If I had a million dollars

Maybe a nice Chesterfield, or an ottoman …

(Chesterfields are generally insanely uncomfortable and I don’t know why anyone would want to sit in one.)

Anyway, the lotto’s up over half a billion bucks again and I’ve been letting my mind wander, because that’s actually what you’re doing when you buy two lotto tickets: you’re buying the ability to pretend for a couple of days that you’re about to be rich for that $10 or whatever you spent. I’m sure I’ve said this in this space before: I have known for years that if I were ever to come into a lot of money the first thing I would do with it is pay off the student loans of damn near every single person I’ve ever met. I’d have to figure out a way to do it without everyone taking on some sort of massive tax burden but that’s what lawyers are for.

Next step: large education-related donations. Hogwarts is gonna have to name something after me and so is the district I work for, although I’d have to come up with very strict conditions about how the gift to the district I work for would be used because I’ve seen how these people act with grants and I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them. That said, we’ve got some buildings that need some renovations. If I’ve got half a billion bucks I can afford to renovate a couple of them.

A new house and a new car are possibilities but not guaranteed. I’m pretty happy with our house, and millions of dollars would provide plenty of funding to fix the couple of things that aren’t perfect. We don’t need a bigger place and I like our neighborhood; that said, I might be willing to pony up for a place with a flood-proof basement with lots of wall space that I could turn into a huge library. There are bookshelves on every wall in this place as is; if we run out of room, that will be why. I’m not about to move into a mansion or anything but if I could find a house with room for all of my books until I die that’d be great.

If I were to upgrade my car it would be to buy a hybrid of some sort. I like my Kia Soul a lot and you could literally give me a billion dollars and I still wouldn’t end up buying a sports car. I’m just not interested.

Writing a single check to pay off the rest of my student loans would put me on Cloud Nine for weeks.

I would keep working, but I would probably not keep my current job. Honestly I’d probably end up setting up a family charitable foundation with a large portion of the money that was left; running that could become my job easily enough, and I’m sure I could find a way to keep busy giving a couple million a year in charitable donations.

I have spent a few minutes trying to think of some single outlandish purchase that I’d be almost guaranteed to make, and believe it or not I can’t come up with one. I am materialistic in certain ways– I have thousands of books and a huge music collection and thousands of comic books– but, like, our TV is mid-sized at best and we just don’t really do expensive stuff around here, and I pretty much buy whatever books and music I want without paying attention to the cost already. Becoming a multimillionaire wouldn’t really add much to how much I spend on those things. I’d probably end up with four times as much computer and four times as much laptop as I needed, but that’s all I can think of. Flying lessons, maybe. How expensive are those? I really have no idea.

What about you?