Gah.

I just got home from having a great time talking on a patio, sipping tea, with a friend. It was nice to be in the shade, away from the heat of the sun, with a slight breeze.

On my way home, I stopped at a gas station after remembering I was running on empty. I went into the station to talk to a clerk and on the way out a guy asked me for some money for dog food. I explained that I only had my card and no cash, and continued to keep walking. He shouted out to me, 'Fine, fuck you. Go back to the rich world you crawled out of.'

Umm, ok. What? How the hell can he judge me like that without even knowing me?! Then I realized that I may put off the persona that I do have money. I drive a new Subaru, I have nice clothes on{even though the jeans were $4 and the shirt $3!}, a little bit of make-up. But at the same time, who is he to judge that I am rich or that I came from a rich family? Because I most definitely didn't!

I saw two sides of the spectrum most of my life growing up with divorced parents: living with one parent that survived on food stamps and lived paycheck to paycheck as a recovering alcoholic, and another parent who worked many hours and still barely scraped by. Granted, once I was in my teens one of my parents started to make more money, but we were by no means rich. I still shopped at thrift stores, I still only had $5 a week for an allowance that I worked for, I didn't get a TV in my room, and I didn't even have a cell phone until I was 15, which is almost unheard of these days!

Sometimes I do feel like I'm living a life that's not my own, like my mind hasn't caught up to it yet. Am I really that person that is fortunate enough to own so many expensive things? I never owned anything as a kid that I have right now, and sometimes I think it's a joke. No one in my family drove a new car, we didn't have bikes worth thousands of dollars, we didn't have top of the line TV's, or even average TV's. We couldn't afford that stuff, so it still seems unreal to me that I have that stuff, and that I can actually afford it.

Could this guy who's asking people for money for dog food been as successful as me? Maybe, I don't know. I do know that I could have become exactly like this guy with the childhood that I had, but I didn't. I don't have to worry if I will be evicted this month because I don't have rent, or if my car won't start in the morning like I did as a kid. I've set up my life so that I don't have to worry about that kind of stuff, and I'm proud that I've been as successful as I am.

Gosh, I feel like none of this makes any sense, like I'm just rambling! I don't know what I'm trying to say here, so I guess I'll just end it here? I guess what I'm trying to say is that I know I'm fortunate, that I don't think of myself as rich and that I actually give quite a bit of my money to the less fortunate, and that this guy in a jerk? I don't know.