I don't know why, but this feels like a confession: I bought a lottery ticket. It was $2. I knew I wasn't going to win. I bought it anyways. I feel pretty good about it. Amusingly, it could have gone bad. First my little story, then how it could have gone bad.
No secret to anyone: I was unemployed for almost all of last year. I don't talk about it much, and I talk about my mental state during the period of my unemployment even less. Needless to say, it was bad. As time went on and I still wasn't getting anywhere finding anything, my mind started looking for alternatives. Enter the lottery. I can do math, and I fair understanding of statistics, so I know the lottery isn't a way to make money. This knowledge is what kept me from wasting money on lottery tickets, but still the fantasy was there. When things got really bad, and I couldn't sleep because of worry, my mind would slip into one of these lottery winning fantasies almost as a defense mechanism to keep me from losing my mind.
The amusing thing about these fantasies, is they were fairly consistent. It might just be my fixation with certain numbers, but the magic number for nearly every thought about the lottery was $54 million. It is one of those figures that insures every debt is paid, you can help out your family and friends, and you never have to suffer through the worry about how you are going to afford to eat your next meal again...it is also divisible by 9, and I like 9. Of course, I am employed and haven't thought about this in months.
So back to the ticket. About two weeks ago, I was reading something about lottery winners and how their lives were ruined by winning the lottery. The amounts the people had supposedly won and then lost seemed a little extravagant so I decided to compare to current numbers. I fire up google, do a search, and boom, there is the magic number $54 million. I laughed. I laughed for a good long while. Just the idea that I fixated on this number for so long and by chance I run into it again.
The next day, I went to the gas station and bought a ticket. I knew it wasn't going to win. I don't even know if I would have believed it if I had even won back the $2 price of the ticket. But I almost felt like I needed to buy it for closure. I brought it home and promptly forgot about it for an hour or so. But when I remembered it, about an hour after the winning numbers were to be posted online, I couldn't find it. The more I looked the more a panic started to rise in the back of my head. It wasn't so much that I thought I was going to win and thus lost out on money as much as not knowing I lost. I had bought it for closure on a small but dreadful part of my life, but then I felt the realization of that slipping away as I couldn't find it.
Cutting out the bulk of the embarrassment I endured explaining the significance to the ticket to Rook and the wife (because if you are this far, you have already read a much better explanation that I gave them), I did eventually find it. Much like I already knew, I was not holding a winning ticket. I didn't get a single number. But I still won. I get to let go, and I got a new bookmark.
Small side note, this was only the second lottery ticket I have bought. The first one was purchased over a decade ago. A friend realized he could legally buy them so we both bought one. It wasn't a winner either.
