My friend Emilie has this great list of 101 things that she wants to do in the next 1001 days. I've tried to make my own list, but so far I'm stuck at number 54. I've stolen a few of her ideas, (since I seem to be slightly creatively challenged on my own) and this week I decided to put one of them into practice: pay for the person behind me in the drive-thru. Now, I'm not naturally generous. It's one of the many flaws of which I'm well aware - so when I decided to buy the person's coffee in the Starbuck's line behind me this past Wednesday, it was a huge stretch for me...especially since I was using a coveted gift card.
I pulled into the Starbucks line right around the corner from my school. For some reason I felt kind of nervous about the whole "sharing with others" thing - I think I was worried that the person behind me would order breakfast for their whole office and I'd end up paying $50.00 for coffee for complete strangers. I kept looking in my rear view mirror to see who would pull up behind me, and finally...of course, a completely tricked out Land Rover with chrome detailing driven by a fully made up woman on her i-phone. I'm not sure what happened inside me, but I just felt like I wasn't unselfish enough to buy coffee for someone in a $70,000 car. So I decided to wait...
So on Friday, I went back to Starbucks (I had a gift card so I figured I'd splurge on a second trip) completely determined to be unselfish this time and buy a coffee for the car behind me no matter what...and of course, no Land Rover this time...just a silver Mercedes convertible - the nice one (ok, so they're all nice) but honestly, the really nice one with the letters like CXLR or something like that - and of course, once again I backed out.
Now, if I'm actually going to pull off this generosity thing, I need to realize that at this particular Starbucks, 9 times out of 10, the car behind me in line will probably cost more than my annual salary. I should probably also realize, that wealthy people need free coffee too - in this economy you never know when the money saved on a non-fat caramel latte, might be just the $4.50 needed to make this month's car payment...or maybe not, which is why instead, I handed $2.00 to the homeless vet on the corner as I pulled out of the parking lot - after all, he might spend it on booze and cigarettes, but at least I know he'll appreciate it...and in the end, I didn't even have to share my gift card...not that I'm selfish or anything.
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