Lottery Tickets: Desperation or Addiction?

In this case I think it is a case of desperation. Here's what my father and I discovered a couple days ago.

My parents own a few homes that they rent out, and especially during this current economy we've had to evict several people...many in the past 6 months. Well, when people get evicted, many leave lots of belongings behind. Some do it out of anger, and some just can't afford to take EVERYTHING with them. One of the tenants that was evicted recently was in dire straits. The lady was completely broke with two kids and a husband with a mental disorder that was receiving disability checks. My father was lenient and gave them many chances to pay their rent, and eventually had no choice but to evict them, as it was hurting him financially having them not paying.

A couple days ago, I went with my father to clean out the house. A couple hours in, he calls me over and shows me a Timberland shoe box and tells me to guess what's in it. I, of course, just thought there must have been some brand new shoes in there or something that they had left behind. Nope. He opens it and I see lots and lots and LOTS of slips of paper in it. Initially, I had no idea what they were, but I took a closer look and realized they were lottery tickets. A shoe box FULL of purchased lottery tickets! This is what it looked like:

We were in such disbelief, amazed and just in awe. We thought okay, these MUST be over a couple years worth of lottery ticket purchases. Not even close. They were between the months of May and July. Three months worth of lottery tickets that filled up that shoe box. Of course, me being the curious person that I am, I just HAD to take it home and count it all and see how much was spent on these lottery tickets. And so I did. It took about 3 hours to count and calculate, but doing it in front of the TV made it seem like nothing. Plus just wanting to know the total cost just drove me to do it faster. lol Anyway, the grand total was (drum roll please)....

$4250. 

Yes, four thousand two hundred fifty U.S. dollars. lol in a 3-month time period. That would be about 7 months of rent for them right there. We just couldn't believe it. These people were just so desperate for money that they spent pretty much all they had on lottery tickets. I was baffled, amazed and at the same time saddened by this. Although I'm sure these people knew deep down inside that they were running a fool's errand spending all this money on lottery tickets, I can see how when you're looking at a bank account with very limited resources, and your dreams, hopes and goals are unlimited, you feel a real sense of helplessness when you don't have the means to make anything significant happen for you and your family. So even though the odds of winning are one in a gazillion, you hang on to the hope that it may soon be your chance to come out on top.

The next day I did a bit of research and found out that on average poor people spend about 10% of their yearly income on lottery tickets. Then I found out that some states are trying to get rid of the lottery, especially the jackpot ones, because it just ends up hurting the poor. The poor are the ones who spend the most on lottery tickets, and the state governments receive about an average of 30% taxes on the lottery tickets sold and many times it's not spent on the people who need it the most: the poor communities. Instead of the states promoting the lottery as a way to profit without working and rather than encouraging people to spend their money on a long-shot chance of winning millions, they should promote investing in job training and educational opportunities - things that would help people get out of poverty in the long run.

But hey, many things sound great on paper, but will never see the light of day.

How I'm Living

Soooo...since July 1st, our house has been under construction. I feel like I'm in one looooong HGTV home makeover episode. (By the way, I used to really not like that channel, and now I'm obsessed. Oh and for the record, I love David Bromstad. Too bad he doesn't like the ladies. Good thing I love his style, though! lol) We started building a bathroom in the living room area (since oddly there never was one), putting down hardwood flooring in the living room, new bathroom, dining room, and hallway, and also redecorating the bathroom in the bedroom area. We've pretty much finished the new bathroom, except for the hardwood flooring and installing the fixtures. The other bathroom has been painted but we haven't picked out new decorations for it. Right now, the brunt of the work is the hardwood flooring. My father is SERIOUSLY a true Mr. Fix-It. He can fix, make, install, build anything. I am learning a lot while helping him. Here are some pictures from Day 1 till now. :)

House Renovation

When It Hits, You Feel No Pain

That's one good thing about music...as Bob Marley pointed out. :) As many may know, I am a music fiend and am always on the hunt for good music, and what makes it even more fun for me is that I love pretty much ALL KINDS of music. Literally. So I decided to take some down time and compile some (okay...MANY) songs that have been on rotation for me lately. Enjoy! :)

Nas & Damian Marley - Tribal Wars (ft. K'Naan)

Two of my favorite artists came out with an album that I'd been anticipating for a long time. This is one of my favorite songs featuring another one of my favorite artists, K'Naan.

Macy Gray - Beauty in the World

I enjoy unique, innovative artists and I think Macy Gray is one of them. This is currently one of my favorite songs...it's just makes me so happy when I hear it! :)

Sia - My Love

Sia is a talented soulful jazz/pop singer from Australia. This song is from the movie Twilight: Eclipse (which I try not think about lol) and is such a peaceful, haunting, beautiful song that evokes lots of emotion. I've been listening to it many nights before bed.

Ali "Farka" Toure & Toumani Diabate - Ai Ga Bani

I absolutely love listening to music from all around the world, and of course Africa is one that I really enjoy exploring. These two artists from Mali are two of the most well-known musicians in Africa. Farka plays guitar and Diabate plays the Kora, a lute similar to one originating in Ethiopia.

Corporate Love Breakdown - High and Dry (Bluegrass Tribute to Radiohead)

Not many people know this about, but I actually really like bluegrass music. I also like Radiohead. Corporate Love Breakdown does a really amazing job of covering this song. I love instrumentals.

John Legend & The Roots - Wake Up Everybody (ft. Melanie Fiona & Common)

This is a remake of one of my favorite songs by the legendary Teddy Pendergrass. It shows how some songs are timeless. Although I'm partial to the original, I'm really feeling this one. It's on repeat.

Broken Bells - The High Road

Broken Bells is an indie-rock band made up of Brian Burton (aka Danger Mouse aka one-half of Gnarls Barkley) and James Mercer, the lead vocalist of The Shins. When I found out these two were collaborating, I HAD to listen. I love the album, and this is one of my fave songs.

Bela Fleck ft. Oumou Sangare - Ah Ndiya

Bela Fleck is one of the most famous banjo players in America. In 2009, he traveled to Africa and filmed a documentary about the origins of the banjo. He subsequently released an album of his collaborations with African artists. This is one of them featuring Malian artist, Oumou Sangare...one of my faves. :)

Gorillaz - Melancholy Hill

I really enjoy the unique sound of the Gorillaz and their interesting collabos, but this is one of their more mellow/pop-ish songs and I like it. :)

Janelle Monae - Cold War

This is one dope chick and a breath of fresh air. She has made me a fan with her debut album.

Phoenix - Lisztomania

This is a song off of this French alternative rock band's 4th album. It's catchy and I'm sure many have heard it on trailers for movies that came out recently.

Seu Jorge - Burguesinha

Seu is a Brazilian musician and actor, most known for his role in City of God. I like Brazilian music and this song just makes me happy. :)

The Roots - The Day (ft. Blu, Phonte, & Patty Crash)

I love The Roots. Period. :)

Sharam ft. Kid Cudi - She Came Along

Sharam is one half of the DJ duo Deep Dish, and he collabos with Kid Cudi to make an interesting song sampling a Patsy Cline song. Pretty cool sounding.

 

Stay tuned for my August picks. ;)

WWJ....Okay, Nevermind. lol

Two posts in two days? And long ones at that? Well, sometimes I just feel the need to write. Trust me, this one is intriguing...if nothing else, amusing. 

Okay, so I'm not baggin on Christians, Christianity, religion, relgious people, conservatives or anything like that at all. It just happens to be that lately I'm running across news that relates to them. Soon after Germany got their second goal (ugh!), I pretty much stopped watching the game and started surfing the internet. I started reading random articles as I usually do – hopping from one thing to another. Then I ran into a somewhat amusing and baffling article.

The article was about a couple that started a “sin free” online sex toy shop geared toward Christians. They pray about things before they add them for sale on their site and base it on Song of Solomon. Another similar website says they “offer great prices on our Christian sex toys while keeping Jesus Christ at the center of it all.” I find this all just a bit funny because isn't a sex toy just a sex toy? What makes a sex toy Christian? The positive thing they advertise about these websites is that apparently they are “porn-free” environments, with no porno pop-up ads or anything like that. But I'm just curious, what constitutes “sin-free” sex toys as opposed to...well, that’s just it—as opposed to what? Sinful sex toys? And do they come in plain brown boxes with no images or directions on them that could be constituted as pornographic? 

After a bit of reading I discovered that apparently any sex toy can be “sin free” as long as it's used by a married couple. But also, how do they know if the people buying the products are married...or Christian for that matter. Do they check? Is there a special survey? Do you have to send in your marriage license? If they do not know if the people purchasing are married, then doesn't it completely defeat their purpose? Also, do they make their own sex toys? Highly unlikely. So then they must be buying them from sex toy manufacturers, who then must be sin-free, right? Right? lol I just hope they know that they're indirectly keeping the porn industry financially in the green, even though they appear to be demonizing it.

Yes, it must seem like I'm really bored to be writing about all this, but hey...I am always analyzing things, but sometimes I just do it for fun, and this was too interesting of a topic for me to just leave alone. lol

So back to the questions: Are they using Jesus to sell sex? Or, are they using sex to sell Jesus? Is this a really creative attempt to proselytize? Either way, I’m sure it’s a win-win situation—as long as you’re married, that is. I just hope that these people aren't jumping on the religion band wagon in order to make money, and I'd like to think they have good intentions.

By the way, about a week ago I saw a church and an adult bookstore on THE SAME BLOCK. Priceless. :)

To Mosque or Not to Mosque

Okay, so the “big news” going on locally (and by locally, I mean like a mile down from my house) is that an old rundown movie theater has been bought by the Islamic Center of Tennessee. They plan on making the spot an Islamic Community Center with a mosque, classrooms, meeting facilities and a possible cemetery among other things. 'So what? How is this big news?' is what some people might say. However since this happened, there has been major outrage and opposition with very intolerant and ignorant reasons for opposition, nasty comments being thrown around, and petitions being signed. I won't say what some have said, but it is very saddening to see how fearful, hateful and intolerant people can be of others who are different than they are.

What these people don't think about is how GOOD an Islamic center would be for the community. Where I live right now has become quite run down and more and more people are leaving and businesses are shutting down. There is also a large immigrant population here which is largely Muslim. Rather than have a lot of these young Muslim kids on the streets, possibly causing trouble and joining gangs (which I can so seeing happening here), wouldn't it be better that they spend time at the center where they will be doing GOOD things like charity work, studying, playing sports, learning in the classrooms, etc.? In the past 6 months, the Islamic Center has tried to open three centers around the Nashville area, and only one (in Murfreesboro, about 25 miles from me) has even been successful in buying the land and going forward with a proposal and design. Not without tons of opposition, though. A little while ago, their sign was vandalized.

And today, opponents in the area announced on the local news that they will be leading a protest march because “a mosque would pose a threat to the state's moral and political foundation.”

On a more level-headed note, a local man was quoted saying, “If America is ever going to be true to its words, then we must adhere to those words we claim to cherish. 'We the people' may be the beginning of the preamble of the constitution of the United States, but when that statement was first written and the document was complete, ‘We’ did not included ‘Me’. The same continues to be true each time we don’t consider others and fall into the comforts of only thinking about 'me'.”

Another said, “Many people who say they love America only want to focus on the good of America. We cling to our guns and religion like a 2^nd Amendment militias. If we are to celebrate our religious freedoms, then stop opposing the right to religious freedom. Just because someone doesn’t believe what you believe doesn’t give you the right to oppose them for wanting to lawfully and respectfully practice what they believe.

I soon became quite disturbed at how big of a deal this became here, and then it quickly dawned on me that I live in the Bible Belt. The Bible Belt is a commonly used term for the socially conservative, significantly evangelical Protestant area of the United States where there is high church-attendance. Now, just because this is the Bible Belt shouldn't excuse these recent events, but it helps me understand it. After all, a recent Gallup poll report listed Tennessee as the the 5th most religious state in the nation. I've heard a few well-known conservative (and mostly extremist) Christians making statements that categorize other religious groups as evil, degenerate, sub-human and/or hated by God. So this local outrage is not surprising. I very much realize that many of these peoples' views do not come from any mean-spiritedness or hatred. They follow logically from their very specific theological view, and are a natural result of the way in which they interpret the Bible. However, it gets really frustrating and sad when it starts to trickle into different aspects of society and government. On the other hand, I'm sure majority of these mosque opponents are just the vocal, far-right minority making a huge fuss. Either way, whatever happened to respecting one another? Oh and what about the Golden Rule of reciprocity: love your neighbor as yourself...which by the way is also in Islam.

Anyway, my wish is that more people would just open their eyes, reach out to their neighbor and get to know them. This helps to eliminate fear of the unknown, and hopefully will help people realize that ultimately we all want the same thing – love and acceptance.

Anti-BP Art

Like most people, I too am upset about the ongoing BP oil leak. I haven't thought about it in the past few days, but I saw this today and it gave me a laugh.

The Best Visual Jabs to Come From the Oil Spill 

Silly Me

It's funny how some things stay with you from childhood, such as habits, superstitions and scars. The ones that stand out the most in my mind are fears. As a child I was always so scared of three things: the dark, insects, and horror movies. As I got older I got less and less scared of those things, although I still prefer not to be in the dark or around bugs or watch scary movies. One silly thing that haunted me starting when I was a young teen has resurfaced now, though. When I was a young teen, even though I was absolutely scared of scary movies, I'd watch the silly slasher ones like Scream. (I've actually seen all three. lol) I'd only watch them because everyone at school did, and my brother loved to make me watch them. Anyway, in the movie 'I Still Know What You Did Last Summer', there was a scene that still bothers me to this day. After the killer is believed to be dead in the first movie, at the end of this sequel, the main character is sitting on her bed with her feet hanging off the edge, and the killer grabs her feet from under the bed and drags her under...and the screen goes black. And that was it! For some reason that scene has STILL stayed clear in my memory and if I am in a bedroom by myself at night, I will not sit on a bed with my feet on the floor without a wave of fear coming over me. Some nights I won't even walk close to my bed for fear of something grabbing me from underneath. If someone happens to be with me, then it won't bother me, and I also usually am able to talk myself out of being scared. But I mean..how silly am i? lol I know that nothing will be underneath the bed, so why be scared? But never say never, right? lol There COULD be a very, VERY small chance that that scene in the movie could be replicated in my life. Right? RIGHT? lol Who knows! It's just interesting to me how I've slightly outgrown my other fears, but this weird one comes back to haunt me every now and then.

I wonder what else from my childhood effects me to this day - good or bad. Hmm...

Mayday on May Day!

One of the headline news this past weekend, and even now, has been the flooding of Tennessee, Mississippi and parts of Kentucky, which has caused about 25 deaths and counting (I think two more bodies were just found as I am typing this). It started on Saturday, May 1 while I was out of town. I heard about everything from my parents as it was happening - the torrential, non-stop rain, which my mom described as "the heavens just completely opening up." lol Well the heavens dropped about 16-19 inches of rain in about 24 hours. On my way back on Sunday afternoon, I saw some of the devastation, but only the slightly affected areas as those were the streets that were drivable. Even that shocked me. What shocked me the most, however, was how 3 miles down from our house there was MAJOR flooding, where a portable classroom got detached from a school and was seen floating down the highway. Look below!

 
I live right off of Bell Rd.

Luckily and thankfully, except for a little water in our basement, our home was somehow okay, and our family was okay. Unfortunately, the basement in my aunt's home got completely flooded with about 10 inches of water. But it's nothing that my handyman dad can't fix (lol), which is what he did all day today. It's crazy though. So many businesses are shut down, so many people have been evacuated, Red Cross volunteers from everywhere are here as a state of emergency has been declared, we are facing possible clean water shortage as the city's only operational water treatment plant has been closed so we have been asked to conserve water, and many schools have been shut down among other things. The thing is, the city is preparing for more flooding as two of the largest rivers in the city of Nashville have been swelling and are over flooding levels. With news coverage on this devastation of Tennessee, Mississippi and parts of Kentucky on all day, I can't help but reminded of what I saw almost 5 years ago in Louisiana. Of course, we didn't have a hurricane and our damage is not as disastrous, but I still am reminded of it nonetheless, and can kinda relate to it as I have seen it with my own eyes. I just hope there are no more deaths and that all affected locations recover quickly...and that the rain expected on Friday is minimal.

Here are some photos of Nashville metropolitan area from today.
Nashville Flood Scenes