Dying on a diet of hope

Yesterday, I saw this painted on the side of a garage: "He who lives on hope will die fasting."

I must admit that sometimes the poetic significance of things flies right over my head, thundering like a 787 Dreamliner, and the meaning of this quote definitely escaped me at first. So, being a member of the Google generation, I figured I could find my answer online. Sure enough, I did. At the aptly named Answers.com.

My answer was this: "hope is not enough to live upon, there must be some material needs met." Yeah, I probably could have guessed this one. Silly me.

But anyhow, I know now how ironic it is that I saw that yesterday since I have been feeling for a while like I am Slimfasting on hope. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong -- and sometimes it's not that anything is going particularly wrong but just that nothing is going right.

My friend Julie is having a moment of ahhhhhhh! as her life pulls together. As she aptly put it at lunch today, "I've got the guy I've always wanted, the car I've always wanted, the life I've always wanted!"

How often does this actually happen to people? Especially to those who truly deserve it? I talked with Julie earlier about how something good has to happen to me.

For instance, I wanted to get an apartment or a house and now I'm stuck living with my dad -- although this has been tempered by the possibility that my best friend Michele might move in with me. I have been losing my faith in my ability to do journalism and have been flailing like a drowning person, waving my hands out for help and I just keep getting pulled under.

I keep hoping that something good will happen and I'm losing my hope. If you've got nothing but hope and that's evaporating too, what do you do?

(The above image of Marlon Brando was taken for LIFE magazine by Edward Clark in 1949.)