I read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal everyday just to be dazzled by the riches — both liberal and conservative — that I will never know.
News? Who cares about the news? Not when there are $350 bottles of French wine to drink (only not by me) and $2.2 million mini-jets to be flown. (I stare at the pictures and say, “Cool!”)
Politics? Who cares? It’s all about money and I have none. These two papers prove it every single day, and it gives me great pleasure to read about it so I can be envious and drool.
In the Times’ style section last week they had a feature on cardigan sweaters. I don’t personally like cardigan sweaters. In fact, I pretty aggressively hate them. But that was before I saw one for $500 in the newsprint. Now I want a cardigan.
In the Journal, I saw a house in the West Indies on a cliff overlooking the sea that is starting at $10 million. It had a home theater, observatory with retractable dome, grotto with waterfall (I don’t know what a grotto is, but I bet you could put a tiki bar in it) and a dance studio. I ran to the computer to crunch a few numbers, just to see if there was some way I could squeak it out (maybe by cutting out red meat or gas for the cars.) But even if I could get a 30-year loan with a .001 percent rate, I still don’t think I could cover the $27,700 monthly payments. Not even close!
In fact, to show how poor I am, my computer’s financial software has a home loan calculator that only goes up to, get this, $9,999,999. Even the damn computer doubts my potential.
Another story talked about William McGuire, the now-disgraced CEO of UnitedHealth Group who has decided to step down after a stock options scandal. Now, mind you, he’s stepping down because of scandal — something he did! — yet, he stands to walk away with about $1.1 billion in stock options. That’s right, 1 billion! If I do something scandalous at work, the best I can hope to profit from it is about $3.72 and a package of staples. What am I doing wrong?
But to really and truly see how far I’m falling behind the super-rich, I read this headline in the Weekend Journal last week: “Curating the coffee table.” The subhead read, “Designers arrange objects for miniscule spaces.” It went on to tell about so-called “rearrangers” or “accessorizers” who charge between $50 to $250 an hour to come into your home and arrange your knickknacks, add style to your clutter, give a bit of pizzazz to that grouping of family photos, and if you need it, go out and shop for more expensive crap to re-clutter up your house. Call it “fashionable clutter” or “when your crap has style!”
These days, I don’t even have a coffee table. Ours was banished to the loft so the glass edges wouldn’t leave dents in my baby’s head, causing her to endure questions for the rest of her life like, “Were you hit by an airplane?” or “Didn’t your daddy hire a qualified accessorizer?”
So instead, like heathens, I have to put my coffee, or bowl of ice cream, or plate of cookies on the floor where the dog can walk by and take a swig or snag a snack. Nothing says I have dis-arrived like looking down to find your dog with her tongue telescopically descending into your coffee mug for a quick slurp.
“Hello, daddy,” say brown eyes peering up at you, “you don’t mind if I “
Sure, go ahead, drink my non-gourmet coffee. Remind me how I don’t drive a Bentley, how the backyard is glaringly missing an observatory and how I wouldn’t know a $350 bottle of French wine if it fell out of the sky and hit me. Well, at least I have the Times and the Journal to live someone else’s life vicariously.