A Material Girl

Okay, I admit it. I am a material girl. And no, that doesn't mean I woke up this morning thinking I turned into Madonna. I just mean that I like material things. I love having a thousand pens in every different color. Without my computer and my candles and my car and my books, I don't know what I would do. Shopping for new things makes me happy, dammit! And I am not going to be ashamed about that.

Sure, the church teaches us that we should be happy in the Lord and that material wealth is not important, etc etc. I know that material wealth is not the source of happiness. I realize that you can have everything in the world you ever dreamed of from a limousine to a private jet to a fucking solid gold toilet seat... and still not be happy. However... anyone who says that having money and material things doesn't make life easier is a big fat stinking OJ Simpson-I-did-not-kill-those-people liar. Money makes almost everything easier. (with the exception of maybe dying... but then again, having a lot of money means you can afford the really good pain killers...)

Right now, G and I are finding ourselves in a tight situation. We can afford the basics and then some extra on top, but we are certainly not to the point where we can go shopping for a bunch of new clothes or afford a fancy wedding. Our house is nice, but it's a townhouse. We share space with other people and we don't have a garage for G to work on his old Hornet. I just wake up everyday thinking about the future and how we are going to get from point A to point B in the fastest time. Then, I go to bed every night thinking of how much I have fallen short for the day. How much harder I should be working in order to reach those goals.

One goal, for example, is a nice house with actual grown-up furniture and nice carpet. Kitts Creek is one of those cookie cutter kind of neighborhoods in the area that is currently being touted around here as the premiere place to live. A house like this one costs roughly half a million dollars. I would love to have a house like that, but holy shit. How much money does a couple have to make a year to be able to reasonably afford a house like that? Maybe our next house is somewhere in between what we have now and what is pictured here, and that's fine, but I think it's important to have goals and to look ahead at what needs to be done in order to reach them.

My problem isn't figuring out what I want. My problem is finding the motivation and the every-day juice to work hard enough to get the things that I want. Every day is a struggle. I just have to keep my eye on the prize and remember that I'm lucky enough to have the man of my dreams beside me, struggling right there with me. Money and material things can't buy you happiness, but if you're lucky enough to have already found someone who makes you happy, why not work to have the money too? It can't hurt. :)