Gold Diggers

It's raining again in Costa del Sol and I guess that's why the fields are literally bursting with flowers. It's spring weather here and the plants are well-watered.

I was reading a bit about Dewi Sukarno, a former Japanese insurance sales lady who worked as a hostess at night and married the then Indonesian President Sukarno.

What can I say? Dewi Sukarno certainly lived a much fuller, exciting and enjoyable life as a so-called gold digger than if she'd stayed a 'insurance lady' in Tokyo.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with being an insurance lady but I know of an excellent one who really does her job well...and her life is well...a bit sad.

I say she does her job really well because when a father of an acquaintance went into a coma after being hit by a teenager on a motorcycle who was uninsured and did not have a driver's license - it was this particular insurance lady who helped my acquaintance through the gauntlet of bureaucracy and made it possible for her to get her father's life insurance and as a result buy an apartment in Tokyo. This insurance lady also used to be a manager in one of Japan's most prestigious companies and well she left them because of male chauvenism that was helped along by jealous women in the company who could never hope to be promoted.

They pulled stunts like putting salt in her coffee.

I admire her for keeping her head up and her liberty and having a real career. But I feel life has been so hard for her she's forgotten how to enjoy it. She lives in a very modest apartment and feels buying scented candles and soaps is too much of a luxury. She wears very drab clothing but has funny idiocyncrasies about which brand of panty hose and underwear she wears. She is about as adamant about these unaspirational brands as a fashion victim is about wearing things from the most popular designers. She has her job and her career but somehow she has lost the plot of living. She lives to work instead of working to live. If she contained this world to herself, I don't see a problem but she criticizes her friends for not living like her and lectures them.

Compare this to Dewi Sukarno. She pretty much took steps to ensure that she got the money to live as she pleases...and she succeeded.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying Dewi is better than my insurance lady friend. What I want to say is that I don't think Dewi was less dedicated to getting what she wanted than the insurance lady I know.

Being a basket case myself at being a gold digger, I might say I even admire her single-minded dedication and drive to achieve this. It's not easy to get the attentions of men with money and an attention span as short as the skirts the girls around them are wearing. It's not easy to convince such men to marry you because they have a world of women to choose from.

So though I will never go down this route - I have to say I cannot help but admire women who follow through on their gold digging. It's probably even harder than doing an honest job in some ways.