Million Dollar Dreams

I heard this morning about a raffle drawing that the Florida Lottery is running at New Year. They are offering ten $1million prizes, and are only selling 1.25 million tickets, making the odds of actually winning a million bucks a mere 1 in 250,000. The tickets cost $20 and are expected to sell out very quickly. So I snapped one up. Hell yeah, I want a chance at winning the cash! There are some smaller prizes too, which I definitely wouldn't say no to. I am not a big lottery fan, but I play the regular lottery maybe twice a year. I have been known to say that the lottery is a tax on people who can't do math, but it's definitely fun to dream about winning and I figure the odds of winning are so astronomical that it doesn't matter if I play it twice a week or twice a year - it really makes no difference to my chances. But this has a much greater chance, even though it's more than I would normally spend on the lottery in a year, so why the hell not, eh? It could pay for my 5th IVF cycle if there needs to be one. And if I don't win, well, I'm not really going to miss $20.

But then of course I started dreaming of actually winning. And whereas before my lottery winning dreams involved yachts and quitting work and sailing the pacific, these were different. You see, I don't think $1 million is enough to radically change your life. I mean like quit work and be a bum for the rest of your life type radical change. But, it could radically change your existing life for the better, and mores the point, the lives of those around you. Maybe you wouldn't be able to quit working forever, but it would certainly open up possibilities, like going back to school to start over, and paying off your mortgage so you could afford to take that lower paying but more rewarding job. And then I started dreaming of paying for IVF cycles for, say, 5 people who don't have a hope in hell of being able to afford it themselves. Can you imagine what that would be like? To actually have the power to say to a bunch of people "here, go and do what you've been dreaming of, go and have a real chance at having a baby". It makes me quite misty eyed to think about it. Wow, how good would that make you feel if you could really do that? I mean, sure, giving a fat check to my brother or various other family members would be nice, but then again, they'd expect me to do it if I won a boatload of cash, so it kind of takes some of the fun out of it. But at random, offering someone a potential way out of misery? That right there is something worth dreaming of, my friends.

Aaah, dreaming is nice.