Be Careful What You Wish For
If you turn on your television set and attempt to watch a program you’ll be bombarded with commercials. There are an enormous amount of them. Many have catchy jingles and are trying to invoke some sort of change, or hope that if you see it enough times it will fill a void deep inside you, making you feel you have to buy their product. They’re the grown up equivalent of your mother telling you to clean your room. Hear it enough times and you will do it.
One true classic, and my personal favorite, is by Disney. The chorus sings “When You Wish Upon A Star” as Cinderella waves her magic wand and stars encircle her. Starting from childhood, people begin wishing for the strangest things, and as we get older they just get a little stranger.
How many times have you seen the Lotto Jackpot rise to an enormous amount, only to have you wishing it was you who hit, dreaming of how you would spend your newfound fortune. However, how many times have you seen on T.V. those Lotto winners in far more trouble now than when they were just your average Joe’s and Jane’s?
There is also the people who wish they could lose weight even though their significant other wishes they kept it. They get risky surgeries only to wind up with horrific problems. We’ve all heard the stories, and we still wish we could lipo it all away.
Let’s not forget the car we wished for to impress the ladies. However, after buying it and making payments, we wished we had our old car back because you are afraid to park the new one in the street. Let’s not leave out the fad-diet nightmares either. If you actually read the labels on some of these foodstuffs you know what I’m referring to. I swear to you, one label actually read, “may cause sudden uncontrolled anal leakage.” Read that once more, and ask yourself if you factored that in while wishing to lose weight. You might be thinner, and yes, you might fit better in a size smaller, but I guarantee you, your friends are going to call you, “Suzie Skid Mark” each and every time you leave the room.
Also, the people wishing for hair that nature never intended them to have. You look into the next isle and see someone with a box in their hand with your color hair on it, wishing it was theirs. Maybe we should just all wake up in the morning and say, “this is what I have, this is how I am staying,” and actually be content with what we have in our lives.
As for me, here’s one instance I vividly remember prior to being a cage dweller. I was enjoying a summers day in my backyard, good food on the grill, my pool filled with clear water, when both of my beepers started going off (yes, I have been locked up since beepers). My twenty-five pound cell phone was ringing and my house phone chimed in shortly thereafter. Then my friends appeared unannounced to go swimming, and, of course, the dog started barking at a squirrel.
I turned around and said, “I wished I had no ringing phones, no one knocking at my door, and no one to bother me, including the dog and those pesky squirrels.” Now writing this missive from my prison cell, it’s dawned on me I should have been a lot more careful what I wished for.