Syndicate and Hague

Megan and I were coming home from an evening at Spyhouse (me desperately writing a paper for a conference, a sad excuse for a paper; Megan reading) and caught the end of The Story on our glorious Minnesota Public Radio. This is what it was about:

Jessica Zichichi and her husband Sal have held onto good jobs - their problem is the housing market.

Jess and Sal were living in a small house in Cape Cod that they loved. Then Sal took a job in South Carolina. It was 2006 and they figured they could easily sell the house. In the meantime, they’d live on their 33-foot boat.

Then the bottom fell out of the housing market. Jess and Sal were stuck living on the boat while they rented their house to a nightmare tenant and tried to rustle up enough funds to build a one-room barn to live in. And then Jess got pregnant. She talks with Dick about some of the good that’s come from her family’s ordeal.

With all the awfulness of our own buying(?) a short sale ordeal overwhelming most aspects of our lives at the moment, hearing Jess’s story was like a moment of light. I think this may have been a rerun because I vaguely remember the story, and I remember originally thinking “oh how terrible!!” - but this time it just delighted us. We laughed and gave each other big smiles every time Jess’s story intersected with ours. Just knowing someone else was going through things as ridiculous as ours - and more so, at least we’re not living on a boat, right? - made our transient life a little less lonely and tragic.

It’s not perspective really, more of a relief at shared troubles. I guess that’s perspective in a way.

All I know is that MPR brings me so much joy so frequently. And I love listening to it with Megan.

***

By the way, I haven’t even talked about how we got married. But it was so fantastic. I’ve started a few posts about it, but things have been so nuts with the house stuff that I haven’t even had the level of concentration necessary to finish writing the posts and do the wedding justice.

Back in April when Megan and I fled our insane and scary living situation, we had just put a very reasonable - but low - offer on a house in an absolutely dreamy part of Minneapolis. Yes, we had to leave in the middle of the night; yes, we had to put all our things in storage; yes, we were getting married in less than a month; yes, it was hard to crash here and there with two cats and a dog; yes, it was the end of the semester; but we would get the house and live happily ever after the end.

Ha. Hahahaha. HA.

This is our third month of “transition.” Technically, we are homeless. Homeless as in “no permanent address,” not homeless as in “sleeping in a shelter,” but still…the state of being unsettled sends out ripples in every direction. Concentration, sleep, creativity, motivation, money - they all decrease.

I have reminded myself repeatedly of our privilege. We had to move suddenly, but we had enough resources to buy boxes and rent a storage space and even get movers to take things to storage. We had places to stay - sure, we had to move around a bit, and staying with other people is stressful for all involved, but we got to keep our animals with us. We were (and are) homeless in the most privileged way - we’re waiting to close on a house. And it’s keeping us in limbo.

However, it’s starting to drive us insane. Every time we think things are ready to go, something else happens to throw a wrench into the ordeal. It’s the problem of trying to buy a short sale, and of a real estate market full of insanity. But we’ve just come to a point today where - unless something dramatic changes - we may have to walk away from a beautiful house in a beautiful neighborhood for reasons that have nothing to do with us.

I am building walls around my heart (I love this house) in an attempt to prepare myself for the worst. Aside from our love for this house (we’ve not seen anything we like nearly as much), though, is how exhausted we are from all this. The idea that we have to move yet again in August - after we just moved again in July, and without knowing if/when we’ll get the house - it’s making me lose my damn mind. To have gotten the banks to accept our offer and now have it on the verge of falling through…

My writing life has suffered greatly from lack of stability, as has any research I was planning to do this summer for school. Instead I spend an inordinate amount of time creating false structures of stability around me. And try to remind myself of how much worse it could be. Because it could always be worse.

But here is my confidential to the banks moment:

You suck. You suck. You suck. You loaned people money when they had no way of repaying it. You inflated the housing market to a disastrous point. No one knows what the hell anything costs anymore because of you - and appraisals are now all over the place. You facilitated peoples’ desperation or greed or ignorance to a point where you were all bound to fail. You’re not making any money on this damned short sale that you’re holding on to. Every day that goes by is another day this beautiful house is vacant, and is another day of disrepair. You suck. Take the losses you’ve brought on yourself. You suck, you suck, you suck.