I like to tell people that I have three framed photographs in my home, but if I’m honest, three is probably a stretch. I do have three photographs in my home, one graduation portrait for each of my sisters. But they’re all in the cardboard envelopes they came in, the kind that are embossed to look like a frame but that inch closed over time, first covering the picture and eventually toppling over.

I actually have nothing hanging on my walls at present, but I know I should do the mature thing; I should buy frames, hammer some nails into the wall, and hang the pictures up. It’s a fitting gesture and timely, too, since I’ve spent the last few years moving various aspects of my life into the “adult” category. I’ve got an adult job now, complete with adult health insurance, and two pairs of clunky, adult-like “professional” shoes. I could probably indulge in a little home décor, but the transition worries me. How do you go from having no framed photographs to having three without being horribly awkward about it?

Where wall décor is concerned, I’m in a stage as awkward as the one immortalized by my own graduation portrait. I was a nervous, slouching teenager, and my yearbook photo is a testament to the terrible things that can happen between a badly cut fringe and a set of aquamarine braces.
Unfortunately, all three of my sisters took portraits that transitioned directly from endearing to gently dated. Sibling snarkiness aside, they’re great photos, dripping with a sincerity that belies the eerie whiteness of their smiles and that unnatural tilt of the chin. They’re definitely the kind that belongs on a wall.

Hard as it is to believe, my trouble hanging these photos has less to do with the vast difference in cringe-worthiness between my graduation picture and those of my sisters, and more to do with a general lack of aesthetic commitment. Blank walls may seem clinical to most folks, but I maintain that my walls are only as blank as my resolutions. It’s one thing to decide that you’re too old and too classy to maintain the ironic faux-décor of the collegiate youth — I don’t keep the cardboard palm tree from my beach party up year-round anymore. But it’s another thing altogether to realize you’re someone who takes themselves seriously enough to hang pictures on the wall, especially professional portraits. In doing that you admit that you’re settled; you’ve ascended to the kind of renting that empowers you to put holes in the walls. And after that, there’s no going back to the carefree days of mixology how-to posters.

Like it or not, when your furniture is a medley of things your mother didn’t want and things your boyfriend couldn’t be persuaded to part with, deciding to add wall décor is a statement. A single framed portrait in a house of otherwise blank walls doesn’t blend or mesh. It’s awkward and shrine-like, a flare calling for improvement. Nailed irresolutely above your battered plaid couch, a framed photo emits an unblinking, critical aura — suddenly the lamp needs replacing and your baseboards look dusty. Once you start it’s instinctive to plow onward, gaining speed and throw pillows at each turn. You’re now a gawky adolescent of the interior design world and there’s nothing to do but grit your teeth, brandish your credit card, and wait it out.

This may seem a little over-thought, but my paranoia isn’t entirely unfounded. I’ve seen havoc wreaked upon the homes of friends who waited until they had something impressive to display — like a ski boat or a baby — to hang a framed photo on the wall. For some of my slovenly pals, a heavy silver frame and sepia wedding portrait bred instant dissatisfaction with their apartments. There’s something unsettling, they tell me, about centering a matted print above a tangle of Xbox wires and someone’s grandpa’s green velvet recliner. For many of these couples, a display of wedding pictures became an epicenter of classiness, leaving destruction in the form of L-shaped microfiber couches and matching dishtowels in its wake. Futons don’t stand a chance against the enhanced sparkles on the rings in professional engagement photos.

It would be easy to excuse my nostalgia as a coming-of-age sort of spasm, but I prefer to think my reluctance is about the transition and not the end result. It’s shallow, I know, but I’m not eager to reenter a stage of awkwardness and groping compromises. I’d prefer, through some miracle of social graces or a credit line at IKEA, to transform overnight into a confident person with busy, homey walls — a person fully worthy of three graduation portraits. And I know that like in all really important transformations of the intermediary stage, when I have some beige microfiber couch but still use beach towels as curtains, it’s bound to be pretty damn ugly. But at least no one wants to take a picture for the yearbook.

Photo by Dave Durden

At the first of the month people in my office are supposed to get wacky. Not the kind of wacky that’s dangerous or provokes legal action but wholesome, productive wacky. Randomness, that harbinger of all things kooky, was the only real rule — that’s what my boss said at the weekly staff meeting — besides, of course, all of the usual rules, which would still be enforced. The traditional pecking order, too, was staying, with zany headwear offered as professional equalizer. After traveling hundreds of miles by way of Powerpoint slides and managerial seminars, the doctrine of workplace wackiness has finally reached the squat office park where I work. And if “radiating cheerfulness” wasn’t listed in my new job description, I might have something very snarky to say about it.

Random may be the new watchword, but it isn’t surprising that my business-casual employers are suddenly keen on silly hats. The hats, along with the emphasis on desk décor, are a reaction to the corporate culture of zany behemoths like Twitter, Zappos, and Google (whose offices house pool tables, volleyball courts, and assorted video games). With such notable endorsements, the philosophy of the unorthodox work environment is downright marketable, a fact which hasn’t gone unnoticed. Zappos, which hosts a video blog showcasing the relentless happiness of their staff, began offering seminars in 2009 for professionals interested in adapting their workplace-wackiness regime. The two-day seminar retails at about $4,000, which, coincidentally, is far less than the raise I’d need to work in an office where the staff acts as entertainment for public tours.

I’m aware that this level of sass in the face of good, clean fun is only possible for someone who used to cut pep rallies to hang out in their parked car. And I should be clear that I have nothing but respect for the kind of wackiness that crops up organically when people work together closely, especially when lack of sleep is involved. Nor do I have a problem with people expressing themselves or having fun at work — I’m always in favor of conference room gossip sessions. But there’s something about the goodness and cleanness of this particular fun — to say nothing of its mandatory nature — that brings out the worst in me.

As it turns out, the worst in me is a decidedly adolescent facet, an entity that rears its shaggy-banged head at any mention of cubicle costume contests. While unfortunate, this manifestation actually makes sense in the face of all this randomness. Likening the corporate workplace to a high school isn’t a particularly original observation, but I won’t sink to the level of discussing the way your boss looks just as scandalous in shorts and sandals as the vice principal used to. The thing about this trend that speaks most pointedly of teenagers isn’t its implementation — it’s the idea that randomness is the best and highest form of expression, a cure-all for boredom, misery, and dissent. I know this much from experience. When I was a teenager I used to eat toaster strudel, not because they were good, but for the sheer joy of eating something called a strudel.

Your boss wearing a sombrero and cupcake suspenders isn’t any different from the kid in your calc class who wore the same outfit. Sure, one drives a luxury SUV and the other a Razor scooter, but they’re both fibbing about their sartorial motives. Your boss says he wants you to be comfortable and zany, but he really wants you to stop calling in hungover. And although that kid from your calc class was advertising profound indifference (he totally didn’t care what anyone thought), he was trafficking in defiance a la Hot Topic. But the most pressing similarity between the two — besides, of course, your reluctance to take either party to the prom — is the transparency of their efforts and the effect on those of us with deep-seated emo tendencies: I’ve got a sudden desire to dig out my Shins albums and smoke a pack of clove cigarettes.

For most high school students randomness is key. It glorifies disorientation; doing something pointless acts as protection against the looming expectation to do or create something meaningful, an expectation that many of us later obsess over as young adults. For teenagers, every mismatched pair of toe-socks they own is another reminder that nothing is serious — at least not yet. Wackiness stands in beautifully for complicated and half-baked feelings of irony, rebellion, and plain irreverence. When you factor in how direct expression — whether satirical or earnest — requires taking an honest look at your circumstances, it’s no surprise that teenagers tend to express themselves through randomness. Back in the days of braces, curfew, and enlarged nose pores, I tried not to take an honest look at anything.

These days, however, I can’t help but look closely when I see a poster advertising a Spring Fling for meeting sales goals. But I don’t intend to protest this call for wackiness; I plan to be quietly apathetic, a strategy I perfected when I was 15 and couldn’t be roused by anything short of a boy with messy hair and a deviantArt account. Randomness is an awesome thing, but to emphasize arbitrary symbols — the unseasonal Christmas trees, the cube décor — instead of the creative, innovative work that these spastic acts are supposed to reflect, is deceptive. For the average worker in a non-creative industry, this is a mandate to think about cute nicknames and plastic vomit in the water-cooler, not about improving workflows or products. Without context, randomness provides a distraction and a bandage. It’s mental ergonomics.

Then again, the violence of my distrust might be more generational than dispositional. Maybe it’s just my age; maybe I still struggle too much in affecting grown-up hair to be excited about the chance to wear a fake mustache while typing. Or perhaps it’s a matter of timing. I grew up in the ‘90s, when we were taught that guys in suits were not to be trusted. It was the post-Wall Street, post-Office Space, and post-Wayne’s World era, a period when depictions of corporate life were unsweetened by the American version of The Office. We knew that no good news came from a wingback chair behind a shiny desk; we knew that stockbrokers were just lawyers who did cocaine, and that every lawyer was just Emilio Estevez before he started hanging out with the Mighty Ducks.

And just as we’re emerging into the professional sphere, boss types everywhere have decided to turn to entry-level workers with the ultimate practical joke: they’re farming for quirks and institutionalizing acts of petty rebellion. But I think they’ll find that like most good teenagers trapped in adult bodies, we’ll pull the opposite direction. We’ll roll our eyes and pop our gum, because we know that randomness is fleeting and transient by nature — sort of like being a teenager.

Photo by Philip J. Beyer

A few weeks ago I was making some notes in my leather-bound planner when a coworker asked if I was writing in my diary. Her assumption startled and embarrassed me. One shouldn’t take the accusation of public journaling lightly, especially since I considered it quite obvious that I was writing in an impressive, serious notebook — not some diary with a hairpin lock and curlicues in the corners of the pages. At the time I was writing in my softcover, large-sized Moleskine, the weekly planner/diary of choice for Hemingway fangirls, notebook enthusiasts, and would-be writers who never write much of anything. Since I’m all three of those things, the notebook and I suit one another.

It pains me to be the kind of person who uses sickly back-slashed phrases like “weekly planner/diary,” but I suppose there’s no getting around the fact that I’m a notebook person — specifically a lined, college-ruled, unnumbered pages kind of notebook person. And with one notable exception, I’m probably not too different from the other notebook snobs that you’ve known and mocked over the years. My trouble is that I can never bring myself to write in my notebooks.

This little eccentricity has never stopped me from buying notebooks; there’s a shelf on my second-best bookcase bowing under their weight as I type this. In the beginning it was heavy, hardbound notebooks with gold-leaf pages, the kind you buy at stores that sell Tolkien chess sets and novelty bumper stickers. As I got older I sought out “artisan” notebooks with soft leather covers and pages with visible fibers; I bought them at street fairs from artisans in ugly beanies and at Renaissance fairs from artisans in tights and corsets. I even spent a few months cradling a colorful composition book inside my hoodie like every other girl who wants to be the love interest in a Michael Cera movie.

For me, the allure of notebooks has always been more symbolic than functional. I collected them, in part, because I like the look of crisp pages and the satisfying heft of carrying one in my purse. But I also bought them because, like many other would-be writers, I found it easier to fixate on the idea of a notebook than to think about things like query letters, eye strain with no health insurance, and infinitives that are determined — heaven help us — to split. Of course, I had no idea what I wanted to write, but I knew that I wanted to be a writer and I knew that notebooks, like fancy pens and coffee with a shot of cane liquor, were part of a secret, transformative ritual.

For years I associated notebooks with the idea that I would write out my first novella in two sittings, longhand (delicately crossing out words with an inky line from my fountain pen), which elevated the medium to a paralyzing level of importance. Faced with a real notebook, the ugly reality of bad handwriting, questionable spelling, and ink blots the exact size and shape of my plot holes intruded on my fantasy. Notebooks, as any notebook enthusiast will tell you, have a legacy, and all of that timelessness can weigh on a person. The pressure to do justice to the notebook, to write something as classic and romantic as the paper housing it, is just too much; I can never muster the courage to begin.

The whole thing is a lot like the impossibly heavy vintage typewriter that I carried around in the trunk of my car for two years. I bought the typewriter because I enjoyed pretending that I would refurbish it and use it to type my (nonexistent) personal correspondence. But even as I lugged it out of the antique store, I knew that every sheet I spiraled through the roller of that typewriter would be one more page I wouldn’t write. The paralysis associated with a typewriter is twice that of a notebook because it’s twice as iconic; each keystroke would mark the noisy advancement of reality against my idle daydreams. And for a whimsical sort, those daydreams are worth any loss in gas that comes with carting around 30 pounds of twisted metal. So the typewriter sat in the trunk of my car, rattling around and compressing my rear axel, until I got the gumption and upper body strength to sell it. .

If you consider how long I’ve lived beneath the leathery glare of those notebooks, wincing every time I reached past them to grab a sci-fi novel, my recovery from notebook madness was an abrupt and simple thing. Not long ago, I moved into a building with crooked hallways and no elevator. Through some twist of fate or calculation, I was left to carry the two boxes of empty notebooks up from the moving truck. I’m no great athlete — I imagine few notebook enthusiasts are — and somewhere between the second and third stories the weight of the notebooks stopped being symbolic. At that moment, when the notebooks became plain, everyday heavy, it occurred that I was carrying a box full of paper set aside for the first draft of a novella that I might never write.

For reasons rooted equally in embarrassment and optimism, I’d like to think that this epiphany is inevitable for all notebook enthusiasts. Notebook obsession, pen fetishes, and certainly the desire to buy and refurbish vintage typewriters, aren’t about getting the appropriate gear to become that iconic writer; they’re about maintaining the distance between that icon and reality. Because as long as we focus on the romance of the supplies, we don’t have to write a damn thing until we find the perfect notebook.

This strategy is effective; it shields you from the terrifying act of actually writing. And as a compulsive email checker, pipe-dreamer, and firm believer that you can’t start a project until you’ve cleared out your Google Reader and taken three showers, I can attest to its wily adaptability. The only downside is that it tends to lead to revelations like the one I experienced between the second and third stories of my apartment building. It’s an ugly thing when you realize that you have 15 blank notebooks (several of which have your initials embossed on the cover) and nothing to show for it but a possible hernia.

Because I still enjoy the weight of one in my purse, these days I carry a single notebook — the aforementioned “diary” — that I use solely and heretically as a day planner. For everything else I confine myself to computers. The charm of word processing is that it’s forgiving and intangible; every attempt does not commit an entire notebook, and you can add and rip pages from the binding at will. The ability to erase easily and completely is an amazing thing, though it lacks the tactic charms of a skeleton key or complimentary ribbon page-marker. And although the subtle clacking of the keyboard isn’t exactly timeless, it’s certainly something a body can get used to.

When you consider that I don’t own a television and love shouting, “Get over Friends!” at women with Jennifer Aniston-esque haircuts, it’s strange that I pine for a version of the holidays that boils down to just 22 minutes after commercials. (20 minutes if you don’t include the comic subplot about finding cranberry sauce in a crowded supermarket, which I emphatically do.) But there’s something seductive about a gathering where you’re rooting for disaster, a holiday where each inedible side-dish or unexpected guest isn’t a tragedy, just a step towards that inevitable slap-stick conclusion. The cliché floats in my imagination with all of the romance and clarity you can demand from memories created by a pair of rabbit-eared antenna prongs: a handful of people with gleaming smiles (their values and lifestyles aligned on all points, excepting a few trademark eccentricities), who jointly overcome a series of mishaps and the burden of a laugh-track to enjoy a bountiful and joyous meal.

As a dame in her socially-ambiguous twenties, I can appreciate that there is usually no discussion of where our cast of sitcom cronies will be spending their holidays. Last year, newly married and with no experience in large-scale negotiations, I was completely bamboozled; time limits were assigned, snide text messages were sent, and guilt was distributed like Starbucks gift cards. I’m pretty sure I committed us to at least three Thanksgiving dinners and every tree-lighting ceremony within 200 miles.

I dwell, currently, in a kind of holiday limbo. I’m old enough to celebrate the holidays on my own — old enough to complicate my yuletide maneuvers through marriage, even — but not yet old enough for grander holiday matriarchs to view my deviations as anything less than social terrorism. I’m further hindered by the lackluster nature of my convictions; I’m overbooked, sure, but if I chose sides on Thanksgiving, I’ll spend Christmas Eve imagining that my great-aunt is glaring at me from the space between her lap-dog and her oxygen tank.

From this position of staunch cowardice, a sitcom holiday seems utterly guiltless and magical, as much fun as a mashed potato binge should be. I’m not going to take the easy route and say that TV-style holidays are magical because they don’t involve actual families; admitting that would validate television clichés a little too thoroughly, like an admission that I’d cast Bette Midler as my mother. It also doesn’t fit with the theme. As the characters’ speeches and champagne-on-the-fire-escape New Year’s resolutions tell us, sitcom friends comprise voluntary families — albeit incestuous, dysfunctional ones.

I suspect that their magic comes from the sort of tunnel vision that makes it possible to pretend that five people can find various lovers, roommates, and business partners amongst themselves for seasons on end with no slackening of suspense. Those of us hovering in that gap between being a kid and giving our parents grandkids frequently find ourselves with too many options during the holidays; we try and fail to achieve the correct ratio of obligation to celebration. In this struggle, we could all take a lesson from sitcoms. Oftentimes, hidden in what seems like a throwaway episode of network-TV muck, there is a surprisingly rational balance between sappiness and punch lines.

In the world of sitcoms the holidays are important — that’s why they get their own episode. But when that perfect pumpkin pie gets chucked in someone’s face, we realize that the rituals hardly carry the life-and-death weight we assign them. This year I’m adopting that same kind of tunnel vision. Any protests from the holiday matriarchs will be answered by pointing to the ample evidence in late-night syndication.

All I need now is a cast of sitcom pals to pull off my plan properly. To do it right I’ll need a gung-ho feminist, a wacky guy who might live in his van, someone with over-sized eyeglasses and a perchance for corduroy, and a super suave man-slut type. As a point of interest, I’ll be acting as the neurotic character whose preoccupation with holiday traditions threatens to suck the fun out of the Thanksgiving. It shouldn’t be too hard, since that’s the role I play in my real life.

As readers of this series are probably aware, most of my ideas about homeownership are pretty theoretical. Admittedly, thinking about houses makes my brain turn a bit mushy — on bad days I can be downright whimsical. And like any mush-brained sentimentalist, I hate gumming up the works with harsh nuggets of reality. So I spent months reflecting and theorizing, pleasantly preoccupied by a cocktail of feelings and wallpaper catalogs. The real, physical implications of our decision didn’t hit me until we received a moving date from the title company. I was at the rental house when I heard the news and suddenly reality was all around me; it was crowded on tables, shoved into desk drawers, and stacked on shelves. The rental house was full of those pesky nuggets of reality and every last one of them needed to be moved.

During the escrow period I had a lot of time to think about the house we were buying, a two-bedroom, one-bathroom place with marvelous doorknobs and an interior paint job that relied heavily on maroon accent walls. As my impatience sloughed into stir-craziness, I determined that the time for theories and feelings was over; it was the hour of preparation and strategy. I started packing with militant flair, labeling each box with a black marker and stacking them in special strategic piles in the garage. Giddy with false optimism and itemized checklists, I spent my evenings feeling prepared and drawing incredibly out-of-scale layout scenarios on dozens of graph paper tablets.

Of course, setting a moving date created a set of challenges that threatened even the staunchest of graph paper tablets. I’d been successful in my early labeling efforts (though we ended up with a lot of boxes that read, “winter clothes, some heavy shit, a CD?”) but I was quickly running out of room in my imagined layouts. Our new house was small, just under 750 square feet, with a one-car garage and only one hall closet. Our rental, on the other hand, was an astounding 1,100 square feet and each foot was stuffed to the brim with knickknacks and paperback novels. By my crude math, that discrepancy meant that I needed to rid myself of approximately 350 square feet of junk before the move.

I hesitate to paint myself as a fair-weather micromanager, but the question of culling knickknacks was almost enough to trigger a sentimentalist relapse. My first instinct was to pile all of my belongings in the living room and evaluate them based on affection and whether I could imagine them in the new place. Obviously I liked all of my knickknacks; a knickknack that you don’t like is just a creepy statue. The question was whether I liked each of them enough to share 750 square feet with them and whether buying a house required some kind of new-house-new-epoch purging ritual. I elected to build up some momentum before I undertook the thinning of my belongings.

I committed myself to the logistics of the move — demurely measuring, making painfully logical decisions, and explaining to my almost-ex-neighbors in the politest tones that it wasn’t up to me but that I would do my best to ensure that it wouldn’t be more young people moving in. I wrapped glasses in newspaper and transferred bills, researched and bought a refrigerator. The old green recliner with the velvety finish disappeared in that magical way that things disappear when you describe them vaguely on Craigslist’s “Free” section. Remembering the ominous creaking of my desk the last time I shoved it into my backseat, I decided to spring for the U-Haul. I was taking on more than $100,000 in debt. Another $0.69 per mile was just a drop in the bucket.

Moving day came too quickly and with it the disasters that always occur when you move, starting with the timely explosion of the sprinkler system at the rental house and closing with the disconcerting puttering of the air conditioner on the new house. I panicked, proving once and for all that months of sustained panic doesn’t dilute the real thing, as everything unraveled majestically: the locksmith didn’t show up, the subletter on the rental fell through, and all of those helpful relatives who’d never bothered to visit but seemed so keen to help us move were late, despite the by-the-minute timeline I emailed them.

And so it happened that on the first night in our first house I felt tired, sunburned, and disappointed. In some ways careful planning is almost as dangerous as sentimental whimsy; each creates a careful image of the way you want things to be and a large corresponding capacity for disappointment. Neither is particularly accurate. A zealot of micromanaging and whimsy by turns, I can attest that there are some transitions that you can’t soften with graph paper or a heaping tolerance for delusion.

I never did get around to deciding how many knickknacks constituted 350 square feet. All of my assorted junk — down to the porcelain dogs and wooden statue of Abe Lincoln — were shoved, last minute, into unlabeled boxes, their importance dwarfed by the sudden realization that there was no way I could be trusted to drive the U-Haul. And despite the conclusions of crude math and sentimentality, there was room for all of those knickknacks in the new house; they’re sitting in unlabeled boxes in my living room, fitting comfortably if imperfectly between the couch and the wall. The remarkable thing isn’t that they fit or that I have allowed relics of my “old” renter’s life to bleed into my new abode — it’s that I have a living room, and house, to put them in.

Photo by c1ssou

A house is a solid, permanent thing, but the process by which one buys a house is a minefield of intangible threats and delays. When purchasing a short sale, your initial offer goes first to the primary owner of the property, a spectral someone you might not know but whose underwear you saw in the closet when you were pretending to admire all of the storage space. If accepted, the offer is then considered by any banks holding loans on the house. Contracts — the kind that make no guarantees but commit all parties to a long consideration period — will be signed, then re-signed because of misspelled names, and finally signed a third time under the hawkish gaze of a notary.

Once you’re contracted, you may be tempted to feel something like accomplishment, but don’t be fooled. What follows is months of deadlines set for no apparent purpose; there will be deadlines for appraisals, loan extensions, and extensions on loan extensions, each of which will pass without comment or progress. Your first instinct may be self-righteousness, but you’ve been missing deadlines too: it’s been several months since you sent that email telling your landlady that you and the dog she didn’t know about were moving out ASAP.

For people trying to buy a short sale in an impacted market like Sacramento, it’s understood that the “short” refers to the loss the bank will be taking on the property, not the length of time it will take them to process the offer. And while short sales are preferable to foreclosures, most banks don’t rush to close the deal. Understandably, each bank wants to be sure that they are getting the greatest return (and the greatest possible percentage of that return) on each property. Our real estate agent casually estimated that the average short sale closes 6 to 9 months after an offer is made, with no guarantee of success.

For the prospective homeowner, the technical jargon boils down to a lot of waiting and one incredibly awkward “just kidding” email to your landlady. You’ll wait for the banks to decide how much of the selling price each will receive, and then for the real estate agents to decide who will give up a percentage of their commission to the bank that lost the tussle. While you wait housing prices in your neighborhood will fluctuate and interest rates will fluctuate with them. And though you hate to admit it, there are bad days when your enthusiasm also fluctuates, and billboards for housing developments bring on fits of road rage.

Another remarkable characteristic of this waiting period is the consuming haze of ambiguity it produces. While you wait, everything seems theoretical, from the loan money to the fact that you’ve putting off cleaning your bathroom for months in hopes that you could move out instead. Even the house you’re trying to buy seems indefinite — an appraisal comes back showing that the square footage on the advertisement was a bad estimate. Turns out, there are 50 additional square feet in the house that you might eventually live in.

In the midst of this uncertainty, you may begin to feel a bit despondent. You’ll no longer tell friends that you’re buying a house; you’ll acquiesce, under pressure, to the fact that you may, someday, be moving, if you can find anyone willing to take all of the imaginary money that the loan officers think you’ll have in years to come. When you sign official paperwork you’ll no longer flatter each form with a flourish worthy of the Founding Fathers. After a few months you start to complain of hand cramps and resign yourself to a grim set of initials.

As the months drag on, you can easily lose sight of the fact that you’re in the process of making an important decision. Your role is so passive during this part of the purchase that you’re more likely to feel as though you’re undergoing an obscure form of bureaucratic torture. But actually, as you sit at home wondering whether your landlady is going to kick you and your dog out of the rental that you may or may not be moving out of anyway, you’re being proactive as all hell. And if you’re lucky and patient, maybe someday you’ll get something — a house perhaps — for all of your efforts.

It’s been my experience that once you settle on a house, you’re immediately struck with a premature and hyperactive case of buyer’s remorse. It’s a perfectly sensible and understandable reaction; a house is an enormous purchase with all kinds of repercussions in the realms of taxes, credit, and one’s ability to chastise the people living upstairs by slamming a broomstick against the ceiling. But for me this sensible doubt was also tinged with a little anxiety-fueled irrationality. As the last day for backing out of the purchase approached, I became obsessed with the possibility of getting the house and finding out too late that it didn’t match us.

“Matching” is my term for the popular but little-voiced opinion that a house should be reminiscent (physically or symbolically) of the person who lives there. As a home-buying concern, matching is only applicable to people who don’t recognize the “potential” of a place. My husband, who is the sort who sees everything through a film of Home Depot possibilities, thinks that matching is a crock. Regarding its more refined manifestations — including my own belief that I could never match a two-story house because they are inherently fancy and I am inherently not — I tend to agree with him. Or rather, I agree with him whenever we aren’t personally in escrow

But even in times of rational thought, matching has some undeniable appeal. A proper match has to satisfy present circumstances as well as future plans; a house should have a sufficient number of rooms and parking spaces to accommodate the people and cars that will live there. As someone who just moved out of a three-bedroom house where two of the bedrooms were categorized as space for as-of-yet undetermined hobbies, I can’t stress this enough. Of course, the danger involved in planning for the present alongside the future (when you’ll be filthy rich, professionally successful, and rife with hobbies) is that the present is often a bit less picturesque.

When I was still actively looking at houses, I saw a house owned by a man who had obviously ignored the theory of matching. Structurally, the place wasn’t remarkable; it was a rare specimen with hardwood floors in our price range, but the porch sagged and the garage walls had several gaping holes where the yellow fuzz of insulation showed through. I knew the house wasn’t right for us — there was a pervasive, musty smell and the bay window lauded in the advertisement didn’t shed much light into the dark living space — but I was curious, so I held my breath a little, feigned enthusiasm, and continued the tour.

With the exception of the living room (which sported the funky-smelling carpets and a big screen TV) the house was set up like an exhibit at some low-budget, period-ambiguous museum. Maps, magnifying glasses, and other outmoded scholarly tools crowded display tables in a dark “study,” and the walls were covered with gaudily-framed prints of medieval people engaged in fox hunts or famous beheadings. On the bathroom counter, a Victorian vanity set was arranged beside a safety razor covered in cobwebs; modern hygiene was represented by a cheap plastic toothbrush crowded to one corner of the grimy sink. Scarier yet was one the dark guest rooms featuring a child’s brass bedstead: a baseball mitt, stiff with newness and dust, sat smack in the middle of the comforter.

The owner and sole resident was a guy in his mid-forties who spent the duration of my visit pacing the overgrown backyard with a lawnmower. Home-owner mismatching makes people nervous — think Girl Scout with a Rottweiler — but I was determined to give this guy the benefit of the doubt. Sure, he might be a serial killer. But he also might be a hopeless romantic who never got married, had a kid, or grew enough facial hair to need all of the room and antique grooming supplies his optimism had furnished him. The mismatch between his projected needs and his real ones created an illusion of craziness which would have prevailed even on the slight chance that he wasn’t completely nutso.

During escrow I thought a lot about that house and the man who lived there. As my own negotiations settled down and I regained some semblance of rationality, I was able to admit, yet again, that matching is a fairly silly concern. Houses, after all, can change almost as quickly as circumstances and pretensions; the sad fellow in the musty house could have filled his spare rooms with pinball machines and keg-fridges as easily as he filled them with antique linens and creepiness. Matched or mismatched, buying a house is a commitment to a space and structure and has no bearing on sanity or identity.

The house we’re buying is a little small, and the owner’s financial situation is complicated; we aren’t sure when, if ever, we’ll be moving. The delays aren’t ideal, nor is the fact that the lighting fixtures look as though they came from some Trekkie’s clubhouse, but I console myself with the knowledge that the house doesn’t yet resemble the set of a Bergman film. Because when I think about walking through that musty house, I’m still a little surprised that every door only revealed more dust and more misguided décor. Matching may be a crock, but in a house like that I was expecting to find someone more tragic than a guy with a lawnmower.

Photo by kafkan

Unfortunately, there are few things that make this prospective homeowner jumpier than advice — more particularly the brand of conflicting advice that real estate tends to generate. One of the earliest decisions involved in buying a house is deciding whether or not you want to tell people what you’re up to. The advantage of being open is that most homeowners (and all casual watchers of Extreme Home Makeover) are eager to advise a first-timer. The downside is the sheer volume of advice that you’ll receive, and in the case of people younger than 30 — especially those of us who look younger than twenty when not taking drastic hair-spraying measures — how often that advice will begin with a misty-eyed tale about the transformative power of homeownership and end with a diatribe on the advantages of renting luxury condos.

Being the chatty sort, I elected to be open about my house search and was immediately treated to an avalanche of feel-good phrases and cautionary advice; even my closest friends went back-and-forth between apocalyptic predictions and an enthusiasm that smacked strongly of the American Dream. Tales of homemade bread cooling on brick hearths intermingled with stories about sinister Dickensian bankers, the sort who enjoy making people pawn their pocket watch to avoid eviction on Christmas Day. This disconcerting combination — all the more unsettling for its strangeness — made me very nervous.

During those months, every tale about faulty homeowner’s insurance and busted pipes reminded me of the permanence of the purchase and the need to balance a house’s charm (read: age) with its potential to collapse around me. Similarly, stories about predatory lending sent me paging through my loan agreement, searching for loopholes that I couldn’t have recognized even if I had seen them. And every time someone told me to ignore the crime rate in a neighborhood because memories, not statistics, make a home, I became acutely aware of how choosing a house can be an intuitive voodoo-logic thing, and how likely I was to screw it up.

Like most people who are in a little over their heads, I became a bit defensive about receiving advice. Proverbs and platitudes I resented most of all — probably because I felt corniness was the only technical subject in which I could hold my own. The following four statements comprise a list of the most startlingly accurate generalizations that I’ve heard in recent months. I like to call it, “Four Surprising Truths Learned When I Thought Someone Was Patronizing Me.”

1. Set a budget, but your taste will go up.

When my real estate agent told me that everyone readjusts their initial budget to include more expensive houses, I dismissed it as a polite disapproval of my very conservative price range. A few weeks of viewing homes where previous tenants had stripped the hardware and left hobo nests in the garage changed the mind of this fair-weather-DIY-er; I adjusted my budget to allow for houses that were slightly more expensive but also a lot smaller, in hopes of getting a house in better shape.

2. There will be a house that haunts you.

I heard this statement often and never believed it until I met a little stucco house located — literally — on Main Street a few towns over from where I live. The backyard was overgrown and the kitchen held the dark-wood gloom of the ‘70s, but the house had a mudroom and a lot of potential. I debated the commute too long, weighing the extra driving time against the inlaid cabinets in the dining room, and eventually made an offer that was both too little and too late. I’ve seen quite a few houses in recent months with creaky porches, dusty mirrors, and feral cat colonies, the kind of house that I would secretly believe to be haunted, but the Main Street house is the only house that haunts me.

3. You have to see 30 houses before you know what you’re looking at.

The number changes, but this sentiment stands. It’s only now, with several dozen houses and a new vocabulary under my belt (siding, raised foundation, and API) that I’m starting to feel comfortable viewing homes. When I first started looking I was so distracted by the awkwardness of wandering past someone else’s half-filled hamper that I couldn’t focus properly on the condition of the house. Only time and more viewings can desensitize you to the strangeness of quantifying your admiration for someone’s home while they wait patiently at the neighbor’s house.

4. Escrow is terrifying; you’ll get cold feet your first time and chicken out.

Having just gone into escrow for the first time, I can attest that is indeed terrifying. Looking for a house has been a drawn-out process, like an odd high-stakes scavenger hunt without defined prizes or time limits, and the more involved I became in the search the more removed the end result seemed. Now, just as I started getting comfortable with the process of searching, one of my offers was accepted, and I have a whole new game and vocabulary to memorize before I decide to sign a contract. Whether my first time in escrow (with all of the signatures and meetings with sinister bankers that escrow implies) will be terrifying enough to scare me away, however, remains to be seen.

But, if I do manage to brave escrow and jump through all of the legal hoops with mild grace and artfully notarized signatures, I may enter into the final stage of buying a house. If that is the case, I will be done with searching and I’m a little ashamed to admit that the whole of my wisdom on the topic can be condensed into four teeny paragraphs — paragraphs that read suspiciously like a twine-embellished sign on the wall of someone’s country-style kitchen. Fortunately, the shameless nature of the statements doesn’t make them any less true. As it turns out, when doing something as marvelously clichéd as buying a house in the suburbs, all kinds of platitudes apply.

Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institute.

Actually, “unfair” hardly seems harsh enough; at best I’d been hasty, and in some cases, I was fairly certain that I’d been mean. When I realized this I was sitting in front of a loan officer, sporting a pair of shoes that I usually reserved for funerals and trying to charm my way into a mortgage. Sweating profusely and surrounded by multi-lingual posters declaring that a penny saved was a penny earned, I suddenly regretted all of the perfectly respectable houses I’d written off for little infractions like river-rock walls, chain-link fences, and kitchen sinks shaped like kissing cherubs. It might seem a little crazy, but sitting in front of that loan officer in a bank attached to the local supermarket, I felt like one of those houses.

I was visiting the loan officer on the advice of my brand-new real estate agent, a charming fellow full of platitudes about multiple bathrooms being the secret to domestic bliss. A loan officer, simply put, serves as gatekeeper to the bank — he examines the credit, debt, and capital of the applicant and decides whether she is likely to pay back her loan. I didn’t relish the idea of discussing my expenditures and turbulent job history with a stranger, especially a stranger with the word “officer” in his job title. However, my real estate agent assured me that a consultation like this was a necessary part of financing a house, so I donned my most responsible ensemble and followed his advice.

Whatever my misgivings about the nature of the meeting, I did hope that it might give my house search some direction. Every morning I scrolled through pictures of people’s homes and expanded each thumbnail, ignoring the captions and descriptive paragraphs as I tried to imagine my furniture on the owner’s carpet and my face in her picture frames. I was admittedly short-sighted and unsympathetic; I rarely exerted myself to visualize what a room might look like with new wallpaper, and I never tried to empathize with what the owners might have seen in their old stuff. I clicked systematically through the updated listings, flippantly dismissing houses for broken windows, ugly carpeting, and rusty bathtubs. Occasionally a picture would catch my eye — usually some pornographic full-length shot of a pantry — but most mornings I didn’t see a single house that I liked well enough to arrange a viewing.

In the loan officer’s cubicle, I started to wish that the idea of viewing and potentially buying a house had never crossed my mind. I was nervous and I’d spent the morning practicing the kind of small talk that I imagined financially secure people made. I’d even worked out a heart-wrenching story to explain my recent departure from “professional” work and the subsequent pay cut, hoping to give an undercurrent of heroism to the morbid tale told by my paycheck stubs. I knew that I wasn’t a hopeless case financially; I had a steady job, some savings, and decent credit. I was eager, however, to give a back story to the numbers, to explain away decisions that might seem illogical on paper, and maybe give myself something of a human-interest edge. And if given the slightest opportunity, I might have done just that.

As it happened, during our twenty-minute meeting, the loan officer never asked me for a personal statement. In fact, besides a terse question about whether I was really married, in a tone that suggested having different last names was simply too bohemian, the loan officer didn’t ask me any personal questions. He merely took my driver’s license, hen-pecked my name into his computer, and in complete silence, scrolled.

As the silent minutes passed and I realized that there would be no further questions, I became frantic. If the loan officer never asked me anything, I couldn’t explain myself. There would be no time to air my endearing crackpot theories about homeownership, or to mention that I haven’t overdrawn my checking account since I was sixteen and that even then I never overdrew to buy things like drugs and condoms, only the sort of lame, responsible purchases that herald a lifetime of frugality. He’d never know that, despite the alarming number of W-2s in my file, I wasn’t the kind of person who leapt nimbly from job to job. I stared at the loan officer while he stared at the screen, certain that I could never qualify for a loan without prefacing my financial realities.

I spent the rest of the consultation in despair, thinking about the assumptions that the loan officer must be making about me and wondering whether he could see my bank statement and knew that I order my deodorant from Amazon. But as the silent meeting wound to a silent, unrecognizable close, I noticed something familiar in the intent stare and violent scrolling of the loan officer. It was a pose of power and indifference, tempered with the knowledge that there might be something or someone better on the screen tomorrow. I realized that if the loan officer didn’t ask me any questions, it was no better than I deserved; he was looking at me in the same clinical way that I’d been looking at houses.

To attribute feelings of vulnerability and embarrassment to a house is silly, I know, but when I emerged from the loan officer’s cubicle into the florescent lights of the supermarket, I felt a strong sympathy for houses. In a way, hunting for a house is an endless barrage of rooms that you wouldn’t have painted that color, couches you wouldn’t have placed there, and windows that you’re pretty sure you wouldn’t have cracked. In the midst of all the things that you might not have done, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that someone did do them, and that they would probably jump at the opportunity to explain themselves. Unfortunately, when we look at houses we have to make our decisions based on the same kind of disembodied factual residue as a loan officer.

And, finally, silver lining: A few days after our meeting the loan officer called me and explained the results of his evaluation, which was based on my own factual residue. Despite having taken a long leering look at my broken windows, and never having heard any of my crackpot theories on homeownership, the loan officer approved my application. He not only approved it, but approved an amount generous enough to get me into the perfect house, provided that I can look closely enough to find it.

Photo by Laughing Squid

To be clear, I’m not one of those anti-materialistic chumps who don’t care where they live as long as they’re healthy and happy. On the contrary, I nurse an obsessive concern over my living space. I suffer seizures of embarrassment when admitting that I once rented an apartment with a wet bar in the living room and palm trees in the parking lot. I’ve lived in the same rental for two years now (a little house with a gate à la The Secret Garden in the backyard), but I still spend hours online peering at pictures of linen cabinets and loitering on the kind of blogs frequented by people who frame pieces of vintage wallpaper. 

But through all of the years I spent packing and unpacking, searching for the next adorable bathroom or picturesque alleyway, the idea of buying a house never occurred to me. Renting, I thought, was liberating. It was the choice of the artistic and intellectual as showcased in Woody Allen films; it allowed one to be adventurous and transient, always ready to move from one furnished brick warehouse to another. In college I imagined riding a bicycle up to my rambling seaside (rental) home, where I would drink toddies and smoke cigarettes in something called a turret. Later, when my obsession with Virginia Woolf subsided slightly, I imagined myself living in a pre-war apartment above an organic produce market. I never achieved this dream, but I’m sure if I had, the proprietor of the market would be jaded and arthritic and save me all of the best oranges.

I wish I could say that my decision to buy a house was entirely an emotional one, that I woke up one day and the romantic clichés cluttering my brain had been replaced by a strong, reasonable nesting urge. I could pretend that I was transformed by NPR into the sort of person who gets — really gets — what an interest rate is and doesn’t feel the least bit tempted to change the station when the word “foreclosure” comes up. I could even blame the fact that I’m married to someone who occasionally uses words like “escrow” and can fathom the elusive financial equations of homeownership (house + x^2 = good), but even that wasn’t much of a factor in my change of heart.

The real reason that I want to buy a house is part financial and part fantastical. I’ve lived in California my whole life, and I understand that overpriced real estate is a tax on the right to be self-righteous when telling people from other states that you don’t live anywhere near LA. However, when I renewed my lease and calculated the percentage of my income that went to my landlord last year, the majesty of renting started to fade a little. This disenchantment melded with my feeling of relative financial stability, and I began to wonder if buying a house was really the cultural betrayal I imagined. And every time a nosey family member or frantic newscaster credited the collapse of the housing market with giving people in my tax bracket a slim chance to buy a home, my curiosity grew.

The second, fantastical part of my reasoning is harder to explain. I’ve spent years searching for the perfect rental without ever finding it. Sure, there were close calls; there have been apartments with crank windows, shaded balconies, and tile floors that I’ve schemed to inhabit, only to find that there is a strange smell in the pipes, a broken oven in the kitchen, or a crazy homeless man who pounds on the door at night. My rental resume is filled with fabulous doorknobs on cheap doors and centrally located 600-square-foot cottages that seemed so much bigger during the hurried walk-through. No place is perfect and when you rent you have to choose between making due and moving on. Typically, I’ve moved on.  

That, I think, is what finally convinced me to start looking for a house of my own. As much as I’d like to fancy myself a rambling artist and adventurer, I’m a fairly boring person with a fairly developed interest in my living arrangements. And while I’ve accepted the fact that no place is perfect when you walk in the door, I haven’t given up on the idea of a perfect house. Owning a house gives you options beyond resignation and moving; it gives you the opportunity to change a house, to paint the shutters, hammer nails willy-nilly into the walls, and create your perfect home through sheer will and well-informed textile choices. When you think about it that way, buying a house is both a responsible and sentimental thing to do. It’s not quite as romantic as perpetual renting, but it comes close enough.

Illustration by wackystuff.