Late-fee-induced homocide

There's only one thing that drives me crazier than the existence of suffering in the world, and that's getting charged late fees. I'll bet that Lucifer himself thought them up and that's the REAL reason he got kicked out of Heaven. Whenever I get dinged by one, I feel like a leech has attached itself to me for a free meal. Last month, I'd forgotten to pay the Visa bill and the parasites attached to my wallet and sucked out $49 of blood cash! HOW can they justify that? Being that they're operating in a morally gray zone, I felt that I was free to operate there, too--is that wrong? I called them and kinda told them I didn't think I'd received my Visa bill. They apologized and sent me a copy and reversed the charge. I still felt guilty about it, so I'll probably end up sending the $49 to some charity--nah, I'll just add it on a bagel gift card a friend (who obviously knows us well) gave us.

Since my upbringing has made me so sensitive to guilt that the mere whiff of it is enough to make me crumble, I've come up with my patented Guilt Defense System 500.© My primary weapon is my sharply honed justification skills--effective enough to the point that I can feel good about absolutely anything I do--its really quite liberating. You should try it! I've come to the conclusion that if a business is willing to screw me, I'm within my rights to preemptively screw them. This is perhaps most evident at the movie theatres. If they can justify charging $9 for a ticket, $5 for a pop, $30 for a non-sticky seat, and $5 for popcorn, I can justify smuggling in some peanut M&Ms, a 2-liter Diet Coke, and a hibachi to roast a rack of lamb. (Note: roasting a rack of lamb at a late-night screening of "Silence of the Lambs" is NOT a good idea!)

Speaking of movies, we've been trying to rent more to keep from paying such high theatre costs (we figure the money we're saving will allow us to buy that Greek island as soon as 2008!), although that comes with its own risks. The last time we were at Hollywood Video, I had to pay almost $10 in late fees--and it was embarrassing to have the clerk tell us loud enough so the people behind us could hear our shame that one of the late movies was a Hillary Duff movie. We call it the Movie That Shall Not Be Named, and thought that if we never talked about it, we could pretend we'd never seen it--unfortunately that meant we forgot it too well and by the time we'd remembered, it was two days overdue. Telling the other customers our secret shame was a much stiffer punishment than the $10 was. Another leech attaches--now I know what sharks feel like when they're covered in remoras!