Diary of a Low Budget Superhero

"Why do you do this?"

A simple enough question. Why it made me tearful? That part isn't so simple. This is a bout between me and my own whiny self pity, so if you're not in the mood or are sick of people griping about the economy, move along, nothin' to see here.

So, this was yesterday, and "why do you do this" was my Joe asking me why do I insist on looking at real estate online when I know perfectly well that we can't buy anything, not now, and not in a future visible to anyone without rose-colored glasses? See, I've been looking at ZipRealty and Trulia for...well, a few years at this point. I pore over the price reductions, the number of days on the market, the calculated down payment amount if you have three percent, if you have ten, the amount you would need on hand for closing costs...

The reason he asked me this question just at that moment was by way of response to what I had just said to him, a bitchy statement bitten off like a chunk of ice, put in the form of a question, accompanied by me pointing dramatically out the window, across the street, to the condo units whose windows face our own, Commonwealth Avenue and the B line train between us.

"$528,000 for one of those places. Can you believe it. Can you believe over half a million." I correct myself: Commonwealth Avenue and the B line train and a phenomenal, monumental lifestyle gap between us.

"Why do you do this?"

"Why shouldn't I? I need to know what's out there." The knowledge I have amassed since 2007, about square footage and roofs and vinyl siding and furnaces and taxes, I could write a book. A depressing book. 2007 was, by the way, when those half mil condo units were built. We saw them go up. Nicely enough appointed, but nothing spectacular, and anyway, situated above a pretty loud sports bar and pizza place that's open 'til 3am, with a convenience mart on the corner. There is no parking. While they were constructing them, they hung a banner touting the "coming soon" and it read $750K. We wondered who they thought lived in this neighborhood? The fact that half of the units remain empty might answer that question: nobody lives here who can afford this property. This is a neighborhood of students, young professionals and middle class folks, plenty of working class and laborers and new residents, mostly from Russia and Haiti. $750K? This is upper Allston, not Newbury Street. "$528,000 is their ROCK BOTTOM," I added.

I just wanted Joe to share my outrage at this, further evidence that we're priced out here. We can either become country mice (or at least suburb mice) who own, or remain city rats who rent.

Still seated before my laptop, I clicked over to a property I had found. Not here in Boston, but in New Jersey, in the town where his parents live. I read aloud the listing, pausing to make note that this is a townhouse twice the size and less than half the price of those units across the street, and about five times the size of our apartment. 2279 square feet. The mere thought of all that open space made me choke up a little. High ceilings. Two car underground garage, grill range with a conventional AND a convection oven. Two refrigerators. Hardwood floors. Granite counter tops. Recessed lighting and skylights, All stainless appliances, a wood burning fireplace, a huge patio, finished basement, tons of storage, walk in closets, a master bath with steam shower and jacuzzi tub. Air conditioning! And $235K. Not that we're moving to New Jersey, it's just one of the things that could happen in the world. Taxes are high, but then, I'm living in Taxachusetts right now, so...

"Why do you do this? It makes you sad and cranky. We're fine, we have each other."

"I know it makes me sad and cranky. But Joe, I don't know what we're doing. We're stuck."

I do feel stuck sometimes. Stuck in a tiny apartment with a fridge shorter than I am and a single external (windowed) wall. That's where the tearful part comes in; he's right, we ARE fine, and we love each other more than any two people can possibly dare to dream. I told you this entry was a bout between me and my own self pity. We're healthy, we're frugal, we have no considerable debt left. Just a student loan at this point. Trying to save, but it's going sooo slooooow. At these times, blowing my nose and dabbing my wet cheeks, I try to remind myself there was a time when "saving" was a laugh, when it wasn't just a grumble about how bills are taking away all my money, but a dark, wolf at the door feeling of gravity because there WAS no money there to give up to bills. It's been many years since I've literally wondered where my next income was coming from and whether or not I could survive on Ramen and Wonder Bread.

Yes, I'm saving. I have been working numbers lately trying to figure how how long I have to save, and at what rate, before there's enough in there to even consider a car? Because, oh yes, I would need a car first in order to even think about buying a home, because clearly "in the city" is just not going to happen. I'm gonna end up in a nice home, but if you asked me to bet on the odds of an easy commute via public transportation...? No bet.

(And then what do I do with Joe, who doesn't even want to learn to drive?)

I just can't help it, every now and then I get into these sad sack modes where I NEED MORE SPACE. For example, I was so happy to get a KitchenAid for Christmas, I actually wept. But every time I have to move two things to get it on the counter to use, I get into the sad mode. Whenever we do laundry and it's a clothes hurricane in here, I get into the mode. My friends come over and have to crowd onto my small "apartment size" Bob's Furniture couch, and despite the happiness brought by my friends, I get into the mode. Whenever I get on hands and knees to sponge the winter sludge from the doorway area, I get into the mode. My kingdom for some kind of foyer or entry space that a person enters first, before the living room proper, so that winter's salty wet muck isn't a moat I must leap in order to enter my bathroom.

I satisfy such occasional self-pity by talking to myself like I'm a bratty child. "Listen, Veruca Salt," my logic brain has to tell my inner whiner, "You have regular eggs, nobody needs a golden goose, you little snot. There's people with no eggs at all, they'd kill for your regular eggs, now shut up and go to work or you'll really be eggless." I kind of suck it up to stay happy. I AM happy. But now and then I get back on Trulia or ZipRealty and ask "Why not me?"

In October when I went to visit my old childhood girlfriends, I had this same talk with one of my best friends in life, my soul sister when we were twelve. A lot like me she is, we even have similarly-minded men we've settled down with, and she's a gal whose finances meant she had move back in with her mom, with husband and kid in tow. It's symbiotic, her mom needed the help, too. So she's back in her girlhood bedroom where we used to have sleepovers gazing up at Duran Duran and Rick Springfield posters, read Stephen King aloud to freak each other out and record elaborate talk shows into her tape recorder. I commiserated with her about the impossibility of this economy, saying "I just don't know how people are doing it."

How are people doing it? How do people have weddings and vacations and kids and dogs and cars and a house?

Right now we're living comfortably, but that is only because we live simply: we never take a vacation to anywhere, we have so far skirted the car payment and upkeep, we shop using coupons and avoid extras such as big cable TV packages and any product that starts with a "i"...

I keep saying that getting just a LITTLE ahead would be great. I don't even want a million dollars. My whole life would change for like $15k or $20K right now.

"Why do you do this?"

Maybe it's just a matter of keeping my eyes on the prize, to remember why I work so hard and to have all the necessary knowledge when I finally get there. You have to constantly think of ways to pare down and keep more money. Already, a day later, I put a bunch of my books up for sale on Half.com, and tomorrow I'm going to kill the MCI long distance, we don't need it. Save, save, save.

Eye of the tiger.

Ding ding.

I was driving my Geo Prism, my first car that was "my" car, commuting from my apartment in Somerville to work at GiantSuckingSound.com in Billerica. I generally listened to WERS on the radio. A song ended, and news broke in, reporting that a plane had hit one of the towers.

I thought that was so strange and unfortunate! My first thought was literally "How did that pilot hit the WORLD TRADE CENTER, it's not like you can't SEE it." But I was envisioning a LITTLE plane, a Cessna or something, and assumed it would come out that the pilot lost control or the engines failed. I didn't think of damage to the building at all-- they're HUGE, a small plane crashing into one would mean closing a few floors for repair at most, and hopefully the people inside saw the plane in time and ran for safety.

I think the reporter thought that, too.

But not a few minutes later, the flustered reporter came back and said that ANOTHER plane hit. That was the first time I felt any dread. I switched to a news station. It became more serious and the world darkened a bit. It wasn't a little plane. Big plane. And not just one, which may have been a believable accident...two planes. No accident. We didn't even know yet about the other planes.

I got to the office park, quickly parked the car. I saw "the smokers" outside. A group of women who took smoke breaks together, they would step outside this certain door. They were clustered outside that door and one of them, Corrine, had a radio. Everyone looked ashen and stunned. I hurried past them into my office and turned on my radio at my desk, shoved my laptop into its dock and turned it on, while snatching up the phone to call Hub. I either woke him up,, or he'd just woken up -- he was in grad school at the time. "Turn on the TV," I said.

"What channel?"

"Any channel."

He watched while I listened in, the horror increasing. He turned up the volume so I could hear. He described what was on the screen. People running. Smoke. Blackness. When the towers fell, he told me. I wanted to not believe him, but I heard it. I could actually hear it. I think we tried calling all our NY friends. I think I may have tried to work. I know we hugged each other and there were tears. I know I went home later and watched and re-watched the footage. The running, the screaming, over and over again.

A few weeks later we went camping in upstate NY with Z and Fatima, Jeff and Zephyr. They needed to get out of the city, and we really needed to spend some quiet time with them. Z and Fatima are Arab. There was a lot of meaningful discussion and hugging. They're wonderful people. They'd cooked food and brought it on foot to the workers at Ground Zero. Hot food, coffee.

Kind of like Arthur Dent in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, when he tries to fully internalize that the earth had been demolished by Vogons to make way for a hyperspace bypass, I couldn't get my head all the way around "the towers are gone. New York doesn't have the twin towers anymore. Thousands of people died horribly." It was too much to think about, I couldn't accept it. Instead, little realizations would come to me and fit through a crack in my wall of nonacceptance. I broke down when I remembered the T-shirt I had when I was little, with my own face on it, that my parents bought in a novelty shop at the top of the World Trade Center -- they took your photo and made you a T-shirt. And remembered and revisited bits of an online diary I'd followed for years, then called Cubegirl, whose actual cube had been in an office in the towers and who'd cheated death only because she'd very recently fallen in love and moved to Boston...I'm proud to say I know her, now, so it's weird to think of her as "cubegirl" anymore. Or just every movie (or episode of Friends) that used a skyline shot of NY, featuring the towers, was enough to send me into a fresh bout with sorrow.

This will be a day of remembrance for my whole life, and I guess my main wish is that it's the worst thing I'll have as a firsthand fact of terrorism. So many people in the world have seen so much more. Bombings and worse.

As for the men and women in uniform keeping us all safe, "thank you" doesn't even cover it.

I didn't so much clear yesterday's Hurdle of Blah. It's more like I kinda shuffled up to it, stared at it awhile, drank a second cup of coffee, nudged it aside with my butt as I plodded past. Hey, I got to work and did my stuff, didn't I? Leaping over hurdles is for next week.

This is the kind of mood when I just do not get people. Every day there are new feats of Stupid that trumped yesterday's, and there will be still more Stupid tomorrow, and yet the world manages to spin around the sun and we do it all again the day after that.

Some are Big Stupids, like Michael Vick, that Arizona pastor who is publicly encouraging his flock to assassinate our country's leader, everything Sarah Palin says, and whatever unholy thing that makes Paris Hilton famous.

Most are Little Stupids.

On most days, I just gawk at the Little Stupids, even when they add up and make me question mankind's survival. I just say "If traffic is so bad at five o'clock, why do you still leave at five? It's the same thing every day!" I say "Dude, of COURSE you're tired, you went to bed three hours before you're due at work!" I say "Hey lady, I'm no expert, but wouldn't it be better if you wait for the walk signal before darting out into traffic, then that cab wouldn't have almost hit you?" I leave friendly notes in the restroom that say "Don't pee on the seat, thanks." I handle the Stupid and maintain a level of Happy.

But on days like this, the Blah days, I can't even bear to look at the Big Stupids face-on, and the Little Stupids make me want to go home and hide under my covers. It's like the more Stupid there is, the more it eats away at my normally sunny disposition and leaves me wondering just why the hell am I so happy all time?

I might have a new way to gauge the Stupid level.

Every single shopping cart at Stop N Shop bears a clear notice stating that the wheels will automatically stop turning once the cart gets a certain distance from the store's electronic sensors. Do you get it? The cart won't GO. You can't take the cart with you when you leave the store. Yet every single day there's a sad little cluster of dead carts, in the exact same place on Everett Street, shining under the afternoon sun like a chrome monument to that day's fresh batch of Stupid. Some days as I walk past on my way to get some lunch, there are six, seven, eight carts.

I muse "What was the first guy thinking." OK, he's easy. Let's assume he didn't or couldn't read the sign. We live in a very mixed neighborhood, you will hear any number of languages walking around. It's one of the things we like about living here, it makes for awesome bodega's and funky little eateries and an overall cool "neighborhoody" vibe, where you can still get a cup of coffee that doesn't come from Starbucks, a bunch of flowers that doesn't come from a Kabloom, and an ice cream that doesn't come from a Baskin Robbins. Plantains and golumki and knishes and karaoke and falafel, we got it all. Not all signs are in English.

But then what was the second guy thinking? He doesn't need to understand the sign saying "cart will stop." He can clearly see the stopped cart. But then, maybe that guy didn't get the connection between that cart, quite immobile, stranded on the corner near the bridge where that homeless guy sleeps and huffs his Reddi-Whip cans, and his own cart, which is about to lock its wheels and grind to a halt.

But how about that third guy. And the fourth and fifth. Because by then, it's like a friggin' cart pile-up. Look, if I'm walking along a wintry sidewalk and I see five people flailing on the ground ahead of me, I'm gonna say "Hm, must be icy up there." I won't need a sign warning me "Icy Sidewalk!" No language is needed, no college degree, not even a high-school equivalency. Just your eyes. You could land on that corner from another planet and "get it." Cart stops here.

Yet every day. Every single day, new batch of dead carts.

Just like the pollen count I check each morning on the weather scan channel to see how the air quality is that day, I'm gonna start doing a cart count to see how the Stupid quality is that day. One or two carts, I can expect to get a lot done and no one will piss me off. Three to six carts, it'll be a busy day and I will require some good music or a good hard workout to clear out the Stupid. Over six, and everybody just better watch out. You want to talk to me, bring chocolate.

If only I could go home and hide under the covers on those goddamn 9-cart days.

Or is it the blah's? Blahs. Blah's. I dunno, some words look wrong both ways. Either way you spell it: meh.

I haven't had a tummy ache in a couple of weeks, but I just feel blah! I got the blood work results -- no apparent gallbladder issues, and liver and pancreas look fine. No results from the ultrasound but I assume they'd have called right away if anything was amiss. I guess I should just keep doing the food diary (kinda HAVE to, counting the Points on Weight Watchers!) and see if there are any triggers in common. I'm definitely leery of the Vitalicious gluten-free, sugar-free low-fat mini-muffins now...then again, I ate four of them in one day. (Well they're SMALL).

I didn't go to work today. I just felt too...blah. Treating myself to movies (13 Ghosts remake, and I Love You, Man and a re-screen of Sneakers). Work tomorrow, so I'm mentally working up towards a blah-clearing hurdle!

I was struggling to get through a particularly gnarly workday, but when my co-worker ventured out into the rain and brought me back a tuna sub (thanks Jeff!) I tried to shut out all the frustrations and take an actual break.

One hand on the sandwich, the other on my mouse, I tried to take my mind off work for ten minutes. Facebook tipped me off that E News online was streaming the Michael Jackson service. I came in during the latter half, and I couldn't watch it all (a "break" at my work is, well, not so much) but I caught bits of it.

And you know what? All you haters can kiss the back of my butt.

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