Please, please be good!

When your routine is pretty dull and your outlook is bleak, you find ways to perk things up.  In a preview of retirement, my daily perk has become the age-old routine of going to check the mail.  Even though the mail is slowly going the way the dinosaur, and nothing important is on its way(that I know of) there is anticipation and hope that are built each day as I approach the post office; although the anticipation is usually dashed once that magical box is opened.  Although I am old enough to remember correspondence such as letters or cards to be a regular part of mail, I don't expect them anymore.  I am not expecting great opportunity to be presented either.  The reason, I think, that I anticipate the mail is that deep down I expect it to deliver a proverbial fulfillment of a financial wish; somehow a mysterious cheque or a notice of unexpected money being sent my way.  I don't know why I believe this, I know why I want this, but I've never experienced money appearing from nowhere before.  I'm Charlie Bucket before I open that box; uttering in my mind, "Please be good!"  I always hear about people that have that sort of thing happen to them; needing money and having it fall in their lap.  As I write this, I realize how foolish and insane such a notion sounds, but people do it all the time.  Take for instance lottery tickets.  The odds of winning on lottery tickets are insane; not many people personally know someone who wins, let alone win themselves, yet people by.  Come to think of it, people who I know that buy regular tickets often say that they do it for something to do, much like I am in my daily stroll to the post office; perhaps they are connected.  This notion that our financial woes are going to be wiped clean in a moment must either stem from our laziness and unwillingness to pay for our financial choices, be dreamed out of our exposure to fairy-tale media, or perhaps a product out of our unwillingness to trust that everything will be alright in the end; I'm sure I probably fall into a mixture of all three.  Perhaps it would be better for my self if I perked my daily routine with something productive like a garden, then my trip would actually have daily progress and not the utter daily collapse of hope in an obscure, all-in-one payoff.  Boredom makes the mundane interesting and causes one to over-analyze everything.