The Downside of Ambition

I had a not-so-good weekend. I knew there was a garage sale in my future, I just didn’t know it was going to be the immediate future. It’s this Saturday. (Of course I’m not sure the organizers are aware that there’s a 30% chance of rain – yesterday the weather people said rain and snow, so I’m glad they’ve downgraded it – but outdoor sales and rain don’t mix well together.)

Anyway, I had already started the purging process, but it kicked into high gear Saturday. I spent all weekend going through bins, digging in closets, emptying shelves, pawing through drawers and dragging huge, heavy trashbags out to the dumpster. However, if this is the junk in my house:

I----------------------------------------------------------------------------I

then this is what I got through this weekend:

I-I

It’s really depressing.

So last night, after visiting Dad in the assisted living place (which is also depressing), I just vegged – amid the stacks of emptied Rubbermaid bins and piles of stuff to be priced. I channel surfed…stopping for a bit to watch snippets of Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire (they were all so cute before they grew up), then saw the last fifteen minutes of Chopped (one of my all-time favorite shows - it's always fun to watch chefs try to make a meal out of rutabagas, Snickers bars, Kiwi fruit and rattlesnake meat) and finally settled in to watch Iron Man.

They’ve been offering Iron Man 2 on Pay-Per-View, but I didn’t really want to watch that until I had seen the first one. (It’s always good to do these things in order. I discovered this because I saw Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince before seeing Harry Potter & The Order of the Phoenix, and found out the hard way that they’d killed off Sirius Black in the earlier one. This was a horrible shock and I was very upset.)

After watching Iron Man, especially with the weekend I had, I’ve decided that being a super villain would just be too much work. I can hardly deal with five bedrooms and a garage sale. World domination would be way too much trouble. I mean you have to do all that planning, and you have to organize minions, and there are the costs associated with paying them and providing food and lodging…not to mention the inter-disciplinary disputes that would invariably break out amongst the terrorist factions. You’d need lots of equipment – especially tech stuff, which is not my strong suit. And, let’s face it, you have to have energy…lots and lots of energy, because it always ends up in a long, drawn-out fist-fight with the good guy (in Iron Man the fist fight was between two guys in mega-ultra-superpower-iron suits and there was a lot of collateral damage – which costs a lot of money to clean up and is very messy).

There’s only one advantage to being a super villain that I can think of. You never need to be polite. They just don’t expect you to be courteous as you’re blowing up people and decimating cities. This would have come in handy this morning when I opened my garage door to find a UTA Paratransit mini-bus blocking my driveway as the driver fiddled with paperwork. Instead of leveling the bus with a wrist-mounted sidewinder missile and then laughing maniacally, I had to walk up, tap on the door and ask the driver politely to move her bus.

With the mood I was in this morning, the first option would have been much more satisfying.


 Oh. P.S. Big-time secondary crush on Robert Downey, Jr. (If you know me at all, you’ll know who the big-time PRIMARY crush is on…but it’s always nice to have a fall-back position ready.)

for now,

Nedra