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Location: Home.
Listening: Comedy Central.

So this afernoon, someone attempted to rile me over the email list I'm on, after I made a comment about yearning for a higher purpose behind personal ambition than financial gain:

... of course, your interest in money, or at least your lack of disgust at [people you know] who seek it, is more likely just one manifestation of your thirst for power -- money being an expedient way of achieving a modicum of power.

After brief consideration of this bait, I responded:

You know, on any other day, I'd counter this with some sort of erudite rebuttal.

However, I'm bored and in a very direct mood, so fuck it.

I like power. Rather, I love power. I like wielding it, giving it over, and being in the presence of it. I like its trappings and its benefits and its responsibilities. I like boardrooms and conference calls and fucking guys in suits on their desks during their lunch hours (and, conversely, fucking guys while wearing my suits on my lunch hour and then going back to work). I like to poke at power, turn it on its ear, spin it around, take it around the block a few times, and then make it bark like a dog. I've done a lot of drugs but none of them are quite as much fun.

However, money has little to nothing to do with it. I've never drawn a strong correlation between the two, which is why I think the American mindset that strengthens that correlation aggravates me no end (especially when I see it validated in actuality again and again). I know a lot of guys who are, or will be, multi-millionaires. Few of them have any ambition, drive, desire for achievement, success...power...at all. They can throw all the money they want to in front of me and it won't even distract me. If I really thought money was the key, I'd have married it a long time ago. I'd have flown to San Francisco and laid around in a suite all weekend on someone else's dime. I'd have been to Europe more than once. I'd have at least a pair of diamond earrings, several dresses, and one or two very nice cars. Money with nothing behind it bores me and if you're climbing the ranks at your father's company, I will never be impressed. So much for your modicum.

I like power because it likes me. We get along. Do I thirst for it? Not really. Do I keep running into it? Yeah. Is that deliberate on my part? I don't think so, but then there's the subconscious to deal with. Will I do anything to get it? Nope. There's always more around the corner, somewhere, so there's no point in trying to scrape up as much of it as you can in one place.

None of this means that I would have ever gone anywhere near Bill Clinton. Power cannot negate the fact that one is an Arkansan.

Nothing against Arkansans--it's more of a tongue-in-cheek finale. I was, after all, engaged to one, once upon a time.

I could write on this topic for days, but the above response pretty much summarizes my thoughts. The lure was tossed out by an ex who is now a relatively powerful young lawyer at the largest international law firm in the world who, for some reason, is constantly pestering me about my affection for oxford cloth and boiler rooms. It's apparently hard for him to comprehend that power in and of itself can be attractive, but that the people attracted to it can understand it without being corrupted by it. Essentially, they can treat it like the recreational drug that it is without becoming addicted.

Of course, he did graduate from Harvard Law...