It would be creepy because I'd sign the card, "Grandma"

It's probably a good thing that I'm as broke as I am. I'm too spontaneous and weirdly generous and if I could afford shipping, I'd be mailing anonymous and ridiculous things all over the country.  Last year (2010) we had snow at Xmas and I had a friend in Colorado Springs who was facebooking about how much she missed snow and I spent days trying to figure out if I could afford to mail a freezer bag of snow to Colorado. As it turned out, dry ice is really expensive!  And every once in a while I'll find something that reminds me of my dead grandmother, usually some horrid and cheap hard candy, and wonder for a moment if I should mail some to my cousin. I have one cousin who had that perfect combination of A) living an hour's drive away from Grandma, B) being raised by her borderline Oedipal father to worship Grandma, and C) a selective memory able to completely erase the racism, weight comments, constant criticism, and just plain awfulness of Grandma.  And she will post comments on facebook every once in a while about how much she misses Grandma, which only proves that she has absolutely no accurate memories of the woman, but still if I had the money to do it I would totally order those cheap blue-tinned butter cookies and have them shipped to her.
When your grandmother calls you a whore for having a boyfriend at age 15, on the street, at the top of her lungs, it forms your opinion. Plus, she called every grandkid who wasn't rail thin fat, and told the thin ones they were going to starve to death, and once told my cousin not to sit on chairs anymore because he was going to break all the furniture by being fat.  Seriously, she babysat for a weekend once and had him sitting on the floor the whole time.

Bored and frustrated

I have finished Ryan's quilt top. It is a horrible example of how bad I am at math. My measurements were so off that what was supposed to come out twin- sized is a baby blanket, so I had to add borders to it to make it bigger (I had bought pre-cut packages of fabric so I couldn't just make more quilt).  I would like to sandwich the thing and get going on the quilting, but I only have beige quilting thread so I need to buy some in a more appropriate color. I know what I want, but the closest fabric store is an hour away and I can't go there just to buy 2 spools of thread.  I called the little quilt shop in town and they don't have it.  Ugh.  So why bother laying out the quilt back, blanket, and quilt top and pinning it all together when I can't do anything after that anyway?  So I am frustrated and eager to get going on this. Ugh.

The poor and the fantasy

It has been my experience, and I'm perfectly willing to admit that it may be only my experience, that there is a socio-economic link to supernatural beliefs. If I'm wrong, let me know. But if I'm right, I want to know why. Is it just a simple case of poor people wanting to escape their relity with magic and mysticism? I don't know. But in case I need to, let me clarify and explain.

The only people I know who genuinely fear Ouija boards are dirt poor. The only people I know who believe fairies are real, who are Wiccan or believe druids built the pyramids or think that somewhere in Ireland is a foggy forest of unicorns, are poor. Not just "the economy is rough we need to tighten our belts" poor but "welfare checks come out on the first so we're eating cheese sandwiches and wiping our asses with coffee filters until then" poor. Tarot cards, palm reading, vampires existing in reality. These seem to be things that tween girls and the poor have exclusive domain over. So why? Why are poor people so willing to spend their money of ceramic statues of generic Native Americans, dream catchers featuring neon turkey feathers, and sparkly velvet paintings of elves and fairies?

Again, I may be wrong. I may have proof that I'm wrong in my own memory but just not remember it now. But in general, past the age of 25, people who say they are "spiritual" or "in tune", often just tend to be really dirt poor.