WINNING IS EVERYTHING

I don't know who would want to read my own pontifications on a regular basis, but I'm willing to keep a diary online if it, at the least, doesn't harm anyone. I am sitting at my freelance job with lots of time to kill and have already entered all the online sweepstakes I can find. I'm hoping to get a new car, and since I am a freelancer (as I mentioned), I would love to get one for nothing. Not that winning prizes costs nothing. It is an odd trap, really. First you are smitten with the idea that you can somehow get something for nothing. Then you start putting in the time it takes to enter contests. Soon you are spending hours online, typing in your name and address in the hope that you will win a transformational prize like an auto or a trip to Europe. After all, time is money. If you're going to spend all that time the reward had better justify the expenditure. As time goes by, and you don't win a house or speedboat, you begin to enter contests for tiny prizes like pencils and bags of peanuts — and you do it with a gusto you once reserved for large cash jackpots. Oddly, the bags of nuts mollify sufficiently to make you spend another two hours online the next day, doing the same thing, praying for another legume win. At this point, if I don't enter at least ten contest a day I feel like I'm losing out on something. I know what I'm really losing out on is my life, or at least the portion I could be enjoying otherwise if I wasn't typing my name into little boxes all day. There is no free lunch