April Will Certainly Be Cruel To Me, At Least

Oh, remember back in November? Do you remember that miserable month last year, right after my in-laws were here for three weeks under the most appalling and stressful set of circumstances I really can imagine? That month where I committed to blogging every day for a month, because, well, basically because if everybody jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge I would totally do it too?

So they've made it a thing for every month, not just November, and because blogging every day over here is not enough, not when my job...oh, my job. My job, it is terrible right now. I have no words. It's enough to make me forget to clear my browser history at work. Ever heard of being Dooced? That would be really passive-aggressive of me, wouldn't it?

So the theme is letters, and I like letters, and so I'm going to try it in April. I'm hoping that it will be cathartic for me, and will maybe pad the impact that my professional life is having as it blasts into me full-speed, over and over again.

NaBloPoMo Day 4: Life on the Other Side of the Tracks

When we moved to the D.C. area three years ago, we had one goal: to find an affordable apartment with a washer and dryer, as close as possible to Dan's new job. It made sense at the time: he was the only one who had a job.

What we found cost $1000 a month, had a barely functioning washer and a dryer that had to have a "rest" between loads or it would stop working altogether, and was located in what was by far the worst neighborhood that I had ever lived in. I was upper-middle class by birth and had grown up on a tree-lined street with white clapboard houses in a liberal University town. White-bread Democrat land.

Oxon Hill wasn't even that bad. Granted, I lived in a better part of Oxon Hill. But in the three years we lived on Livingston Road, I got to witness my first domestic assault. A man jumped out of the passenger side of a black Escalade with spinner rims, marched with great purpose over to his wife/girlfriend/accquaintence, who was walking down the sidewalk in front of her apartment with her son, who I would estimate to have been around four, and knocked her to the ground with one punch square to the face. With equal purpose he marched back to his car and got back in, and whoever was driving the car drove off. The little boy helped his mother off the ground without a word, as if he'd seen it every day for his whole life, and they went back into their apartment. I was nearly nine months pregnant at the time, and I was so petrified by the entire experience I can't believe that I didn't go into labor on the spot. It was the same month that a local woman and her ex-husband made the national news when he walked into the store where she worked, doused her with gasoline from a 20-ounce bottle of Sprite, and lit her on fire in front of a store full of customers. She eventually recovered from the third-degree burns on her face, upper body, and arms and went on Oprah. He received a life sentence for attempted murder.

Oxon Hill isn't really that bad, not when you compare it to the parts of Southeast Washington D.C. that it butts up against. But we live in Laurel now. It is up in the top corner of Prince George's County, wedged between the Howard and Montgomery County line. The median house price in Laurel is $640,000. There are restaurants, real restaurants, where you don't shout your order at a little Asian woman through three inches of plexiglass and push your money through a little drawer. Same with the gas stations: real people take your money. People here are less concerned with bus schedules: no real need for them here, where fewer people depend on public transportation.

It is clean and polished here in Laurel. I am not afraid to fill up my car with gas after dark here, like I was in Oxon Hill. The neighborhood kids don't look and act like they've been eating lead paint chips--and in fact, there are real neighborhood kids, not kids who will only be around for a month or two because their parents are unreliable and they are staying with an aunt or a grandmother or a friend until they're shuffled off to someone else. There are real neighborhoods, not just a bunch of apartment complexes.

The most ironic thing about it: we are actually priced out of buying in Oxon Hill, except in the worst areas, neighborhoods where I would actually fear for our safety. The National Harbor project is driving prices up so fast that a three-bedroom condo is going for $249,000, and a single-family home is considerably more.

But this condo in Laurel is $200 a month less than our old apartment. It is small--boy is it small--and it is at the top of a positively brutal set of stairs that made moving in feel like the Bataan Death March. But it is also quiet, populated with pleasant and considerate neighbors, and well-maintained, all things that set it apart from our old apartment complex.

Our last attempt to buy a house went horribly awry in every conceivable way, so much so that I am not really willing to try it again. We have a short-term lease with a really lovely woman who is the daughter of a woman I work with, who got married, built a house in Richmond, and moved there, and I can't imagine staying here a long time. I'm sure in the next few weeks, I'll be ready to start looking for something that is really ours. We won't be able to afford Laurel when we do,
and it's a forty-minute commute for Dan to get to work, which makes him just crazy.

But I will probably not see a woman get punched in the face in front of her son here. It's just not that kind of a place--not that domestic abuse doesn't occur everywhere, but this isn't the sort of place where it's likely to happen right in front of me. It's nice here, so nice that I'm forgetting from time to time that all we did was drive half an hour up the county.

So.

So. Here's how it all went down.

Last Tuesday afternoon: Inspection. All is well. There are two short lists of minor repairs that need to be made on the house, our list, which is cosmetic, and the inspector's list. The seller signed off, agreeing that all repairs would be done to satisfaction at the final walk-through, which was to take place this morning.

Wednesday evening: our loan officer receives an email informing her that the mortgage lender would not approve the loan, because the co-op in which we were buying does not insure the full structure of the house, since it's been improved upon. We were aware of this and were prepared to buy additional insurance; however, the lender feels that the co-op is underinsured and therefore not eligible. In addition, there is a lien on the property for water improvements that the seller is liable for. Our loan officer calls our agent and our loan processor at home.

Thursday morning: I get up and discover that my apartment has gained an additional grandparent overnight--my father-in-law, who has driven from Michigan to help us move.

Later Thursday morning: I get a call from the agent, who informs me of the development with the lender.

Friday morning: I go to work trying to find another lender who will accept us. No one will close this loan, and Friday afternoon, Dan and I make the decision to walk away from the table.

Monday morning: Since we will not be moving, we will not be needing daycare in Indian Head. I call our previous daycare provider, and she informs me that she has, regrettably, filled our slot, and cannot take Max back.

Monday afternoon: Dan goes to the apartment complex office to inform them that we will not be moving out. We had been on a month-to-month lease at the bargain price of $1210 a month. The office informs him that we had told them a month ago that we would be closing on our house and moving out at the end of the month, and so they had rented the apartment. They are holding us to our end-of-the-month committment.

Monday evening: We meet with a new daycare provider. She is lovely, professional, charmed by Max, affordable, and very close to the school where Dan teaches. This is the first thing that has gone right in days.

Later Monday evening: I talk to the daughter of a consultant we use at work, who has moved out of her small condo and is willing to lease it to us. It is 30 miles from the school where Dan teaches, but we are out of options and out of time.

The house thing has been expensive, stressful, exhausting, and ultimately incredibly disappointing. The rest of it has been small potatoes indeed. As much as my in-laws drive me slightly crazy, they are making sure that we are okay and moved into a new apartment before they go back to Michigan, something for which I am very grateful.

I am grateful. I keep repeating that to myself. I have so much to be thankful for. We could be in Southern California, where the Santa Ana's are expected to pick up again this weekend. We could be in the Dominican Republic, under three feet of water yet again this year. Millions of families become homeless every year, for a million different reasons, and as lousy and difficult a situation as this all is, I am grateful. I am.

But this has all been excruciating. Words sort of fail me, and while I'm not generally a crier, this is all getting to me just a little bit. I am really quite at the end of my rope, and while I am tying a knot and holding on for dear life, this is really all I am capable of doing until I can go ahead, get my feet under me, and begin to move forward again.

So, this is funny.

My boss went to Capital Hill yesterday to testify before a House of Representatives committee. I spent many many hours getting him ready to answer questions succinctly and in as few words as possible and without whipping out a seventeen page flip chart every time he needed to make a point.

He was cogent, he was salient, he was tenable. He was ready. He was at the top of his game.

He left everything that he needed sitting on his desk in a folder.

He did get his notes and all of his stuff before he was scheduled to go on, but not without some considerable manuvering.

In the future, when he goes to testify before Congress, he will do so with his notes pinned to his sweater, like a kindergartener.

This story is the only fun or funny thing I have to say right now. The rest of my life really is just pretty bad right now, and I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around the awfulness, but I will probably at some point write about our underinsured house. It's actually not ours, and it won't be. But that's a story for another time, and that's because I am not currently done slamming my head in my car door looking for relief from the agony that has been the last two days.

Mother Nature's Son...Um, I Mean Daughter

I'm sitting in my office, watching a spider crawl up the wall, listening to an all-Beatles internet radio station because I left my Ipod at home for my nephew to listen to, and thinking about instant karma. The zen concept, not the John Lennon song.

If I kill this spider, will I be run over by a semi on the way home? According to my understanding of karma, it's a little more complicated than that, a gradiose version of paying it forward only to be rewarded in some other lifetime. However, in the week before closing on my house, is it really a risk I am comfortable taking?

And...can I balance out killing a spider by the other nice things I've done today: resetting the timer on the coffeemaker so that my mother-in-law would have fresh coffee when she got up, leaving my laptop and Ipod for my technology-deprived 18-year-old nephew who is working his tail off for us in getting us moved, and letting a Hispanic guy in a Mazda merge into the space in front of me on Kenilworth Ave. this morning?

While I wrote this, the spider wandered off, and it's all fifteen minutes of wondering wasted, except that it's got me thinking about karma this week, when the goodwill of the cosmos seems to be a topic of great importance indeed for me.

Is it a Sign? Probably not, but it feels like one.

Playing on internet radio as the loan officer calls to tell me that Bank of America has issued final approval on our home loan and scheduled us to close on October 20th: "Here Comes The Sun," performed by Nina Simone.

It has indeed been a long, cold, lonely winter, and I wouldn't have gotten through this week without you, internet. I heart you.

I Wanna Be Sedated

Here we are, two weeks out from closing on our house, and the word of the day, boys and girls, is STRESS.

Closing on a house is expensive. And to be honest, if we had any money, we'd already own a house. What's worse is that I'm paying the final month's rent on our apartment: $1210. This is not money I really have to spend right now. It's money that needs to go towards a few final costs--like the $900 that Michigan Tech claims that Dan owes from over a decade ago, and we just don't have time to fight with them over. It's gotta come off the credit report before the loan goes through. Not to mention that we have to--absolutely HAVE TO--come up with $7200 for closing. There's that small matter.

Couple that with a month very heavy with guests--my mother, two of my best friends (in a row, not at the same time) and now, Dan's mother and nephew are coming. And staying. Evidently forever. Through closing at least.

I am beginning to feel like my mental health is being compromised. Compromised, people. Like hard to sleep at night, hard to eat, so fucking anxious I can barely string two coherant thoughts together. It's really a great trademark for a writer. I'm sure you can imagine how good I am at my job right now. I'm alternately clingy and snappish with Dan and Max, I am finding it increasingly difficult to be civil to my mother or my mother-in-law.

I have got to find a way to get through the rest of this month without doing any of the following: seriously alienating people who love me with what I'm sure appears to them to be one long-lasting and overwhelmingly bad mood; getting fired from my job for failure to achieve any of the objectives for which I was hired; make myself physically sick; or just simply suffer a meltdown.

Recently we found several toys on the recall list of Chinese-made toys that Max owns, including a set of Baby Einstein soft blocks. One of them has a frog on them, and if you pull the frog's leg, the block vibrates. Max used to pull this frog's leg by placing its leg between his teeth and pulling. My child has been regularly chewing on lead toys for over a year. There's some more good news for me; somewhere in the middle of all of this chaos, I have to find time to get my kid to the doctor to find out if he'll have to take the short bus to college. Does the short bus even go to college? And is my kid already suffering from lead poisoning? From what I understand, the symptoms are decreased attention span, acting out, poor judgement, temper tantrums--so am I to understand that my toddler may not be acting like a toddler because he's a toddler, but because there's something wrong with him? I don't even know what to say about that.

This much anxiety is not good for me. I may need some kind of medication here at some point, people, so if it's true that 1 in 6 professional adults uses drugs recreationally, let me just say to the 1.5 crackheads that are currently reading this post: it's time to share.

Jane, You Ignorant Slut.

So, when the sellers counter-offer included a change from a closing date of Halloween to September 28, what did I fail to consider when we agreed?

It wasn't that, in less than one month, we would be waking up in a home that we owned.

It wasn't that the house was priced at least $100,000 less than any of the other crime scenes, I mean houses, that we looked at, in a better neighborhood, and in better shape.

It wasn't that there was another offer on the house and that, were we to accept the counter-offer, time was of the essence.

It wasn't that, hey, I work for a homeownership development organization! Maybe I should buy a house.

I didn't forget any of that. I thought about all of it.

What did I forget?

That by pushing up the closing date by a month, we were in no way reducing any of our costs associated with buying a home.

Oh, and that we don't happen to have a spare $9000 sitting around to take to closing with us in less than a month. In two months, we could have pulled it together. In three and a half weeks: not so much.

Duh.

At Least We Don't Have To Evict Any Crack Whores

As I write this, our real estate agent (if you need one, send me an email and I'll send you his name and number) is writing a contract for an offer on our first house.

We haven't said anything to most people--including our parents--because we get tired of having to answer the "found a house yet?" questions. My mother is the worst. She would call us every day if she thought we'd answer the phone that often: "How's the house-hunting going?" Seriously, I love you, but shove off. WE STILL LIVE IN AN APARTMENT! Does that tell you ANYTHING at all?

There really aren't that many ways for house-hunting to go. We live in a very expensive area and, while we make a good living between the two of us, it's not good enough to afford a $600,000 starter home. Okay, I've talked about my mother, but this is not a woman in touch with the realities of living in the D.C. metro area. She lives in an enormous 4-bedroom, 3-bath modern split level in Kalamazoo, Michigan. When she bought it, Pharmacia, the area's largest employer, had been bought by Pfizer, and all of the employees were gradually being let go or transferred. There were about 15 houses for sale in the three blocks around her house, and suffice it to say, they were a steal. Her beautiful, modern home went for $161,000.

This is not the case here. Where we live, $161,000 will not buy you a one-bedroom condo in a bad neighborhood. And by "bad neighborhood," I mean the kind of neighborhood where you duck when you hear gunfire. The kind where you don't really want to raise kids.

When she was here in May, we looked at a two-bedroom townhouse in Greenbelt, Maryland. That is a long way from where Dan works--45 minutes, easily. This townhouse was listed at $214,900. My mother and I both left in tears, while Dan, inexplicably, went on and on about how much he liked the shed out behind the place.

My reaction: "I would rather be homeless. Like, living in a HOMELESS SHELTER."

My mother's reaction: "They must have listed the price wrong."

Dan: "Did you see that shed? That shed makes me very happy."

Molly: "Would you shut the fucking fuck up about the fucking shed? What the fuck?"

Molly's Mother: "I can't imagine anybody paying $215,000 for that. That looked like a meth lab."

Molly: "When have you ever been in a meth lab?"

Dan: "But the shed..."

And so on. Anybody wonder why I really just wanted to talk about my hair? That house had an entire wall in the living room that appeared to be made out of cardboard, painted to look like exposed brick, nailed to the studs.

But a couple of weeks ago, I saw a listing on Craig's List for a house in Indian Head, Maryland. Indian Head is a long, long, long way away from where I work. It is a long way. I will just leave it at that. It's not so bad for Dan, but this will be a 1-hour commute for me, minimum.

Indian Head, Maryland, is not a very happening place. I did not see myself moving here. It lacks things like Target. And a grocery store.

However, when you find a house that is twice the size, at least, of anything else you've looked at so far, and the price is $150,000 less than the last place you found that you would even consider buying, you make exceptions.

We found a house. And we're making an offer. OMG, BFF. WTF?