Wishes

Every time I open a pack of cigarettes (which I'm doing waaay too often right now) I take out a cigarette, turn it upside down and put it back in. Then I smoke it last and make a wish. Usually, actually, I don't really bother with the wish, or I wish something dumb and facetious, like, "Hope I don't get cancer!" Ha ha. Cigarettes are funny! They kill you slowly! Today, though, I went to smoke my wish cigarette and I seriously considered my wish options. "I hope it all works out," I thought "I wish that things work out." Then I thought, well, you should probably be more specific and anyway, things do work out. Time goes on and things change and they dig up all of downtown Asheville and so on; jobs change and houses and everything, in a way, kind of works out. Or at least gets submerged in time. It just doesn't usually really work out to one's satisfaction, you know, in the way that evil gets punished and the righteous or at least the heroine, in this case me, rides off into the sunset with the cute guy.

Thus I realized that this was a dumb and impossible wish and I had damn well better wish for something concrete instead. So I wished for a purse that doesn't slide off my shoulder constantly. I even, at one point in my life, fantasized briefly about having surgery to put a small hook on my shoulder bone to hold a purse in place. Anyone who has ever been holding a cardboard cup of coffee in one hand and a bunch of other things in the other hand and had her purse whump down off her shoulder onto her forearm, thus spilling the coffee, will sympathize. A purse that stays on my shoulder; yes, that's what I'm wishing for.

Unfortunately I might as well wish for things to work out, because I think the odds are similar.