We rarely buy lottery tickets, maybe 3 times in the last 15 years. But today Marty texted: "Did u get us lottery tix today?"
We joked earlier in the week that we need to get tickets. So did millions of other Americans. The odds of winning are one in 292.2 million, according to the New York Times. To me, that's the exact same chance as "one in umpteen zillion." Our odds of winning are entirely fictitious. I am just as likely likely to run into Scooby Doo in Gotham City on the way to the Oscars. I replied to Marty:
"When is the drawing? Get them on your way home unless the drawing is tonight."
"It's tonight."
"For Pete's sake, how many?"
He wanted five. He asked me to do this because he knew I was working from home. This is the problem with working from home. People don't think you're working. I may be doing laundry, but I am also running spreadsheets while boss-ordained tasks crowd my day. The only difference in working from home versus working from the office is basically whether or not I shower, dress, and put on make-up. Today I did none of these but dress. I wore a 10-year old sweatshirt with a stain on the front, track pants, and fuzzy orange-striped slipper-socks. I had bed head. Sexy. Briefly I thought about changing clothes for my errand, or putting on mascara. Then I decided I didn't care. Nobody goes to the QualityMart except to buy gas, cigarettes or Red Bull, and at least one of them was bound to be less showered and more stained than me. I slipped a pair of blue floral clogs over my slipper-socks, and chose a wool coat suitable for church. On the 60-second drive to QM, I applied lip gloss that I found in the console. There. Now I was presentable.
I waited in line, and passed the time by trying to fluff out the flat spot in the back of my greasy hair. A guy asked me if I knew where the kerosene was. No. Why does he need kerosene? I felt like he might use it to burn felonious evidence in his creepy backyard. But his hair looked clean, which was more than I could say for myself.
I bought 5 machine-generated tickets, and 1 ticket with my own selection of numbers. I started with sacred number 4, and then combinations of numbers 2,3,5. These are my 3 lucky numbers - not alone, but in various combinations with each other. So much of my life involves mixtures of 2s 3s and sometimes 5s - the highways near my home town, the house I grew up in (before and after they changed the rural delivery number to a house number), former apartment numbers, phone numbers of loved ones, and my birthdate. It would be highly unlikely that the winning Powerball number would be 04-23-35-52-53-32 (one chance in umpteen zillion to be exact) but somebody's got to win so it might as well be me.
I texted Marty a picture of the numbers. He studied them. He didn't like them. He bought 5 more tickets on his way home from work after all.
The drawing isn't until 11:00 p.m., but I will miss it. I will be in bed, dreaming of Scooby and me frolicking together in Gotham City with my Oscar for Best Hair.
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