I Wanna House

I have decided that apartment living is not for me. I need the wide open spaces, the extra rooms, and the exorbitant debt that comes with being a homeowner. I don't like not being able to paint my living room if I want to. Not that I necessarily want to paint my living room, you understand. I'd be just as happy to make it look like the deck of a pirate ship. I figure hanging a bunch of ropes along one wall and maybe a captain's wheel in the corner would do it. Then just add a fan and some seaweed for that authentic sea breeze and you've really got something! But my point is that I can't do that in an apartment. The landlord prefers that everything be the same bland off-white paint. Blah.

Really, there's more to it than my conviction that it wouldn't be that hard to make a spare bedroom look like the flight deck of an airship. To some degree, it's probably because so many people I know have either just bought houses or are in the process of looking around. They're mostly pretty whiny about the whole deal, but I think they just don't have the right attitude. That's easy for me to say, of course, but I think it looks like fun to shop for houses. I like shopping! And I particularly like shopping for expensive things. Why, just today I took advantage of a great deal to save $900 on a new laptop. Of course, to save that much, I needed to spend -- well, never mind how much. Let's just say it'll be cool and leave it at that.

In a way, a house would just be a really big gadget. There's endless things to fiddle with (or, apparently, "stuff you have to fix"). But I think the most important aspect is that "buying a house" is something adults do. When my friends buy houses, I feel like I'm falling behind. Oddly, I don't really feel that way when they get married or have children. I think that's because I don't really want to get married. It's weird; many of my friends who have been married a long time are ambivalent about it, but the people who are divorced love it. I've received many glowing testimonials about how great divorce is.

The weird thing is that this house-lust comes at a time when I'm weirdly flush. I've got money burning a hole in my credit rating. It feels wrong, because it wasn't that long ago that my credit was so bad that I couldn't even get a credit card. Oh, I could get credit card applications, but apparently "preapproved" sometimes means "we're just taunting you." And now my credit score is "Excellent" and I'm pretty sure I could borrow a really dangerous amount of money. Oh, sure, some nay-sayers would say "Just because you can borrow money doesn't mean you should." But that's just the sort of thing you'd expect from nay-sayers. Well, that and "Nay."

Luckily, I am saved from rushing into homeownership by basic inertia. I'd have to go to a bank and then probably talk to realtors, and I guess it would be a bad idea to just buy the first house I see . . . it all sounds like a lot of work. Right now, I'm more at the stage where I surf around real estate websites, look at houses and say "Ooh! Look at that!" That's really what the Internet's for, you know.