Yesterday, I made a New Year’s resolution to start a blog. Now I’m blogging.

For those too impatient to learn new web skills, typepad rules.

Thinking of, blogging about, meaning to, wanting …
…something more than you’ve got.

Back when I was a morose teenager, my friends and I started a New Year’s tradition-we wrote suicide notes instead of resolutions. We’d puke out all insecurities, grievances, and plights onto paper and shared. This social flaying brought amazing insight–most of us were angry about the same things(but the most popular girls always wrote the longest notes).

Fastforward to 2005 and I still write a suicide note to myself every year. Some things keep popping up in my Sepaku top ten: my job/school as a cage, fear of exposure, … yak, yak, yak. I’ve learned the excuses for unhappiness aren’t unique, and they all seem absurd following the phrase I want to die because… But that’s being middle class in America–having too much time to think about shit that doesn’t really matter. What’s the big freaking deal, that’s life.

But this year, how do you regret not having enough time to catch up at work or home when tens of thousands of people who were too poor to matter/notice/protect are swept up and forever lost in last week’s disaster?

Yeah, yeah, reference-wise the Asian Tsunami is the new 9/11. But let’s not forget–we live like Kings–even the white trashiest of us. Poverty to us means no cable, or not enough money for new Nikes.

No.

Poverty (capital P) is wishing your house had four walls-not three-and hoping for a pot in which to piss.

So as we get annoyed at the traffic when we’re trying to return the sweater someone got us that we specifically asked to be blue and Medium, let’s stop, shut the fuck up and think for a moment. Let’s remember those people who truly have nothing, are nothing, and want nothing but to survive. And let’s not just get caught up with the ratings darling the Tsunami disaster has become. There are people in the Sudan, the Middle East, and South America whose tragedy is less prime time but just as real.

Find a charity like Doctors Without Borders that considers all of the poor, tired, and wretched throughout the world–not just those getting news coverage. If we all wrote a check for even $10, it would make a difference.

It’d be a tremendous freaking deal.

What does this have to do with wine? food? Nothing. And everything.

It reminds me that I’m not curing cancer. I’m just selling wine and food for a living. Wine and food the likes of which half the world can’t even dream about. How do you understand the choice of 40 different kinds of imported olives when you just hope for poison-free drinking water that doesn’t give you the chronic shits?

Think on that when you dig into your triple creme cheese, artisan whole grain bread, or that $3 latte.

We are lucky bastards, all.