Oh, The Guilt

Once again, there are those who would try to coax me into feeling guilty for my situation. My ex-girlfriend was fired from her job a couple weeks ago–she has known about her impending doom for over six months, and had many chances to do something about it, but was so resigned to her "miserable luck" that she just let it happen. Another old friend was fired last week–his job started at 5 a.m. and rather than adjusting his schedule so that he would be going to bed at 7:00, he continued staying up until midnight as if life were just a continuation of being a teenager, and after one too many tardy appearances and (I presume) multiple warnings, they let him go.

The Gay Pirate continues to not have a job–though he has been offered various day jobs, he has rejected them on the basis that he's not a "office type person," but unlike many office-type-people who have outside passions and aspirations, his only real passions are easy women and massive amounts of alcohol. There are spangers with more impressive resumes than him. So, he continues living in complete deficit, accumulating a thousand dollars a month in debt, which he has been doing for years now. It's fascinating for me to experience, and if he weren't a raging alcoholic I'd still keep in touch, if only to see the actual process people go through on their path to being one of those dirty crazy old alcoholics on the street. They weren't always that way, you know. Once they were a twenty-something idiot who threw their lives away, too.

Me, I got up in my downtown apartment at 5:00, made myself an omelette, and sat out on my balcony and had breakfast while I read the newspaper. I went inside, put on a festive holiday tie, and made my way to my office in the financial district. Tomorrow night I'm going to set up my music studio and record a Christmas album. I'm going to give it out as a gift, but it's mostly just for fun. You know, because I have an artistic life outside work. There's a really cute girl I met from my apartment complex that invited me over, I may swing by and say hello before I take a flight to Washington and spend Christmas with my family, mostly composed of rocket scientists and professors (no, I'm not kidding). Then I'll get ready for my trip to Europe, tickets compliments of a family travel fund, and spend two weeks paid vacation with the most beautiful, wonderful woman God ever put on this Earth.

Ask me if I feel guilty that my life is so different from theirs. Go ahead. And let me tell you why not– they all had their chance. None of them are from broken homes. Boring homes, maybe, but of the four of us, only one of us had to sleep at his parents' store as a kid, so they could work through the night. Only one of us had to get his shoes extended with duct tape when he outgrew them. Only one of us has divorced parents. Only one of us has never gotten prematurely married, pregnant, or a VD (and only one of us has never cheated on any significant others). Only one of us gave up drugs when they got in the way of day-to-day activities. The only thing all four of us share is that we're all from white, middle class backgrounds, and have been given numerous opportunities to succeed. I may not have taken every opportunity, but at least I'm the one who took a few.