“Money can't buy happiness; it can, however, rent it.”

- Anonymous

I don't really recall how the topic came up, but a friend and I were talking this week about diversity.

She made the argument that you would first expect; that women were different from men.

An idea I've known since puberty.

She then tore into how each race was different in their own unique ways, and that individual people vary when it comes to religion, sex, power, ideologies, tastes, morals, fashion sense and just about everything that you could think up.

Our conversation made me realize two things.

One is that I think the reason we have so much conflict in the world is because we haven't that much in common, and two, Nancy gets really chatty when she's had a few glasses of wine.

I was starting to worry about us as a people until I realized that there is one general rule that can be applied to everyone.

Call it Murphy's Law, call it fate, call it whatever you like, this one rule holds true no matter who you are.

Black, white, tall, short, fat, skinny; it doesn't matter, and it never fails; the minute you finally start saving up some scratch, something breaks, dies, cracks, crashes, or just plain doesn't do what it's suppose to do anymore.

Hello payments; good bye paycheck.

We are all in this financial struggle together. No matter where you came from we all end up at some point in our lives learning one basic truth: There is always more month at the end of the money.

For me I've tried everything to make ends meet. First there was the “I'll go on a budget” theory.

I look at budgets the way some look at dieting; I have a general plan and the willpower in mind, but suddenly I binge on something frivolous like, oh I don't know - gas for the car, maybe. Even that little investment into transportation is starting to become a burden.

It seems like every day we pay a dollar more a gallon, but what choice do we have, without the car we can't get to work to pay the bills we're working hard for. That and it's hard to take a date to the drive-in on a Huffy bicycle.

Of course you can take the “I'm just not going to pay the bills” concept, but when they turn the lights off in your house you learn that candles do make an intimate setting but they don't help when you want to watch a DVD.

So unless I start dating an Amish woman, I'm sort of stuck writing out that check.

My only big worry at the moment is that I found a 10-spot on the street yesterday and that can only mean one thing, something's going to break, and of course it will cost $10.

I'm starting to think that the only real diversity we have is the bills we have to pay.

Auburn native Bradley Molloy's column appears here,

each Sunday, in The Citizen.

He can be reached at lovonian@hotmail.com