially more often than a blue moon would bring a smile to my scruffy face.

But then I’d go back to school.  I’d delve into law and/or medicine.  I’d definitely…finally…get my MBA.  I could easily see myself spending a million bucks on college courses.  I’m curious like that, I guess—always wanting to know how things work or what this or that means.  You know, like the difference between an affiant and a deponent?  Or how muon-catalyzed fusion is different from beam-target fusion?  Most of the people in the world are probably fine not knowing the answers to those types of questions, but I’m not one of them.  So I’d spend some money to educate myself more.

And then I may start or own a business.  I live in a county in Pennsylvania that is notoriously lacking in entertainment, particularly for younger people.  I’d maybe open a Dave & Busters or something of the sort.  I’d consider putting in a new movie theater, because watching a movie at the Carmike Park Hills Plaza 7 is almost as bad as setting up my TV on my front lawn.  In fact, we do almost all of our big-screen movie watching in State College or Harrisburg with their stadium-style seating (and where you can't hear the movie playing in the room next door).  I’d additionally put some money down for some walking/bike paths throughout the county—maybe encourage people to get out and about.  And I might invest in a local tech company to try to retain some of the young talent that leaves the area in droves after graduating from high school.

And of course I’d donate a lot of money to charities.  I’d probably focus on bullying prevention, breast and pancreatic cancer, MS, cystic fibrosis, and kids with physical and cognitive disabilities.  Those are ones that are closer to my heart.  After that I’d give some money away to friends and family, and of course that’s always the tricky part because “friends” and “family” would probably be coming out of the woodwork asking for handouts.  I’d probably give more to the people who didn’t ask for it over those who came begging, but each and every case would be different and evaluated appropriately.  No matter what, anyone I know or have known (more than just as a passing acquaintance) could probably expect something.

Above all else though, I wouldn’t let the money change me.  I know that’s easy to say now, having never won more than like a hundred bucks at a casino, but I think that kind of attitude runs deep within me.  I look at some of the closer people in my life—a former coworker who is a prominent philanthropist, some immediate family and cousins and friends.  Some of these people are very well off, yet you’d never know it by talking to them.  They don’t flaunt their money or their achievements or anything else, for that matter.  They are down-to-earth people, and these are the people who have helped to mold and shape and guide the person I am today.  And so whether I had $10 or $100,000,000 in the bank, I think I’d still be the same happy, go-lucky guy I’ve always been.

Could you say the same?

Escaping the Black Friday Hole

It's Tuesday evening and I'm still trying to escape the black hole that I found myself stuck in over the holiday weekend.  I always end up in this veritable prison of ignorance during extended periods of time off.  My routines are thrown askew.  I start adding fifteen minutes or even a half hour to the amount of time I spend sleeping.  I don’t pay much attention to the news.  I feel like days go by and I’ve missed so much—but perhaps that’s the point of time off and holidays and vacations.  Tune out and enjoy quality time with my family.  Right?

But as I was in the midst of my 5-day stupor, I did have one realization that was irritating on a number of levels.  And it involves Black Friday.  It seems that every year businesses are moving up their hours, hoping to prolong the spending sprees that occur on this day.  I caught a brief snippet of the local news on Friday, and a lady was commenting on how she and her daughter began their shopping extravaganza at 4 PM on Thanksgiving.  Really?  Really?!?  Four PM???

Black Friday began as the first day of shopping season for Christmas and Hanukah and Kwanzaa gifts.  The name began in Philadelphia in the 50s or 60s, but it became more popular nationally in the late 70s.  For DECADES stores did not open until 6 AM on this day.  It wasn’t until just a few years ago that stores started moving up their times to earlier hours of the morning.  Last year, for the first time EVER, stores opened at midnight.  And of course this year we had a number of them opening on Thanksgiving Day.  

Yuck!

But even before that, many stores had holiday stuff up weeks or months prior.  Wal-mart, the classy business that it is, had Christmas decorations on its shelves even before Halloween.  If the case is to be made that Black Friday is the first day of holiday shopping, well that’s just silly.  Retailers want your money, and they’ll take it any time of the year.  Why wait until this day to do your shopping?  The sales?  Free shipping?  I can guarantee you that you can find most of the stuff you just bought somewhere else for cheaper any time of the year.  All you have to do is use your noggin and search a little.  And all that other stuff you bought--the HDMI cables for your flat-screen TV, the 10 boxes of Keurig coffee to go with your new coffee maker--all that stuff probably WASN'T on sale, but you had to buy it or else your initial purchase was worthless.  Right?

And as for that lady and her daughter who were out at 4 PM on Thanksgiving, I guess spending time with the rest of the family wasn’t as important to them as trying to find the best deals.  Has our society really fallen to the point where buying gifts (and not-gifts) is more important than spending quality time with loved ones?  I’m not very big on material possessions, and so perhaps that’s where my disdain comes from.  But seriously, I’d rather spend eternity playing board games or tag or watching Kung Fu Panda with my son than spending even a minute in a throng of greedy people fighting over merchandise.

And what’s worse is that we just had a presidential election where one side tried to convince us that our economy is in the toilet.  It’s no wonder that side lost.  If people are willing to sacrifice their time with the family to go out and spend, SPEND, SPEND on pointless baubles and trinkets, I think it’s safe to say that our economy is doing just fine.  I was told of instances where people who (and I have to quote this because it’s from their own mouths) “are living paycheck to paycheck” went out and spent over $1000 on Black Friday on things like flat-screen TVs, tablets, phones, etc.  These same people tried to say that Obama has been running our country into the ground.  They said that he was responsible for gas prices and high unemployment and everything else that is wrong with this country, including their personal financial situations.  And yet they spent over a grand on crap that they don’t need just because some store advertised it as being on sale?  That just makes me want to scream!

Next year I wouldn’t be surprised to find stores opening at noon on Thanksgiving for Black Friday sales.    And before too long, it will be called Black Weekend, considering we already have a Cyber-Monday.  And it’s never going to change.  Unless we have a screen plastered to our faces or a phone or gaming controller glued to our hands, we are bored.  Whatever happened to going for walks?  Reading books?  Engaging the mind in arts and crafts or playing games or just TALKING to others?  No, until we can get off of our butts and enjoy the beauty of the world outside of our little shells that we live in, we will always crave the crap that is on sale on Thanksgiving weekend.

Will it ever change?  No.  But maybe if you are reading this, you might.  Next year, spend your time with your family and loved ones.  No, don’t just spend it.  Cherish it.  Because all that crap you bought this year will be easily replaceable next year if lost or broken.  But your friends and family?  They can never be replaced.

Labels Aren't Just Used For Nutrition!

I have a Zen Calendar on my office desk that I bought at 5 and Below on a whim.  Zen is pretty cool, although much of it is a little too mystical for my liking.  This calendar occasionally has some Taoist words of wisdom as well though, so that makes up for it I guess.

Today’s wisdom was great: 

I love this.  And here’s why.  The world is an awfully complicated place, and yet we are constantly oversimplifying in just about everything we do.  It more commonly happens within our relationships with people, but let me step back and explain this from a very basic standpoint first.  You have a pen on your desk.  Anyone who is reading this is now visualizing a pen.  Does your pen have black or blue or red ink?  Is it a ballpoint pen or a gel pen or something else?  Does it have a rubber grip, or is it a cheap piece of plastic?  There are quite literally thousands of different styles for pens.  Yet they all are explained away with one word?

Now let’s think about people.  Let’s lump all the fat people together, and I can do this because I’m fat. =P  Now let’s use some logic (flawed logic, but logic nonetheless) and say that all fat people are lazy.  Well, we could be correct with this statement, but that's rather unlikely.  I’m probably the last person you could ever call lazy.  I jog two miles a day four times a week.  I try to write 5000 words a day.  I work from 8:30 to 5, which routinely involves solving technical puzzles and riddles that would boggle most people’s minds.  In the evenings I entertain a three-year old.  I may be lazy in journaling what I eat and following dietary guidelines, but does that make me lazy as a person?  And what exactly qualifies a person as being fat, anyway?  I most certainly am fat, obese by doctor’s standards, so I’m not counting myself in this.  But if someone is, say, six feet one inch tall and a hundred and ninety pounds—right on the border of being overweight according to a standard BMI chart, is he/she fat?  I could point you to thousands of athletes who are six foot one inch tall, weigh well over two-hundred pounds, and would never be considered fat.  Fatness, to me, is in the eye of the beholder.  It’s a label.  And it’s not a very nice one.

I’m not going to go on and on about how people bully others with labels here—I’ll save that for another time—but you get the picture.  Labels are so misleading.  Except maybe when it comes to relationships—if a person says he/she doesn’t want to label a relationship with terms like “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” or whatever, chances are that person is looking to dump you as soon as someone with nicer, ahem, labels comes along.  Labels mean EVERYTHING in relationships.  Am I right?

But labels are pervasive in our world.  Try reading a technical journal some time, especially one relating to a Microsoft product.  You’ll read about things such as Active Directory, Hyper-V, group policies, DNS, NAT, blah blah blah.  I’m really quite shocked to see immigrants who learn English as a second language (ESL) then jump into the IT field and become successful.  As if English isn’t hard enough to learn alone, they then have to master technical jargon.  Add in a programming language, which can be just as mystifying, and it’s just all that more impressive.  No wonder so many people complain about immigrants taking all of our jobs.  Far too many of us have too much difficulty mastering English alone, and we were even born here!

Of course, we live in a now, now, now and a me, me, me society, where most people want things done yesterday and often only worry about their own concerns.  When speaking to people like this, you can’t exactly use a hundred different words to describe something simple like a pen.  But you can think with an OPEN MIND.  When the reverse happens—when they talk to you about a pen, or a fat and lazy person—you can understand that their labels are simply that.  Labels.  Utterly inefficient words used to describe something that is clearly a thousand-fold more complex.

Could You be a Hoarder?

http://tlc.howstuffworks.com/tv/hoarding-buried-alive

So I must have spent half a day watching Hoarding: Buried Alive over the weekend.  That show is like the ultimate roller coaster ride.  It starts out with a house, seems normal, but as they approach and go inside, you gasp in horror.  It always seems to go from bad to worse, with some new atrocity of piles of used diapers or roaches crawling over everything or dead animals buried under the messes.  We actually tried to eat dinner while watching it, and I can honestly say that if you want to lose weight, put that on while you are eating.  You won’t be going back for a second helping.

After watching three or four episodes, I decided to clean up my own tiny "hoard" in my garage.  My father-in-law came out to help, and in no time we had three garbage bags full—mostly newspapers and cardboard I never got around to hauling off to the recycling center.  I only spent maybe an hour and a half before my allergies got the best of me, but my daunting mess of a garage is much cleaner, and I can't wait to set up my workout bench again and hang up my punching bag so that I can use a portion of it as a gym!  Yay!

But back to hoarding, I can’t quite figure out how people allow themselves to live in filth.  Granted, my house isn’t always the neatest or the cleanest.  My kid loves to make messes, and while he’s great at cleaning them up at the daycare, at home…well…not so much.  Add volumes of junk mail, my wife’s mountain of shoes inside the doorway, laundry, newspapers, etc., etc., etc., and sometimes I feel like I spend way too much time cleaning up.  But my house will never EVER EVER come close to looking like those houses--even in most of the "after" pictures.

I’ve realized that there are really two problems that are presented on Hoarding.  You have the people that just don’t want to let go of anything, which to me seems like a real mental disease, and then you have the people that are just lazy.  On this one particular episode, this woman lived with her two kids (a 17-year-old girl and a 15ish-year-old boy).  The mother claimed she had fibromyalgia and couldn’t do anything without suffering extreme pain, and the kids wouldn’t do anything either.  Mountains of trash piled up, and nobody seemed to care or notice.  The mother blamed everything and everybody but herself, and she even got to the point where she refused to talk to the therapist because the woman was "belittling her" and saying she was "unfit to be a mother."  This lady was also a diabetic, and instead of putting her USED NEEDLES in a sharps container—or even a plastic bag—she was just throwing them into this garbage heap beside her.  They actually had to have a HAZMAT team come out and clean up her needles, and sure enough the team found at least one that wasn’t capped.  Are you freaking serious, lady?!?!?!?

The kids didn’t want to live there, and yet the girl cooked (on one burner amid a pile of trash) for her mother and didn’t want to leave her.  I kept thinking that those kids should have been placed with their father or in foster homes, but I realized that the daughter was fiercely emotionally attached to her mom, because otherwise why would she live in this filth?  Not to mention the place was crawling with roaches.  Yes, roaches.  Queue the vomit...

In the end they got it all cleaned up, and the family lived happily ever after, blah blah blah.  I don’t buy that though.  That lady had to have been one of the laziest people on the planet.  She couldn’t take trash out because she was in pain, yet she was walking through the house just fine.  She couldn’t even put her needles in a bag so that they weren’t poking people?

What drives people to such low points in their lives?  This lady obviously was depressed and sick and just in a horrible mental state, but to subject your kids to that?  I just don’t get it.

On another episode, one lady actually claimed that she was a very selfish person, she knew it, and she would never change.  Her boyfriend was ready to leave her because of her hoarding, and this was their final straw.  They cleaned up their place and worked out their differences, but I think that lady’s honesty said it all.

We have a hoarder house about a mile away from our residence.  We drive past it nearly every day.  We've watched over the past few months as they have filled three or maybe even more dumpsters, and the house itself isn’t all that big.  Part of me would have loved to have seen the inside before they started, but if given the opportunity to actually go, I ultimately would have declined.  Just cleaning out my cluttered garage was enough to send me into a horrible sneezing fit.

I could never be a hoarder.  Someone very close to me was on the verge of (probably even crossed the line of) being a hoarder, and unfortunately I had to deal with cleaning up most of the hoard several years ago.  Luckily I found some auctioneers that helped us sell most of the stuff, but we had both a big and a little dumpster of pure trash hauled out.  I don't mind talking about it to people, but I'll just summarize it here--it taught me a lesson, that's for sure.

These people that are just lazy hoarders, the ones that won’t throw away their trash—they just need slapped silly or else tossed in jail for a month or two to learn discipline and respect for others.  And really, that lady from that show should have spent some time in jail for abusing her children by forcing them to live in conditions like that.

But for the ones that have to hang on to material possessions, I understand it's a mental disease, but I can't identify with them at all.  They find value in garbage.  The one had a 55-gallon drum filled with ballpoint pens.  Seriously?  Like 10 of them aren’t going to last you the rest of your life?  You really need 5000 of them?  I had to throw out 10 pairs of worn shoes when cleaning up the hoard I had to deal with.  Not one of them was fit for wearing even around the house.

I have a little Zen Calendar on my desk, and one saying in particular was so good that I kept it, cut off the date, and taped it to my monitor.  It reads:

“Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you obtain it, it is nothing special.” – Shunryu Suzuki

That's the way I've TRIED to live my life since high school.  I don’t let material possessions own me.  I may give in once in a while, but at least I try, and I think I'm rather successful.  I mean, I look at my own house now, and I really think it would take a small-sized U-haul for us to move.  If it burned down, I wouldn't be upset.  I'd just replace the things we need, buy a few things to have fun with, and move on.  And here's a good example of my philosophy: the other day I was looking at Poweriser jumping stilts, thinking they’d be so cool to have, and then I realized that I’d probably wear them a handful of times, get hurt or realize that I’m not 18-years-old anymore, and then put them in a closet or up in my loft where we keep all of our stuff that we no longer use.  Yeah, check them out.  They look pretty awesome, right?  But how many times would a 35-year-old use these things??

Bottom line, don’t be a slave to your desires.  Don’t be a slave to material possessions.  The next time you go to buy something, ask yourself if you really need it.  Because chances are that you don’t.