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I just read that about half of the people in the world dislike their own names.   

Irrespective of the statistic, your name is probably the first gift you ever received, besides life itself. And it’s probably the longest lasting. Your name may have been picked before you were even born.  

If you don’t like your name, who would you rather be? To call a rose anything but a rose, makes it not a rose.. 

Yesterday, I was walking in midtown on my way to the the gym when I observed a few feet ahead of me the unmistakeable green hue  of those few crumpled square inches of US currency. Without breaking stride I reached down and clipped an edge with only what was barely required of my right index finger and thumb. 

I have found money on the ground before, and though I’ve never either seen or heard of this happening, I always have a suspicion that money on the ground, especially when crumpled may contain something disgusting. I wouldn’t put it past some city deviant to hawk a nice winter chunk into a bill and crumple it up for a laugh, all for the bargain basement price of say, one dollar. 

As I walked I stretched the bill open. I wouldn’t say that I did so gingerly, but I would say that I did so cautiously and again with as little exposure to my own skin as possible. I concluded that it was no more dirty than any other old crumpled up dollar bill, especially one found on a New York City street. Which is to say that it was pretty dirty, just not abnormally. And it wasn’t wet, which actually matters a lot. After all, you’d probably rather have old, dry, crumpled up bills in your pocket or purse than recently washed, much cleaner, but still wet ones. 

Anyway. 

As I tucked the dollar bill into my pocket I was immediately taken by my own ingratitude. I was regretting that it was only a dollar, and wondering why it couldn’t have been, say, at least $20 which would have gotten me a “nice” hot lunch at a Chinese spot, maybe with a Nantucket nectar thrown in. Why couldn’t it have been a $50 bill or even a few bills stuck together (being sticky in such an instance wouldn’t have been such a bad thing). 

Though I was a dollar “richer”, I somehow felt deprived, even cheated, which is of course ludicrous. I wondered what the psychological term for this would be. I dismissed the notion of “greed”, but concluded that in a micro way (maybe even moreso) I had been ungrateful. I also dismissed any thought of my being unempathic to the person who’d lost money – though to be fair, that’s probably exactly what an unsympathetic/unempathic person would do..

On reflection, I would have still loved for it to have been more money. But in the end, for the bargain basement price of a dollar, I had the opportunity to delve into myself a little and maybe even learn a little something.