Skip to main content

It's easy to be bitter


This month I lost my home to foreclosure. This month Chas celebrated his 20th birthday, and his family (I'm assuming) has seen fit to wish him well on several billboards around town.

Rudimentary research reveals that billboard advertising costs run anywhere from $700 to $3000 a month.

Even at the lower end of the billboard advertising cost spectrum, the price of three billboards would cover my rent, utilities, and gasoline for three months.

It doesn't seem fair.

Today I took Jack to an end-of-the-year swim party at the home of a classmate. Newly remodeled, that home could have engulfed my apartment 5 times over. Everything looked high-end and the parents were the type of overachievers that scare me. I was talking with one of the dads, a guy I've had a few really interesting conversations with, who knows my situation. We were sort of gazing around, taking it all in, and I said, "It's easy to be bitter." Rob was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "You can't buy happiness. And you can't resent them for what they have."

He's right. He and his family struggle, too. He said he wouldn't trade his for theirs, and I agree. They wouldn't want mine anyway.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

memory

10 comments
Read more

expanding my culinary horizons

After last night's culinary debacle, today's culinary surprise was particularly welcome. My dear friend Rukmi brought me lunch! Rukmi is Sri Lankan. She cooks the best food. I ate a fish and egg croquette, lentil curry, saffron rice, all with delicious chicken and what I thought might be tuna. I asked Rukmi what the meat was, and she told me it's all chicken. "The flat, triangular meat? With the spices? Is it tuna?" She laughed lightly. "That's a wegetable," she said, in her lovely Sinhalese way. "Oh, yeah? Like a beet?" That made sense, because it flaked like tuna steak or like beets might. "It is jackfruit." Jackfruit? Jackfruit! I ate jackfruit today. Rukmi told me all about it: she used canned young jackfruit she bought at G & L Market on 22nd St.; fully grown jackfruits are gigantic and if one fell on your head it could kill you. When fully ripe, jackfruit is full of big pods that each have a seed in the middle, like a p...
6 comments
Read more

in which I get knocked down

Sickness saps my energy, both physical and mental. It's surprising, really, how seldom I get sick, since I work in a petri dish. When I do get sick it lays me low and happenings that I might normally take in stride just completely knock me down. Last week I was diagnosed with an embarrassing viral infection, the symptoms of which on their own couldn't possibly have dragged me this deep down: sores in my mouth and throat that blistered and peeled and made every mouthful feel and taste like shredded pennies; an itchy rash around my mouth and nose and on my chest. Compounding that: knees that felt packed in hot wax, the backs of my eyeballs aflame. No fever, so no H1N1. Negative strep. Malaise. But I soldiered (martyred?) through most of the week at work, because I could, and some of the other teachers had to stay at home with their diverticulitis and kidney stones. On Thursday night my laptop died. On Friday night I felt I could deal with my weekend obligations. DH went out of t...
5 comments
Read more