Functional Listmaking

When we told our realtor we wanted to make an offer on the red house, she was excited for us and supportive. She thought it was a good house for us and that we could get it.

So it just came down to the question that drives all economic decisions: how much? And unlike with buying a granola bar, the answer wasn’t a constant set by Safeway but the result of a multivariate equation. As I explained before, in this Very Special Real Estate Market, you have to pick a number you want to offer. And whereas in Normal Places, if the asking price is $p, you might offer $p - x where x is a function of number of likely other offers, amount of time the house has been on the market, and any repairs or renovations you might need to do.

‘Round these here parts, your offer is more like $p + y, where y is also a functional of likely other offers, plus some other stuff, like the fact that the weather was nice on the day of the open house and what the seller’s realtor’s horoscope will say in three weeks and then a fixed but unknown arbitrary positive number because it sucks to be you.

It feels like witchcraft and I don’t believe in witches. I do believe in negotiation. I hadn’t believed that I was going to need to negotiate with my own realtor.

The negotiation was precipitated by the fact that the $y I wanted to add to $p (we’ll call my number $yLiz, with apologies that I can't figure out how to get Blogger to do superscripts) was far lower than the $y she thought we needed to add to get the place (we’ll call that $yRealtor). In fact, rather alarmingly, her idea of what $y should be was almost twice as big as my idea of what it should be.

The disparity didn't surprise me. There is an inherent difference between her incentives and mine - while she was extremely helpful, it was never going to be coming out of her pocket at the end of the day. And there was the, ahem, additional factor that she knew that I hadn’t exactly been Ms. Cucumber while we were at the open house.

But I think she wasn’t aware of the fact that a lot of my enthusiasm was generated by the fact that unlike most sane human beings (who watch television shows like, I dunno, what are the cool kids watching these days? Mad Men? Man, how I loathe that show), I have inoculated myself against fear of renovation by near-incessant viewings of Property Brothers, Flip or Flop, Love It or List It, and other key HGTV renovation shows. In other words, I’m far less likely than the Average Jen to be scared of a little orange paint and a melange of 1940s tile jobs.

So I sat down to negotiate with my own realtor and redeem myself as a Collected Professional Lady in the eyes of my dear and beleaguered Husband. And there’s one skill I learned in law school (I think by accident - I don’t think anyone taught us this) that comes in handy more often than you think. It works like this:

Take out a yellow pad of paper. Take out a pen. and start making a list of all the problems your opponent has right in front of them. If you’re really good at this, you can make the list while still staring them in the eye. And as it happens, I’m really good. (It helps that when you fold back the pages on a legal pad that the person across the table from you can’t see if your list is cascading down the page sideways because you’re not looking where you’re writing).

After I did that, she caved. She said that when she went to them with the offer, she could point out that we had really done the math and that we knew how much it needed ot be put into it and that our offer was very reasonable. And then she said she’d go draw up the paperwork.

Something that feels like a spa-level luxury to this lawyer: having someone else do the paperwork for you.
As she went to get the paperwork, Husband offered casually, “Oh, by the way, I’m going to be out of the country for the next week.”

She stopped walking and turned around. “You’re leaving the country while you try to put an offer on a house?”

Husband answered, “Yeah, I have work. Why? Liz will be here, she can handle anything you need.”

The realtor looked at him, then at me, then at the list on the table, then back at me with an expression I would describe as “retreating to a mental safe house.”

I tried to give her my best non-diabolical smile, but I think it’s gotten rusty.

----------------

We got the house.  Including an old ladder and some other old stuff that was in the garage, to the great delight of Husband.  It's the most grown-up thing we've ever done.

-----------------

The start of the closing process was pretty straightforward, in fact. It did require signing each of our names to approximately twelve kazillion pieces of paper (each).  But we had a strategy for the rest of it, and by a strategy, I mean a happy accident:

“Oh, hey, realtor/title people/mortage people: we’ll be in Hawaii during most of the closing period.”

The resulting consternation was extreme, despite the fact that our realtor should have known we apparently don’t respect whatever secret rule exists that whilst purchasing a house, you must remain within 50 miles of said house for the entire process. Our realtor, mortagee, and title person all could not believe that we were going AWAY. To a FAR-OFF ISLAND. During the CLOSING PROCESS?!?!?!?!?!!!!!

“Well, what do you need us here for?”

What if you need to sign/see/hear/be talked at about/re-sign something?

“You can call either of us on our cell phone. Or you can e-mail us if we need to sign something. We’ll scan it back. They have Internet there. It’s America.”

...but! but! BUT…

“It’ll be fine.”

I don’t know if we were wildly lucky. I don’t know if normally everything does come crashing to a halt if you vacation during your real estate transaction. I do know that I did have to sign a jillion documents what felt like seven times each, and that I was signing and scanning like I was on a personal quest to endurance-test the scanner. But despite the fact that we left town for half of our two-week closing, everything was fine.

And we came back from our vacation to our very own home.

Seeing Orange: Functional Adults Aren't Scared of a Weird Paint Job

If Husband hadn’t already been sold on the barn-like appearance of the house I found on Zillow, he was sold when he saw how old it was. He has a noted fondness for old things. The older, the better. He gets really excited when we see, for example, rusty farm equipment somewhere. He likes things more the older they get. If you think about it, it’s a rare and excellent quality in a spouse.

So we headed off to the open house. Excitingly, Sassy was in town so she could come with us to look at it, which was wonderful since she has fantastic taste in all things. As we pulled up outside the house, we saw a young couple moving in across the street and the woman had on a shirt from our own dear Alma Mater University, so I was pleased already.

Before we got out of the car, I cautioned Husband: “If we like it, don’t show too much excitement. We have to stay cool or it could drive up the price.”

Husband, with a suspicious look that seemed misplaced: “Yes, I AGREE we should stay calm.”

I gave him the side-eye and we all went in.

And, dear reader, it was so great. It was 50% bigger than the house we had put an offer in. There were high ceilings with awesome beams.

It had TWO AND HALF bathrooms. It had a back yard with grass and a deck.

And I may have lost my cool a bit. I think I was beaming. Our realtor had to do damage control later when their realtors called her and said, “I think your client really liked it!”

Now, of course, it wasn’t all one-hundred-percent perfect. In fact, a person with lesser vision (and a person who hadn't spent two months of funemployment watching HGTV look easy) might have been scared off by, say, the orange kitchen:

… or an insane wood stove thing:

…. or a bathroom with a strangely angled toilet:

...or another one with insane tile:

No, those didn’t deter me.  Because I had decided this house was going to be ours. And when I get resolved on something, that’s when I come the closest to being a functional adult. Which was a good thing, since we were fixing to become homeowners - which is the third most mature thing I can think of (after parents and elected officials).

Sassy liked it too.  Husband liked it too (because it had a two-car garage he could fill with rusty car parts).

All we had to do was make the offer, get it accepted, and close.

(Yeah, I know, you see it coming too.)

House Hunters Dysfunctional: Why HGTV Didn't Answer My Casting E-mails

Looking for a house isn't like the other kinds of shopping one does in normal life. If I want paper towels, I go to Safeway. If I want a million paper towels for the low price normally associated with buying a thousand paper towels, I go to Costco. If I want a million paper towels for that said low price but want them delivered to an address I haven't lived at for six months - but on the very same day I ordered them! - I use Google Shopping Express.

This is stuff you know. But if you want to buy a house, there's no house store to go to. You have to run around all over the place and look at them, and you don't even get to know where they are. That's the province of the realtor, who is the keeper of all of the secrets of where the good houses are and the not-so-secret secret that you can't afford them.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, you probably want to know why I, who wouldn’t know General Responsibility if she saw him in a parade on TV, would think it was a good idea to own a piece of land.

For one thing, I wanted to be able to vote at last.* But mostly it was the mold. Most people, upon discovering their rental home has mold, would confront their landlord, or move out, or something. But the thing is…. our rent was really, really cheap. Like really cheap. Cheap like our three-bedroom rental house with a two-car garage was cheaper than a one-bedroom apartment in the dorms that the other law students lived in. And between my money-expensive habit (law school) and Husband’s space-expensive habit (systematically disassembling a 50s car with a retro space station’s worth of chrome on it), it made sense to stay. I may regret this when I die of a pulmonary disease in my 50s, but hopefully my estate’s lawyer finds this post and sues my landlord.

In any case, since at least one of us had finally quit our respective expensive habit, it seemed like it was time to move.

So begin to look for a house we did. I tried to go into the house hunting experience with the low expectations suitable to buying real estate. I've seen Property Brothers - I wouldn't be fooled into thinking I could afford my Dream Home (tm Mattel). We got ourselves a realtor - an excellent one who I think was helping me largely as a favor to my boss’s boss (who has a fondness for buying and selling houses that I imagine she appreciates).

Yet somehow I still managed to be shocked by the houses we ended up looking at. One was painted entirely pea green and, when you walked in the front door, practically dropped you right into the master bedroom. Another had an outdoor shower in the backyard right off the master bedroom, despite having a total absence of a pool, beach, Tough Mudder course, built-in slip-n-slide, or anything else that would justify a porch shower. One had a newly renovated kitchen but a bathroom so small that the sink was no wider than my index finger is long. Yet another had a frillion closets but only one bathroom.

So by the time we got to a house that was pretty good, it looked amazing. It was nice and clean on the inside; the kitchen was decent; it had two bathrooms. Sure, the backyard was a little small. Sure, there were no sidewalks on the streets. And sure, for being in such a dope school district, the house next door did look a lot like a crack house.

But we decided to put in an offer nonetheless.

Unfortunately, in the Very Special Real Estate Market we live in, you can't just offer the asking price. And apparently you really can't do what I wanted to do, which is a negotiation tactic I learned from watching Pawn Stars: whatever price they want, offer them a quarter of it. No, in this VSREM, you apparently** have to offer ABOVE the listed price to even have a chance of getting the property. And heaven help you guess just how much over you should go.

After a bunch of agonizing over the phone with Husband, because I was away for work and thus managing to leave all the annoying paperwork to the better half of our collective partnership, we decided on 25% over the asking price, which was already an ENTIRELY ridiculous amount of money.

Husband: There are a ton of forms I need you to sign tomorrow, though.
Liz: I will be trapped in a room I cannot leave all day.
Husband: Great.

As it turns out, our offer was but one of eight other offers on the property, which sold for around 150% of the listed price. I was grossed out. But we were both over it a few days later when we were hunting around on Zillow some more. And I pointed my laptop screen at Husband after I saw this house:

Liz: “We can afford this one!”
Husband: “It looks like a barn!”

We knew we were going to that open house.



* Come for the typical Millennial immaturity, stay for the American-politics-circa-1791 jokes!

**I'm sorry, but I just can't quit using sarcastic "apparently"s when discussing real estate; my disdain was palpable and has yet to wear off fully.

If I had it together enough to always blog on schedule, I'd really be a functional adult

The extreme absence without leave is not to be excused.  But I offer these excuses nonetheless, all evidence that I am somehow both closer and farther to faking adulthood than ever.  In the six months of my hiatus, I have done the following:

1.  Bought a house

2.  Due to inability to properly clean said house, caused self to break arm rather horrifically,

3.  Worked at the same job for longer than a year and two weeks,

4.  Forgotten everything I ever promised about never painting a room again, and painted a room again,

5.  Said goodbye to my 20-year-old car,

6.  Built a pretty sick Lego car (no joke - it's really awesome: http://shop.lego.com/en-US/Highway-Speedster-31006?fromListing=listing)

But failing to update your blog for a really long time is not very functional at all.  I guess it's in keeping with the theme.  But as a bizarre attempt at redemption, I promise to write in later posts the tales of all of the above (except maybe the Lego car).  

[update: I'm not a total liar - I have at least begun to fulfill my promises.  Click the links above to see my grand excuses!]

And I give you this banana oat muffin recipe I made this weekend (tweaked from this recipe:  http://allrecipes.com/recipe/banana-oat-muffins/), because it was pretty tasty:

Ingredients:

1.5 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup rolled oats (standard Quaker oatmeal here)

1/2 cup white sugar

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1/5 tsp salt

1 egg

3/4 cup buttermilk

1/3 cup melted butter

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 ripe bananas

2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1/2 cup chopped walnuts (if desired)

Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees F and line a 12-cup muffin tin with cupcake papers.

1.  Mash up the two bananas in a bowl using a fork or a potato masher.  

2.  Combine dry ingredients in a bowl.

3.  In a large bowl, beat the egg lightly.  Stir in the buttermilk, melted butter, and vanilla.  Add the mashed banana and combine thoroughly.

4.  Stir the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients until just combined.

5.  Using something like a 1/3 measuring cup, scoop the batter into the muffin tin.

6.  Top muffins with chopped walnuts (if desired).

7.  Bake for 18 minutes.

A Functional Adult's Real Life Is Not the Stuff of TV

When I was fifteen years old, I decided to become a lawyer. Actually, that’s a bit of a stretch---when I was fifteen, my parents informed me that I should become a lawyer because “If you’re going to argue all day, you might as well get paid for it.” To my ears, it was the first reasonable thing they had said in a solid two years. And I couldn’t imagine ever wanting to do anything more than argue. I felt a strong and constant need to vocalize my discontent with approximately everything. 

In college, being a lawyer continued to seem like a good idea. A pretentious boyfriend made it sound very elite, which comported with the certain knowledge I possessed (from television) that all lawyers are intellectual and rich and important. This all sounded fantastic to someone who was not particularly any of the above. Even if I wasn’t intellectual, I was smart and had an only child’s habit of getting what I wanted.

As soon as the law school acceptance letters started rolling in, I had my future life perfectly imagined.

In all vignettes below: hair is twice as long, voluminous, and shiny. Suit made by a designer I haven’t year heard of, but would have by then. No, suit custom made by a secret designer only celebrities have heard of. Very high heels that are somehow comfortable.

Future life scene #1:

A wood-paneled courtroom. Hushed tension. Twelve jurors leaning forward, wide-eyed. I am standing before them all, arm sympathetically stretched toward a handsome brunette man sitting at a table.

Liz: ...and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the finally piece of proof that definitively proves what you already know to be true, deep down in your hearts - this man is absolutely innocent.



Handsome Brunette Man: [nods sadly, serious look in his eyes]

Judge: Jurors, you must now deliberate.

The jury looks at each other, each nodding with conviction.

Jury foreman: That’s okay, your honor, we all already agree. Our verdict is: NOT GUILTY.

The courtroom erupts in cheers! A sour-faced prosecutor angrily grabs his ugly briefcase.

HBM: Liz, you’ve saved my life! How can I thank you?

Liz: [With a wink] How about you let me take you to a celebratory dinner?

Future life scene #2:

Liz, standing amidst a bunch of be-suited businessmen.

Liz: And that’s when I said to him, haven’t you ever been to Taipei before?

The entire group laughs raucously.

Businessman 1: [wheezing] That’s the funniest story I’ve ever heard!

Businessman 2: I don’t think we need to hear any more. Liz: we want you to handle ALL of our cases from now on.

Suddenly there is champagne:

Businessman 3: Let’s toast!

Liz: [In Mandarin] To knowing your way around a courtroom: and Asia!

Everyone laughs uproariously again while clinking glasses.

Future Life Scene #3:

Liz: ... and that's the main takeaway your viewers should take away from this piece of legislation.

Anchor: Thanks SO much, Liz. As always, it's been a complete pleasure having you on our show. Ladies and gentlemen, renowned legal scholar and philanthropist, Liz.

--

My real life does not look like that.

Real scene from my actual life #1:

Liz, in a wrinkled dress shirt, pants, and black flats that are showing wear is hunched over in a desk chair, staring at a computer. The desk is covered in piles of paper. There is a dirty plate on top of one pile with the crumbs of a poptart. Fifteen empty cans of Diet Dr. Pepper also festoon the area. A plant is dead.

Liz is slowly clicking a mouse, once every few seconds or so, without changing position.

Liz: Huh.




Real scene from my actual life #2:

Liz is sitting at an airport. Behind her, a woman is loudly complaining to a Visa representative on the phone about a problem with her credit card. A toddler runs through the terminal, stops abruptly, and starts screaming as his mother rushes over. Two women sit down next to Liz and one starts loudly teaching the older one how to use an enormous smartphone, or so it seems because they are speaking Chinese. A watch starts beeping and no one turns it off. The mother removes the toddler to be near other toddlers, but his screaming sets them off as well.

Liz: [muttering] Why can’t I get wifi here?

Airline agent : Ladies and gentlemen, for those of you headed to Phoenix, we want to announce that there’s been another delay. We do have a pilot now, but due to weather concerns en route we’ll be delayed another hour. Thank you for your patience!

Real scene from my actual life #3:

Liz is finally on the plane in a tiny seat. She pulls out her laptop to try to work on the small tray table. she then awkwardly reaches below it to try to get a manila file folder with a stack of papers in it.

The guy in front of her leans his seat back so far he hits her in the knees and pushes her laptop half shut.

The flight attendant comes by and dumps a glass of water on her arm.

Flight attendant [trilling]: Oops, sorry!

The same toddler starts screaming.

The differences between my imagined glamorous life as a lawyer and my actual life as a lawyer are, shall we say, rather stark. I’ve only ever met one client in person. Not my client, the client of a partner older than my dad. The client of a partner who then shuttled me away after I just awkwardly said, “Hello.” I haven’t been in a courtroom since I started working.

What I have done is gained several repetitive stress injuries. I have also spent long days reading literally thousand of documents until my brain can’t remember why I’m reading them. The big ol’ salary that looked so enticing to College Liz is consumed by paying for the law degree that earned it, as well as an absurd dry cleaning bill because it is important that all of my work clothes be both crappy and non-machine-washable.

It's enough to make you think that the TV shows about lawyers aren't accurate, somehow.  Dear career-impressionable teenaged readers: consider yourself forewarned.

A Functional Adult Too Easily Forgets

It's probably healthy to forget about things in life from time to time.  As my dear friend Sherlock observed, brain space is finite: 

“I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. . . . Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
- A Study in Scarlet

This erudite point particularly applies, I imagine, to negative experiences: often unhelpful and likely to drive one insane, we ought to forget them.

But forgetting comes with dangers.  As those who ignore history are bound to repeat it, so are those of us who ignore our mistakes bound to repeat them.

In my case, the mistake was swimsuit shopping.

I went swimsuit shopping the other day because I hadn’t bought one in awhile and I was going on vacation.  I was, on the whole, excited about going - I like shopping and it was the end of the summer, so I knew all the swimsuits would be on sale and I’d get a good deal.  Plus, buying a new swimsuit is the technical beginning of vacation and the excuse to check out mentally up until actual departure.

What I realized as soon as I got to the store was that nearly a half-decade of relying on old swimsuits meant I had forgotten how degrading swimsuit shopping is.  I can’t buy one pieces because the ratio of my person is somehow different than whoever they make swimsuits for and they never. ever. fit.  

So a two-piece it was, which meant that, while everything was half off, everything was also half off the racks: as in lying everywhere on the floor due to some mad rush I had missed or an extremely localized tornado.  If I found a cute top, there were simply no matching bottoms.  If I found some bottoms, they only had the top in a different color.  But I braved through every single rack in a quest to find a good one.

I remembered enough to know that I needed to try on a LOT of swimsuits because most probably wouldn’t work.  So I grabbed approximately 40 or so halves of swimsuits and, in defiance of the six-items-per-dressing-room fiat broadcast by a lethargic sign, threw them all on the floor of the dressing room.  (That’s a generous word for it; it’s a stall at best.)

I had barely started at this point.

And then I remembered the wonder of trying on swimsuits.  First, there is the inherent bunchiness of trying on a garment that is pretty much underwear over your existing underwear for sanity reasons.  But the real joy of trying on a two-piece swimsuit is the stark reminder of how much I am not the right sizes.  Because you can get two different sizes per piece, the suit is just mocking you: “Hey!  Society says you should be large on top and small on the bottom, not the other way around.  Man, you should stay away from fluorescent lighting!”  

It wasn’t helped by the fact that the picked-over remaining swimsuits available in any size approaching mine were... strange.  It made me desperate: I willing tried on a suit with rainbow-sherbet colored fringe hanging off the top, telling myself, “Maybe it’s cute on?” 

Yep.  This happened.

I generously reinterpreted what size I was.  I tried to tell myself that maybe I didn’t hate ruffles after all.  Maybe Jessica Simpson can design a good swimsuit, despite the otherwise serious gaps in her understanding of aquatic life.  Maybe I didn’t mind wearing a yellow top with pink bottoms, or one with Minnie Mouse polkadots.  Maybe a swimsuit should have glitter.

I should have known when I saw all of these
left from the previous occupant.

After flinging them almost all of them on the ground in disgust, I came out of there with two swimsuits: one, indeed, at least nominally designed by our dear Ms. Simpson, and the other one with some baffling straps that are very confusing to tie but look okay once you get there.  I hope they work out, because I don't think I'll be able to move this memory out of my brain attic for awhile. And here's hoping they are more durable than my ability to recall how much I hate swimsuit shopping, or else I'm in trouble.

A Functional Adult: EMPLOYED.

Here’s the thing about pretending to be a functional adult: eventually, it catches up to you.  Like how back in the 9^th grade, I was really good friends with this girl Anaheim, and I used to say “Oh my gosh” pretty frequently, and Anaheim started saying it too to make fun of me, but she said it so many times that she stopped saying it mockingly and was just saying it seriously.  See also everything hipsters have done, ever.  (Low hanging fruit, people: one must grab it before a bird eats it.)

So… that kind of happened to me.  Like one fine day I was just writing a blog about how I was occasionally trying to be a real grownup, not quite sarcastically, but more as a joke, like if you handed your toddler a briefcase and put a fedora on him, how that would be pretty funny?  Especially if you really had a toddler and perhaps would be a little low on regular adult conversation?  That was me, being an adult.  Really just a toddler with a briefcase.

Except somehow… I actually use a briefcase now.  Okay, it’s a big purse that husband gave me for Christmas and it smells AMAZING like the most succulent of cowskins, but I still put a laptop in it and pads of paper with notes on it and business cards and pens that say Marriott on them.

Yeah.  I have a Real Job.  It happened awhile ago.  Maybe you noticed the steady decline of words in this blog.

Here are the gains and losses I have experienced thus far of said Real Job:

Gains:

·         Income

·         An office

·         Business cards with my name on it

·         A big computer monitor, though I had to buy it myself *eye roll*

·         A  coffee habit

·         An online shopping habit

·         A fear of my blog being read by my coworkers

Losses:

·         Time

·         My immune system

·         Invitations to hang out with my name on them

·         Eyesight quality

·         Sleep

·         Time to wear all the shoes I keep ordering

·         Time to write my blog

So on net…. Something?  Something?  Mostly I have lost all conversational topics that are not, Hey, My Work is Boring In This Particular Direction Today, Man Amiright.  Which is okay when talking to my coworkers, who definitely get it,  but less so when talking to civilians who just stare at me and wonder aloud why I am holding my eyes open so wide.

So the new task is to find a way to make it all more interesting.  So far, the only thing I have come up with is extreme gossiping, but it’s working really poorly given that all of my coworkers are just nice normal people who are neither romancing each other nor carrying Deep Terrible Secrets.  They all just go to work, and then afterwards sort of hang out and watch TV in the evenings.  Which gives me nothing, because if I wanted to gossip about THAT I could very well TALK ABOUT MYSELF.

So I’m open to suggestions here.  How do I undo the fact that I may have accidentally become some sort of adult?