Karen and I went to bed around 22:30 last night, and, for a change, she had trouble getting to sleep while I didn't. I did have some weird dreams, though, very complicated plot, something about my brother being a burglar and everyone in the world knew it (including my mother) but me. I think that I was successful in getting him not to rob a friend of mine, but unsuccessful in getting him to change his criminal ways. Like I said, weird.

I was going to add a little more to my list of odd things about me today, but the first item I was going to put in there deserved a little more, I thought.

• My IQ, according to an on-line test, is 152.

So, as my father used to say (and I'm sure that he was not the originator of this phrase) "If you're so damned smart, why ain't you rich?" Given the fact that, according to the survey analysis, I am smarter than 99.5% of the people in the world, I should also be wealthier than 99.5% of the people in the world. But here I am, struggling to stay at the 50% mark.

There are two personal qualities that would make this correlate:

• I'm lazy; or
• I don't give a shit.

Well, OK, I admit that I'm relatively lazy; I do suffer from lack of ambition. But not, I think, enough to make up for that vast difference. So... this leaves the alternative: I don't really give a shit.

Why not? I wish I knew, but the fact remains: I don't care enough to be wealthy. All I really want is to have my immediate needs met, and for the least amount of trouble that I can go through to accomplish that. Is this a character fault, or a chosen way of life?

My personal needs are rather modest, really. A computer, an interesting job, communication with my peers... and food, a place to live, medicine so I can continue to be relatively healthy. The needs of my family are, of course, rather more extensive.

I have always had the feeling that, if I wanted to, I could be a lot richer than I am now. The major drawback is that I would have to work my ass off doing something that isn't really interesting to me. And I have never thought that was worth the price.

This theory has never been put to the test, though. But I'm sitting here thinking, I've got fifteen, maybe twenty, more years of productive life. What am I going to do with it? Why not, just for the hell of it, try to get rich?

That's a good question, and one that I'm going to have to deal with shortly. For there is an opportunity on the horizon... maybe not to get rich, but rather, to make a lot more money doing something that I'm good at but that I don't really like to do.

And, just for the hell of it, I'm going to do it.