When I was a kid I read a book (I think it was one of those Judy Blume novels where the greatest ambition of any girls’s life is to get her period - gotta love ‘em), where the main character’s mom was perpetually entering competitions. Yknow, the kind of lucky-draw/ call-in-and-stand-a-chance-to-win/ write-a-jingle-for-this-product competition? As I recall the main character’s family’s TV set had been won through one of these competitions. This obviously impressed me somehow, because that’s the only thing I can remember of the entire book.
I mention this because I want to explain my newest preoccupation (I don’t have interests, I have preoccupations, I’m a child of the ‘90s). It all started when I won my wallet from Poketo. That was the first competition I’d ever entered, and it all seemed too fantastically easy: write a nonsensical haiku, get mailed a pretty wallet from
(My mom, when I told her I’d won a wallet: Are you kidding? I can’t believe someone from this family has actually won something! I chose to ignore the backhandedness of that compliment.)
A couple of weeks ago I was taking a swig of milk from the fridge (to digress – I swear full cream milk was designed by the gods expressly for the pleasure of the human tongue) and I noticed, while my tongue went to heaven, a little yellow sticker on the bottle cap that I’d not seen before. It said that Magnolia was having a lucky draw, and if I was so inclined as to mail them that very bottle cap, I might be the lucky winner of attractive cash prizes. The first prize was $25 000, the second was $15 000, the third was $5 000, and fifty runner-ups would each get $100.
I stood there for a while savouring the milk and calculating. 25 000 bucks is a shitload of money for mailing somebody a bottle cap. So is 15 000. And 5 000. Heck, even a hundred dollars would be welcome. 53 winners, one of whom might be me. How many Singaporeans would haul their lazy asses to the postbox for this? I considered. People are so lazy, yknow! In the end I optimistically pegged it at around 200. 53 out of 200! I had more than a 1 in 4 chance! Never before have I been so thrilled by statistics. I finally grasped the appeal of gambling. I wrote my particulars down on a scrap of paper and mailed that bottle cap off the next day.
It was so exciting.
For the rest of the day I kept thinking of myself as a potential winner. I felt like I had planted a seed and if the conditions were right all that potential would grow into a pretty little tree, sprouting hundred dollar notes. Then I figured why just plant one seed, why not plant a whole bunch of them? Like those green bean experiments we used to do with the wet cotton wool? I used to love that. I was so fucking proud of the little buggers growing away all by themselves.
So I’ve decided that for the next 4 months I am going to be a professional freelance competition- enterer. I hereby make a pact with myself to enter any and every competition I possibly can. No matter how obscure! No matter how undignified! I’m not gainfully employed anyway, so how else will I get my hands on cash? And it’s the perfect occupation for me. It corresponds exactly with my results for all those career-guidance exercises we did in school: flexible hours, room for creativity, fast-paced and ever-changing environment, lack of authority figure to report to, minimal effort and maximum payoff. What I want to know is why no career counselor ever pointed me in this direction in the first place. Instead I kept getting stupid careers like artist and whatnot, jobs that have prerequisites like talent that I unfortunately lack. It also appeals to my love-hate relationship with the concept of destiny, which I apply to everything. If I don’t win, I think, but of course you didn’t win, realistically speaking the statistics were stacked against you, it’s all a matter of probability, remember what you learned in KI. Then I feel world-weary and wise. If I do win, I think, omg of course I won! I knew it! I’m blessed! It’s fate! Then I feel like someone up there likes me, like some omnipotent being has written a story and I’m the hero.
Also, I think, it’s good to embrace more hope in this cynical post-modern, post-Beckett, post-Radiohead emotional landscape. Good for the soul and all that. If I win something, it’ll be a triumph of optimism in the face of pessimism. A big victory in the spiritual war that we as a society are fighting. People will stop killing each other and stealing from each other and start believing again. And what is $25 000 compared to the gift of hope? Isn’t that the most important prize of all?
Isn’t it, though?
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