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

memory

Girl Asleep

Congratulations, Rosemary Myers! If Miyazaki had made Napoleon Dynamite and set it in Disco Australia it couldn't have been better than your movie.

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...

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