Around 20 years ago I attended a positive thinking workshop and the presenter asked, “Who is going to have one million dollars a year from now?” Nobody responded. “Then you won’t.” (Or something like that.) Then he asked, “Who will have $10 million in ten years?” So I stuck my hand up. I meditated into a beta state and visualized winning the bundles of bills in the lottery and having fun giving it away. At home I continued to visualize spending the money (as just seeing a pile of money isn’t good enough) and even typed up 13 pages of ideas of how to spend it.

So, what’s the point in working on a career when, in the long term, I’m going to win the lottery? This is an example of how positive thinking can be damaging — it leads to false expectations and I’m not happy with anything less than what I’ve dreamed about. When the lottery reaches $10 million it sparks that memory and I’ve recently rewrote my financial daydreams. Besides the usual (big party, vacation, car, house, harem) and giving to empowering charities, here are some highlights of my brainstorming, divided into three sections:

Write a newspaper column espousing my opinions such as there should be tax deductions for volunteer work, adding rep by pop seats to Parliament for small parties, the Tobin tax on large bank transactions, settle native land claims, protect farmland from subdivisions, and changing Employment Canada and welfare to not treating applicants like criminals.

Offer each cousin (and second and third cousin) a $2,000(?) gift, not cash. They have to buy something they wouldn’t normally buy, something outrageous. Free trips to Canada for my Swedish cousins.

Hire someone to explain economics to me, where does all that money go to? Break down a few generations where the dollar I spend goes, how much to tax, how much to banks, how much to profits and executives. Why is it more expensive to live here then in the third world where they can survive on $40 a year? How can Europeans afford four to six week summer vacations while most Canadians only get two weeks off a year?

Time to do a physical exercise program, Tai Chi? Or just buy larger sized clothing?

Produce a movie, especially fun stuff with political or nonsexist sexual content. Two ideas for backgrounds:

1. The CN tower always in the background, from different angles from around Toronto; zoom into tower for scene changes.
2. Two cameras, one long take, of a couple talking inside Queen Street Streetcar, showing the changes in the street from Neville Park to Long Branch (Sequels being Dundas, St. Clair, or King St. routes).

A world religion and sex tour. Travel to ancient religious sites in India, Jordan, Mexico, etc. and to nudist resorts and red-light districts.

Host Toronto trivia contests including geography, sports, (multi) culture, and history. Foot/bicycle/car rallies with historic clues (possibly sponsored by a bank, having ATM machines as check points).

Hire athletic Olympic coaches to get the Canadian Olympic chess team in physical shape. Have team training weekends in a rural retreat where they will have physical and psychological trainers as well as work on specific areas of their game. Also, make available a large computer for analysis.

Pay for women, juniors, and players of colour from other countries to come to Swiss events in Canada. To pair them up with Canadian players who will play in a tournament in their country.

Have municipal championships or donate city prizes in the Toronto Open, top four individual scores from a municipality form a team score. By municipal I mean large neighbourhood, or former city like Scarborough, or region outside of Toronto.

Donate prize in the Toronto Open of airfare to Vancouver to play in the Keres tournament, and a prize in the Keres to play in the Toronto Open. Similar twinning of other Canadian cities.

Set up University/College scholarships and coaching for youth champions.

Set up a pension fund for players who have represented Canada internationally.

Donating chess club and CFC memberships and chess lessons at school fun fairs and auction fundraisers for things like the Toronto Symphony or Canadian Opera Company.

Commission series of portraits and Internet biographies of Canadian Chess Champions (and other Canadian non-major sports heroes).

Fund large ads for community events in local newspapers. Events like lectures, local historical walking tours, school fun fairs, music recitals, art shows, and the start of amateur sports seasons. Events that are progressive politically, socially, spiritually or psychologically. Or humorous.

Fund community bulletin boards — especially on the TTC — which could display [Note some of this has now been done with the free newspaper, puzzles on posters and the new TVs]:

• posters for cultural festivals
• reproductions of works of local artists
• short stories and excerpts from award-winning Canadian novels
• money-saving household tips and practical trivia
• historical biographies of people who have streets named after them, Canadians of colour, Canadian inventors
• stories of historical events in Toronto and the history of how immigrants came here and created neighbourhoods
• stories of heroes in Toronto history, people who have saved lives, such as rescuing somebody from a fire or drowning
• educational stuff such as different types of clouds, trees, insects in our environment
• Photo of a TTC or civic employee of the month, explaining what their job is
• Ad for Adbusters (education on advertiser’s manipulation)
• consumer’s reports type article on food, comprehensive unlike current media reviews of only a few all-night stores, or a few Italian or falafel restaurants, or types of yogurt or chocolate
• lists of tax deferred corporations, polluters and other criminal convictions
• a series presenting right- and left-wing viewpoints with facts, not myths and name-calling.

Pay for cameras to be installed over streetcars doors to charge drivers who speed by while passengers are loading. Also pay for passenger footstools on transit vehicles.

Support free bicycles for poor kids and a plane or helicopter ride from the island airport for poor kids who have never flown.

Sponsor colourful floats in parades such as Caribana, Pride, Women's Day, St. Patrick's, and Santa Claus.

Turn a small apartment building into a nudist co-op and at nudist events sponsor prizes of trips to Vancouver’s Wreck Beach or France’s Cap D’Agde.

Set up a sex training centre. It's library will have books from humour to psychology, and include popular magazines and videos. Educational courses will include one where men can earn a certificate on assisting women to orgasm, with volunteer women giving the final exam.

Be a producer for a new cable channel: The Sex Channel. Not a Playboy channel. There will be therapists, talk shows with participation of everyday people — not just models, biology/sex in nature, sex in history and different cultures, anti-rape education, and even on Sunday mornings a celibate show.
[post new City TV sex channel: It's all reruns, it needs live guests with viewer phone-ins and public gatherings like Much Music.]

Fund a study on the 10,000 sex trade workers in Toronto with a 5 year follow-up.

Do a study on panhandling. Hire university students to seek out and pay panhandlers/car window washers, asking them how much they made that day at that location, and make a map of which areas are the most successful and speculate on why.

Hire street people as litter police, each responsible for keeping one block clean.

Collect dead cell phones and give them to people who talk to themselves out loud.

Fund research into Canadian charities. Publish a list of causes, size and salary of staff, volunteers, budget, and major supporters. Follow-up on people they've helped.

Tour manufacturers’ of health–food products, checking sources of products and quality control.

Hire meteorology students to survey rain across Toronto and make a map comparing rain in downtown Toronto versus other areas of the megacity. I suspect that there is less rain downtown than above the old shorelines north of St. Clair, and more in Etobicoke than Scarborough.

Set up a program sponsored by an ISP provider of having Internet terminals in senior homes, training by volunteer teenagers (Similar to Icomm program).

Have a building named after me.

A contest winner has written a book
www.contestqueen.com

Can a Bureaucrat find a new life?
www.saveabureaucrat.com

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