In which I won’t die with the most toys, but I may just die with zero stress… and nothing to show for it.

The winner isn’t the one with the most toys, she’s the one who has what she values most. I don’t value stuff all that much, or fame, or any of those quantifiable things: I value feeling good. (And yes, I realize that means I can redefine success whenever I need to: I’m not stupid, people.) Feeling “good” to me means I’m not tired, I’m not angry, and I’m not frightened.

Perhaps it’s lame to define happiness in negatives (how not-frightened am I? and how not-tired?) but I doubt it. I mock folks who define happiness by their stuff: look at my house! My car! My trophy wife! My nice stuff!

In a conversation with Truck the other night, I heard myself saying, “I live here because this way I can stand the world. I must live in a world where people are more good than evil, more smart than stupid, more kind than cruel. If they’re not good, smart, and kind, then I need to be able to believe that it’s generally for a good – or at least understandable – reason.

“If I have to live in a world where everyone is an idiot, I just don’t see the point in doing anything at all.”

Living in this little town – population 9,500 – allows me to live a mentally comfortable life. I’m confronted with no overcrowding, no senseless crime, and none of the little painful cruelties of life in the big city: I don’t carry 4 lbs of keys everywhere I go; everything is within walking distance; I know everyone by sight. Nearly everyone here is from somewhere else, so people tend to be well-traveled, open-minded, and well-spoken.

I often wonder if I’ve taken the easy way out: my life here is a success because it’s nearly impossible to be unsuccessful here. The status quo is practically level. We all live in the same old buildings in the same old tax bracket and we all wear the same old Walmart clothes.

Avarice here is kept to a minimum because there’s nothing to want. Most people I know concentrate their buying on their hobby mainly, and all other purchases are made from necessity. We don’t wear chic clothes, we don’t drive chic cars. Functionality nearly always trumps style because the weather here sucks.

In other words, I’m not confronted with beautiful, expensive things I can’t have unless I travel.

So I live here, and my life is simple and clean. I have what I need and I’m grateful for those things. I’m grateful for the food I eat and the shelter I enjoy. I feel nearly smug when I consider how little I own these days: some clothes, some books, a guitar, a vehicle, and a knitting bag.

Hey, me? I’m not some conehead filling up space with crap. I’m an aesthetic!

I used to feel smug about my vegetarianism, until I realized it’s easy for me not to eat meat. I think the same just might be true about how lightly I live in the world: I’m not confronted with gorgeous crap I want, so I should hardly get points for not buying it.

They say it’s easier to be a renunciate than a householder. I suspect I’m beginning to understand why.

In which I comment on the anti-abortion situation.

Last week, I read an article about a man who wants the State of Texas to pay women $500 to put unwanted babies up for adoption rather than have abortions.

Because it’s soooo constitutional for states to buy human beings.

Today while I was opening the mail at work, I noticed that one of our customers has return address labels that read Pray to stop abortion (in an irritatingly cutesy, child-like pseudo-handwritten font) below an image of a beautiful, chubby Gerber-style baby.

Oh, for FUCK’S SAKE! Normally I’m pretty quiet about the abortion thing because as long as it’s legal I’m content to keep my mouth shut — and folks who can’t see that we’re eventually going to have more people than resources aren’t worth arguing with anyway — because it’s so very personal. I respect the sanctity of life and the difficult feelings abortion causes, blah blah blah, but a being needs first to possess a life before its sanctity can be protected. And a zygote is not a person. [How do I know this? I just do. Just take my word for it.]

1. It costs far more than $500 for your average human woman to carry a baby to term and deliver it. Paying someone $500 to give birth to a child they don’t want is so insultingly stupid that I start to sputter indignantly whenever I try to talk about it.
2. Sadly, there are women out there who regularly use surgical abortion as contraception. Those bitches, believe you me, will have no problem taking $500 from the state and then delivering a crack baby into the arms of the System to suffer indefinitely.
3. Wouldn’t it be better to pray for the babies who are already here and starving instead of hoping for more unwanted, starving babies struggling through addiction-at-birth, DHS, and foster care?

To the genius who wants to convert Texas’ 75,000 annual abortions into up to 75,000 additional live births, I ask this: How much were you planning on budgeting for DHS to process all those state-owned orphans? Babies generally need to be white, pudgy, and healthy to get adopted as infants (unless Angelina’s adoptions have truly popularized adoptions of brown babies). Persons who are not adopted as infants have a likelihood of adoption that drops exponentially every hour they’re alive. In other words, it costs a lot of money to raise children, and they ain’t small and helpless and cute forever so you can safely expect them to end up costing the state money at some point or another.

I think I’d like have a bumper sticker that reads:

If we could just get the church to quit saying that life starts at conception and move the moment instead to the second or third trimester, we’d be headed down a road of possible sustainability. As it is, we’re gonna cover the world with concrete in another hundred or two generations, which is totally, like, not nice at all to the children of the children of the children of the babies that Texas wants to purchase!

Don’t even get me started on the world’s apparent disinterest in a real space program. Any creature too stupid to leave an open cage when all the food is gone probably deserves to die anyway.