What we'd do when we get rich...

"I hate work."

Everyone looked up from the dinner table to gaze at me with questioning eyes. My folks have always known me to be a workaholic; even my weekends aren't spared.

"I want to play golf," I proclaimed. But I dont play golf they retorted.

I could learn. But I have to be rich.

And talk turned to the lucky person from Cebu who just won the lotto. P127 million. Damn. I wouldn't have to work anymore.

Years ago, it was an ordinary evening when we heard someone screaming downstairs. Thinking that maybe a burglar had broken in or some such, we all ran down. When we got down, our househelper was writhing on the floor in ecstacy. Turns out she hit the lotto -- all six numbers. I turned to my mom and dryly remarked, "Can we be her househelp?"

After a few seconds another batch of numbers were announced... for Metro Manila. Turns out the numbers she got were for Visayas. Man, her tears of joy soon gave way to dismay. You know the feeling when you've lost something of great value. When you've been robbed. Fired from work. You know.

She came that close to not working.

In 2003, a friend of mine introduced me to this rich Puerto Rican woman who was looking for someone to marry. I thought that was weird since she looked like a thinner yet taller version of Salma Hayek. How can someone that beautiful and having that loads of cash have no beau? Turns out that she wanted total domination over her man who eventually decided that it wasn't worth being on a leash.

I was that close from being a habitue of Atlantic City.

I used to love work. Now it's a neccessary evil that I have to go about unless by a stroke of good fortune I become the next Mark Cuban, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Bruce Wayne...

So if I had that much cash, here's what me and mai love will do (not in order though)...

1) Go on a year-long long vacation in Europe (Normandy, Monte Carlo, Santorini, Venice, Rome, the Vatican, Scotland, Paris, Crete), the Carribean, and the Holy Land

2) Get a skybox in Yankee Stadium and the United Center

3) Put up a nice resto-bar hangout near NYU with cool music, poetry reading, and indie film viewing

4) Put up my own coffee shop that will be way cooler than Starbucks

5) Put up a soup kitchen where I can help the poor and needy then hand out turkeys on Thanksgiving

6) Watch some live games in Anfield and the Bernabeu

7) Get a nice house in Princeton, a nice flat in Greenwich Village, and a chateau outside Paris

8) Spend some nights spinning music at Virgin Records in Times Square

9) Play golf, tennis, ice hockey and watch the US Open -- always my favorite

10) Go on a pilgrimage: Cooperstown, Springfield, the gravesite of Jim Morrison, Rucker Park, Graceland and the Sun Studios, the site of the former Berlin Wall, Hadrian's Wall in Britain, Tirad Pass, Massada, Thermopylae and Marathon, Bastogne, the Rocky Balboa statue at the Philadelphia Public Library, the Spectrum, the site of the old Boston Garden, Wrigley Field, and NASA.

11) And lastly my CD collection currently at 4,100 discs and counting will quadruple so I'd have every vinyl and compact disc of my fave music, artists, and albums.

The quest begins in late Fall...