Your lottery winnings

Sometimes, when all the reliable news sources (Yahoo!) tell you about how enormous the lottery jackpot has become, you should start feeling like you'd be pretty stupid not to spend the money you were saving for your "lean" Christmas on a lottery ticket instead.* After all, God owes you for that crippling depression He gave you, right? He'll probably pay you back in some sort of spiritual legal settlement with this particular lottery. At least, that's what you should tell yourself as you stare at the lukewarm oatmeal in your coffee cup that's congealed like some half-digested brain because you never really learned how to make oatmeal properly.

Anyway, it's time to take a trip to 7-Eleven and buy yourself $500 million dollars!

As you walk down the street to 7-Eleven, you should seriously consider how you'll spend those millions. First off, you guess you've got to shovel a bunch over to your family, which should hopefully fulfill your familial obligations for life and act as a money-rich salve for all those weddings and funerals you failed to attend and feelings you failed to emote. Then you think about how you can reward the four people in your life who let you call them friends by paying off their house loans, student debts and car payments, even though you haven't talked to most of them in months and even though everyone involved would probably feel incredibly awkward about the situation: them because you're trying to reward their friendship with money when they'd probably just prefer to know you're not actively ignoring them and you because you feel like they feel like you're not giving them enough money.

Once that's over, you have to figure out what to do with the rest of that $200 million or so after taxes. You should probably give it some charity or something, but then you think maybe it'd be better to give it to individual dying people or something, since then you'll be able to see the results of your fantastic generosity, and as far as the reliable news sources (Yahoo!) have told you, every charity ever is a gigantic fraud. But how do you find those dying people, and isn't it sort of gauche to go up to grieving people to try to throw money at them? Also, the more you think about it, the more you realize money doesn't buy off death or even, really, illness, and that winning the lottery will probably cause you to contract (more) cancer in some horrible cosmic irony.

As you find yourself standing in the 7-Eleven, looking more lost than the homeless guy looking lost by the hot dog spinner, you should come to the realization that the only reason you want to win the lottery is to buy off guilt as some cheap (well, spiritually cheap) way of making yourself a happier person. Then you should go ahead and buy a Slurpee instead, and find that that sort of works too.


*Actually, if you've been living a fraudulent life, you should have been buying them all along anyway.