The Real Package...

Last night I sat down and watched Deal or No Deal for the first time ever with my roommate and her boyfriend, who knows somebody who will be on the show soon.

That's about the only interest I had in the show, the fact that I knew somebody who knew somebody who would be on it in the near future. So I had to see what it was about, which turned out to be nothing.

The contestant, with the aid of random family and friends, picks a suitcase out of about 20 or so with value ranging from one penny to $1 million in them to start the competition. They don't know what's in the suitcae they've picked, but they then start to pick off suitcases, three at a time, opening them to attempt to guesstimate the value of their own suitcase. Once he/she has picked three, a mysterious phone call is made and a broker offers them a value of money, based on the monetary figures left on the board, to leave the game with a decent amount of cash?

Last night a lady, she had to be a sista, blew a chance to walk away with about $131,000 because she got greedy, and instead left with about $20,000.

Got it. Pretty stupid, huh? It seems like anybody with any common sense could go on this show and make $100,000 with ease.

But it got me thinking "What if I really won the lottery? What would I do with the money for society after I've secured myself?"

Most people tend to say, "I'm going to give so much money to cancer research" or "I'm going to give my money to my church" or "I'm gonna (blah, blah, blah)."

Not me. I've actually got a novel idea. Let's say I won $300 million. I'm going straight to the Jansport Headquarters, whereever the hell it is, and purchasing enough backpacks in bulk for the every student K-12 in the Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri school districts.

How did I come to this revelation? I was thinking a few days back about how my stepbrother, St. Nicholas (named so because he got/took anything he wanted), stole a pair of smiley-faced boxers of mine in when I was in high school. They were my favorite boxers - black, silk with yellow smiley faces all over them. The one time I wore them, they were a hit.

Then he wore them, and took away their smiles.

He was three years younger than I at the time, and in middle school, not grammar school for you Chicago folk. We shared a room, thus he had access to my closet and dresser, frequently raiding my belongings after I left for school - shoes, shirts, pants and apparently boxers.

I just thought to myself, "If I had a backpack, I could have at least protected my boxers by taking them with me." Instead, he wore them to school, got the same acclaim I did and was caught by yours truly wearing them over his own underwear as he walked in the house from his busstop later that day.

I then thought to myself how I might have brought more books home to study had I had the means to comfortably carry them home, and gotten a 4.0.

Think about it, maybe that's, one of, the problem(s) with inner-city schools, kids don't carry bookbags. You come to the burbs, and every kid has one, and it's full. You can't survive on a college campus without one. That might just do the trick.

Of course, you also leave open the opportunity that the kids might pack heat, grass and all sorts of unruly things in the bags as well. But wouldn't that be worth it if they brought their books home, and even tried osmosis when they went to sleep?

The city of Kansas City is hell-bent on renovating sports stadiums to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. I kind of think they should take that cash, and buy their kids something to carry their books in so they can learn at home.

Then maybe we inner-city products won't live to win the lottery or to get on shows like Deal or No Deal. And yes, i'll be watching the show tomorrow night when it comes back on because it did entertain me.