Other people fantasize about winning the lottery

I complain a lot about being a Velveteen Rabbit, someone not quite real who doesn't have a real life.

Psycho bitch JK Rowling who desperately needs to STFU about trans anything wrote about a fictional character, Harry Potter, who strikes me as an animus figure -- a symbolic representation of her male or career self -- who becomes overnight rich and famous. And then Rowling became overnight rich and famous.

She tells stories about writing in a coffee shop or eatery owned by friends or something while her baby slept in the stroller and joking that someday she'll be famous and then they will get business for letting her sit there.

On the one hand, maybe she felt or had reason to think she was doing something special and that was a reasonable prediction. On the other hand, we don't know how many other people have made similar jokes and not gotten famous.

I was one of the top three students of my graduating class and I won a National Merit Scholarship to one of the two biggest universities in my home state. I turned down the scholarship, took two years of classes at the local college and dropped out and was a full-time homemaker and mom for years.

At age thirty, a longtime friend of the family said to me "What the hell happened? Everyone thought you were going to be a millionaire by age thirty!"

I also have a long history of making a splash wherever I go, such as being asked to be lead moderator for The TAG Project and member of the board after volunteering to moderate just their homeschooling list and accidentally founding a subforum on Cyburbia and becoming a moderator there after asking the forum owner to read my college class fictional proposal and give me feedback on whether or not it was a good fictional proposal for a class exercise and his feedback was something like "I will need a few days before I can make that happen."

But it's never led to meaningful career success or money, so while other people buy lottery tickets and fantasize about how they will spend their winnings, I imagine that someday I shall experience success in line with what the world once expected of me and fantasize about what a social debacle that will be and how to handle the fallout.

Contrary to fantasies of winning the lottery and spending the money on fun, gun, fun, actually winning the lottery tends to be all kinds of stupid disastrous drama. So I always wonder what success will entail of the "Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it." variety.

I also tend to attract accomplished, respected men, like urban planners, lawyers, self-made millionaires and pillars of the community. I write somewhat often about how this is a problem because it feels like a threat to my desire to have a real career and money of my own.

For the first time ever, these themes my mind comes back to over and over collided recently and I had the following thoughts:

Although I've known a series of men online and felt those were serious relationships that could have led to marriage, those were extraordinarily private relationships precisely because I knew them online.

It's been over forty years since I was dating anyone in meat space in a way where people might see us together at a restaurant or holding hands in public.

I had exactly ONE serious dating relationship in my teens where we had that kind of public presence and I married him when I was nineteen. We were married for twenty-two years and -- except for online relationships that make me feel like a Velveteen Rabbit and not real -- I've been alone since he moved out.

I like my privacy and I have high standards for expectations of manners from other people and they almost never live up to those expectations.

If I ever have any success and/or date anyone in any way "prominent" in some sense, I imagine this will be a shit show. Because if people get up in my business because he's somebody or, heaven forbid, stick a microphone in my face and ask invasive questions about my personal life because of who he is, I'm likely to be losing my religion.

You saw me have dinner with the man and you want to know WHAT?????? I don't even know you!

I wonder can I get rich and stay a nobody no one's ever heard of? 

By BLOGGING which requires a huge audience to make ANY money. Or selling clothes which is basically the same.

No, probably not.

And it's too late to quietly invest in stocks and be the millionaire next door everyone THINKS has no money. Unless I want to be like ninety when I'm allowed to have a life.

I don't like being impolite. That bothers me.

But it doesn't mean I'm a doormat.

If I get rich and famous and you're a reporter and it is your goal to be publicly dragged and humiliated and blacklisted from future press conferences, I guess this post constitutes a cheat sheet on how to get exactly what you want.