Mo' Money. Mo' Problems.

I have always thought of myself as the kind of person who thrives on change, always adapting to but not blindly accepting those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune; yet there is something, isn't there, in that moment when you realize you've been reassigned to a new department without being consulted, when you gaze at the blank white smiling teeth of Your New Boss, when pale hands start pushing teetering stacks of paper tasks across the mahogany desk towards you-- and suddenly you're in the middle of a mental coup, and your Inner Child is taking over, turning over the metaphorical bowl of spaghetti and embracing the floor under the allegorical dining room table in a display of howling, kicking, screaming denial that would make the average toddler in the Terrible Twos look as serene as Buddha under his tree.

NO.

NONONONONONONONONONONO!!!!!!!!!!

DON'T WANNA DO IT!!!!!!


But it's a short-lived revolution. You send your Inner Child to the corner and you go home and open a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck and pack yourself a bowl (because even though it's fun now and again to revert back to the days in which you could poop right in your pants and someone would just clean your butt off for you, it's always better to go back to being an adult with unlimited access to controlled substances.) And as your frazzled brain begins to relax under your own gentle ministrations, you start contemplating it all and putting it in perspective and dreaming of the future and realizing that every day you can take a hot shower and pick out what you want to eat and go outside and be pretty sure you're not going to get shot at or kidnapped, raped and tortured today, and these are all certainties that a good many of the 9 billion people currently occupying the planet don't have. And then you get REALLY pissed off, because Your New Boss is a stupid yuppie with $200 hairdo, TIVO, a couple of apathetic cookie-cutter kids and a huge house in Moraga, and someone should just go over there and put them all out of their misery. Because they ARE miserable, aren't they, spending their money on their stupid gym memberships and $300 cases of shitty California Merlot and lame-ass vacations at Tahitian resorts where they get mad when someone at the front desk doesn't speak English. And their stupid kids are going to crazy from boredom out there in the Suburban Sprawl, they're gonna be stealing their parents' cash to buy liquor, LSD, and really good meth and go barrelling down the freeway in the family SUV, swerve to avoid a hallucinatory purple elephant, and die in a ditch on the side of road. Because people make too much damn money and buy flat-screen TV's while little kids are starving in the dust of Darfur and sooner or later karma is gonna come around and it will be A Bitch. More money, more problems-- that's what Biggie said and look where he is, the poor man. Fuck this job. I'm going to go buy myself a big ass chocolate chip cookie!!!