If I Had A Million Dollars

Sure, we’ve all played the “what I’d do if I won the lotto” game with ourselves. It’s fun and easy to think of all the different ways you’d spend the money and how you’d change your life, for better or worse.

I was out for a walk today, playing that game. It was fun for a while, but then I asked myself, “So what if you only got a few lotto numbers correct and only got $500? What would you do then, hmmm?

I found this to be a much more difficult question to answer. $500? That I have to spend? I can’t sock it away as part of a downpayment on a house or a car? Hrm…

After twenty minutes of walking around I still hadn’t come up with a definitive answer. Most things either cost far more than $500 (like airfare or a plasma screen TV) or far less (like a Cuisinart).

Oh, sure, there’s plenty of ways that I could spend $500. The most fun (and also most potentially tiresome) idea was to walk into Amoeba Records and just go bonkers.

Or I could take a friend to dinner at French Laundry and let the sommelier have his wicked way with the wines (my friend would, of course, have to spring for a hotel room in Yountville for us for that night as we would obviously not be driving afterwards).

An appealing idea: use the money to pay someone else to come in and paint my kitchen so I don’t have to deal with it.

Honestly, this is about the best I can do right now. I must lack imagination. Either that or I’m already fairly content with the things that I have and do. Mostly I’m just very surprised at how much trouble I’m having finding an answer to this question.