November 04, 2004 - 12:12 PM

This Is My Fantasy, This Is My Reality

I have 3 children. 2 girls, 1 boy. I found that it's a lot more fun naming girls than it is naming boys. How about you? The oldest I named Alison Emma; the second child I named Clara Sophia; and the youngest is Sean Philip. Yeah yeah, the last two I used my sister and brother's names...but I think they are great names, and the people they come from are cool to boot, so it works.

Originally, I had wanted to name one of the girls Cassiopeia or Cassandra or Andromeda. Then you could call her Cassie or Andy, which is sassy and spunky. But the full names would be a bit unwieldy and such a pain in the butt for them to learn how to spell. I also love the name Audrey, but I'm reserving that for the future family cat. You know, sort've an homage to Audrey Hepburn and her feline-like grace and features.

Oh, maybe I should point out that these kids are virtual, and they are the result of my virtual marriage within the baseball computer game that I've been playing. I was able to create myself as a manger within the game, and I've been managing the Boston Red Sox for the past 8 years (5 World Series rings! And I just signed a new 4 year contract at $5 million+ per). Me and the wifey might go for another child in a year or two, but right now, we're just trying to raise a 5, a 3, and a 1 year old. I feel badly that I'm on the road so much, away from my family, during the season, but I do try to bring them along with me when I can, and I devote all my time to them during the off-season. I'll definitely be there for them when they start school and organized sports, and I hope my son picks up baseball. Maybe when he graduates from high school or college, he'll have developed into a prospect that my team can draft.

Speaking of fantasy, I was rolling around the idea in my brain of what I would do if I won the lottery. It's not a fantasy that I normally play with, but I was realllly bored while stuck in traffic on some runs, and I was thinking about Matt and Sharon buying a house and Soph and Gee looking to buy one in the near future. So, I was thinking, if I won a $25 million dollar lottery, first of all, i wouldn't do the lump-sum thing...I'd take the 25 yearly installments (because there'd be less tax taken out, and it'd be like a superhuge paycheck every year, so I wouldn't have to worry about "how much did I earn this year?"; I could earn whatever I earned, doing whatever I wanted, and then be pleasantly surprised with this big bonus in addition to my earnings).

I'd get 625,000 the first year, and each year thereafter, I'd get 25,000 more on top of the previous year's payout. Taxes would take away, like, half of the payout, but still, 300,000+ each year coming to you for doing jack squat is pretty sweet. Now, I have no idea how to spend 300,000 dollars every year, nor would I want to. I'd have to talk to Phil, get his financial planning advice, because I'd obviously want to invest what I don't spend.

I think the first year, I'd drop at least 100,000 on Soph and Gee to get them on the way to buying a house. I don't know what the market is like around Boston, but I'm pretty sure that it's expensive. And I'd set aside a sizeable chunk of money each year to help pay off their mortgage. When I returned to the office from one of my runs, I had to do a little research on how mortgages/house buying works since I had very little idea (a realization that came into stark relief when Matt and Sharon were spewing out house-buying-jargon at me, leaving me squatting in my own ignorance. and crapulence), so I went to this ever helpful resource, How Stuff Works, which I stumbled across while bored out of my skull a few years ago at work (I had scoured all the usual websites that I surf through; with nothing else to do, I decided to look for a site that could explain how watts and electrical currents work by typing in random words with a dot.com at the end to see what popped up...surprisingly, howthingswork.com actually existed and redirected to this website).

It looks like I could fairly easily buy a house and pay it off in 5 or 10 years, especially with the non-super-spendy lifestyle that I live. So, in addition to helping my sister by a house, I could buy a house or two in not-too-expensive places as investments...buy them, pay them off, own them, then sell them. But dude, that would be so boring. And to be a multiple homeowner, and have to deal with renting the houses out to other people...I'm just too lazy for that. Maybe I could get one of my more financially savvy cousins to do that for me.

Then I was thinking of buying Nick a new car and Tony too if he wants one; and donating lots of money to CAPAY; and setting aside money to help Phil and Jen buy a home when they decide to settle down in Connecticut.

Should I buy a house for myself? It'd be pretty empty and kind of lonely...maybe I could buy a house and have Nick and LDBL and Mer live there with me. Rent free for them, of course. I could buy some recording equipment and have a small studio in the den to muck around in, finally be able to do my own projects without having to go to an oustide studio, get that little personal career going.

And buying a house would mean I've settled down in L.A., wouldn't it? Something that I thought about while driving on the freeway last night. The sun was gone by the time I left work at 6 PM, a new sensation what with Daylight Savings having pushed the hours of darkness ahead just this past weekend. Erin McKeown's Distillation was in the CD player, and the quiet desperation that comes with winter and its memories of cold New England nights alone crept through my body. My mind tried to calm my emotions down, with little success, and pangs kept popping up in my stomach and heart.

And I looked up, in a bit of a daze. I drove past an exit sign and my eyes couldn't focus on the words. The darkness hid the concrete cairns and steel landmarks in shadow. For a moment, I was driving on a foreign highway. Then, a familiar curve in the road, a familiar bridge. Just by the feeling of turning into that curve and hitting that seam in the road, I knew that it was two more exits until I hit home. I realized that I was driving by internal navigation. I'd been doing it unconsciously a lot the past few days, but now I recognized that the layout of my regular roads and routes was ingrained in me.

It felt like driving along Route 22 in the early morning, before dawn, to get to my high school, or driving back home after a late afternoon's volleyball practice, or a rehearsal for the school musical, or a deadline meeting scrum for the school newspaper. I could do that drive with my eyes closed. And there was always that bubble of yearning and desperation and anxiety and melancholy, straining to burst in my gut while I drove. This was familiar, this was home, this was where I was resignedly settled.

That was the same feeling in my bones last night. I am now "of L.A." This is where I live. This is now "home."

Night driving. It makes me sad.

*********
News on a live-action Transformers movie. It's real, not a fantasy like the rest of this entry!

Now Listening To : Dave Matthews Band-Crash
Random Thought : New Star Wars trailer...and Anakin looks like Frodo, don't you think?

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