You're just coming home, carrying twenty fresh dollars in your back pocket as a result of a day spent mowing a lawn. You don't like your neighbors, but you're fourteen-- not old enough to work a real job yet, but old enough to need money for movies and candy and books. You've asked your mom for money. And your dad, and not to mention your four uncles and three aunts, too. But they save their money for holidays, and it's just unfortunate that your birthday is so close to Christmas that you end up wasting all that cash within a month.

So you've resorted to helping the neighbors across the street, a couple consisting of a grumpy old man and a grumpy old woman. You do outdoor jobs for them: weed their flowerbeds, rake their leaves, shovel the ice off their driveway when the weather gets frigid. Today you mowed the lawn, which is a massive space riddled with tree trunks and oddly spaced-out bushes. You spent about four hours over there, meticulously working.

You do the math. You were there four hours, only got twenty dollars, so you made five bucks an hour. Twenty gumballs an hour, that's what you think. That thought angers you.

And you're so caught up with your anger that you don't care to notice that, when you pour yourself a glass of water as soon as you get to your kitchen, you fill it exactly halfway up. The perfect symmetry that is so often used to distinguish optimists from pessimists barely gets a glance from you as you pick it up and down it in three big gulps, happy for some sort of relief on your terrible day.