M Wants a Laser Pointer and I'm Rich

M wants a laser pointer. Not just your usual cheapie small laser pointer but a big exotic fancy expensive one, the kind you use to burn out people's eyes and take down passing aircraft. At least I'm assuming that's why he wants one. Being a 13 year old boy and all, M is usually interested in things for their potential destructiveness quotient, particularly if they can be used to create spectacularly large explosions. I am balking on the purchase of this item, though. I don't see spending $50 on a laser pointer; the kid is not presenting slide lectures on the iconography of Byzantine icons, after all. I remember when laser pointers were rare and new items, back in the hallowed 90s. My boss bought one - it cost around $100 - for the museum where I worked and than worried horribly that some visiting lecturer would absent mindedly pocket it. She came up with the brilliant idea of putting a big key ring on it, like something you'd used to open a gas station bathroom. I almost let her do it - I was entranced by the vision of a scholar attempting to point out the finer detail in a medieval patron portrait on the wing of some altarpiece while wrestling with a laser pointer attached to an 8" solid hunk of wood, preferably painted in yellow with the words Joe's Exxon - but good sense won out and we talked her out of it.

Other than that, I have nothing new to report. The weather got warm, got cold, rained, shone, wild wind - as is pretty normal for March, global warming notwithstanding. I worked all week and am still not sure that this job was a good career move for me - I'm inclining to the theory of not, not at all, but you never know. And, I became rich.

Yes, I am rich. My tax refund was, for some weird inexplicable reason, about twice what it has ever been before. I am a little afraid. And, on top of that, the house that I used to own with my exhusband in Baltimore, the unsaleable one that was foreclosed on, apparently was sold at auction 18 months ago and ended up netting me $1500. This is all miraculous and bizarre, and although all the roughly $4000, more than I may have ever had in the bank before, is earmarked for various purposes, I have this definite yearning to quit my job and fly to Europe. Or do nothing for 3 months. But I know already what will happen: $2500 will go to buy A a car when she graduates from college in May; $1000 will send M to Quaker camp for two weeks this summer (although he doesn't want to go and is screaming bloody murder); $600 will pay off the bankruptcy lawyer; $760 is my rent for April, and so, you see, it's not only gone, but so is half of my next paycheck. Damn. I am, however, going to go out and buy a new purse. But not a laser pointer.

M goes back to school tomorrow, sigh. It's always such a mixed feeling: I miss him, but I know it's good for him to be there.