Some girls spend their high school years making wedding scrapbooks; a.k.a. pamphlets filled with detailed notes and designs for how they want their future weddings to be like, down to every last table centerpiece. To the parents' dismay, I was more of a money scrapbooker.
I spent most of my high school years thinking of ways to make money and dreaming of being a rich entrepreneur someday who gets to travel the world and tell people what to do. I tutored, babysat, taught piano lessons, lifeguarded, instructed lifeguards, and worked contracts, hoping to turn one of my skills to a full-fledged business.
But I knew nothing about how businesses worked, and was constantly discouraged when I'd ask people for advice. I'd hear the same old: "you're so cute. Why don't you just marry a rich guy." I had to hide from the matchmakers that I was enrolled at UCLA, because in the world I existed, "no man is going to marry a girl who's enrolled in a secular college, especially not that one." Idiots.
Let's be honest, who gave a rat's ass about flowers and fancy wedding cakes anyway? I just wanted power. Ha. I still do.
More than a half a decade and a scrapbook of failed business attempts later, I'm still tugging at the skirts of the business gods, hoping for someone to let me sit at the table, wishing I knew something about anything business-related, and feeling like a dumb fuck every time I fail at another attempt to do it all on my own. Not to mention broke as a bottle of booze.
How did I grow up among so many rich business owner family friends, yet not picked up a single trick from them? How could I be so fucking dumb?!?
Maybe I should've just listened to them and married a rich guy, I start to wonder. I'm too dumb to even figure out how to do my own taxes. Nobody takes me seriously to even want to waste time teaching me the basics. How the heck am I gonna figure out how to tackle my own rent, let alone become a billionaire? Oh, but I want this so bad.
And I do. For real. I'd starve, sleep on the streets, work through the night; do almost anything to make my own operation work. It'd better damn work. I'm one of those people who will have 50 dollars in her bank account and invest 100 in a new project that could one day become my own business. Now does it make sense that I'm broke and in debt half the time?
Someday soon I'll tell you about that time I quit my job in order to pursue the promising career of apartment-flipping, and landed flat on my face (along with thousands in debt and a hefty lawsuit threat hanging over my head, because duh.) Fun.
If I had a dream entrepreneurial scrapbook, it would look like this:
The business logos of every single person who wouldn't take me seriously, lining up the pages of my scrapbook. All mine. Bought by me. Every single one of them, sold and making triple, quadruple, quintuple profit under PardesSeleh, Inc.
I want to buy all of their homes and sell them to the highest bidders, and purchase a summer island in the Maldives as a small birthday gift to my mom. I want to turn all of their offices into warehouses for my hottest brand manufacturers.
I want to be the person whose skirt they tug at, begging for a seat at my table.
It all sounds very vengeful. Psychotic little girl feels treated like a worthless idiot beef shank her entire life, decides to get rich so she can get back at the world, yada yada. But it's really not like that.
See, I don't want to be so rich that I make other people poor. Nah. I want to be so rich that I can make everybody else ten times richer, and still be richer than all of them.
I want to never have to take a commercial bus, train, flight, or car again, because I have my own pilots and chauffeurs. I want to never have to ask anybody for an opportunity again, because I have enough to feed an army. I want nobody to ever dare attempt to tell me what to do with my life, because my life in a minute equals their entire lifetime plus their children. I want to be so rich that Bernie Sanders calls out my name instead of "the one percent," and Occupy Wall Street lights city dumpsters on fire in protest of how fucking rich I am.
And I want to look back at this blog post and laugh at what a poor, pathetic dreamer I was back then. Tell me that ain't romantic!