Secret Squirrel

I am a moron.

The reason the amount on the letter from the bank and the amount in the online mortgage calculator differed by about $35k is that the bank didn't take into account my down payment. They didn't look at my bank statements and determine how much I could put down (the way college financial aid apps do, which is my only previous experience with this sort of thing) -- they told me how much they'd lend me.

So. Thank you all for sharing my freak-out. I am sorry that I took up any of your day with it. (Though I really, really appreciate the support and encouragement and ideas, because you all know by now that that is how I deal with freak-outs.)

Big enormous thank you to fairdice and mayica, for pointing this out!

*hides face in shame*

ETA: I am stupid.

I have been "looking for a house" for six years now. Somerville is the longest relationship of my life by almost six years, and I knew by the two-year mark that I wanted to get married. Unfortunately, the ring is too damn expensive and the wedding is too damn expensive and I'm going to be the mistress with no legal claim forever.

MA has this subsidized program for first-time homebuyers called the Soft Second. I've been using their calculator to determine how much house I can afford. The answer was always "nothing." But last Christmas my grandma gave me a lot of money, and prices have come down, and... great, I say, the calculator tells me I can afford a $262k home! That's someplace I might actually want to live!

So I hire a buyer's broker, paying her money up front because that's how she works and she comes so highly recommended.* I spend a month of Wednesdays taking the required first-time homebuyer's class. We look at some condos in my price range, some of which are actually possibilities.

...And then I get my preapproval back. With the exact same numbers I plugged into the calculator, supposedly using the exact same formula (but obviously not), they tell me they'll give me $227k. That's the difference between "a nice home that I'd want to live in for the foreseeable future" and "something tiny in a crappy part of town that I can't wait to get out of."

I really thought I could do it this time. But I can't, and I never will -- not without getting married (which I may or may not ever do, and the whole point anyway was that this would be mine) or someone I love very much dying (which I don't want to think about).

Honest talk about money, because I never understood why it has to be secret: I make $47k a year. My boss has been doing this for 30 years and she makes maybe $20k more. Even if I moved on campus to pay cheapo rent and save on transportation, I'd save at most $5000 a year. That's pocket change compared to what I need. I live a relatively frugal but comfortable life, and never worry about money for the day-to-day stuff.

But I will never, ever, no matter how much I save or how long I work, have any real money. I will depend on landlords and a roomate, or a husband, for my home for the rest of my fucking life. I can't begin to tell you how depressing that is.

I'm tired of being asked (by family members, mostly) if I'm "still looking," with this implication that once you start looking, you should just be able to find something and buy it, so what the hell is taking me so long?

I'm tired of people (brokers and bankers, mostly) suggesting that I "put down a bigger down payment," like I have an extra $40 grand in my couch cushions and I'm just being stingy.

And I'm so, so tired of being the world's most responsible adult, with a good career and savings and God's own credit score, but not being able to manage this major indicator of American adulthood. (Or the other one: marriage, or at least keeping a relationship long enough to get to that point. And I don't want the third one: children.) I know it isn't rational, but I feel like a total fucking failure.

*She's refunding it, because she is awesome. Rona Fischman, for those of you with real money.

1. I cannot have another conversation like the one I had at lunch today, in which my normally sane colleagues freaked out about the fact that we all pour from the same plastic containers of salad dressing and use the same ice cream scoops. OMG the germz!!1!

Yes, human beings touch things that other human beings touch. If you would like to wear an astronaut suit at all times, you can avoid this. Otherwise? Germs. They fucking happen. DEAL WITH IT.

2. Two of my 6th graders have started a monthly lunchtime discussion group about books made into movies, which they asked me to advise. This is adorable, and I love it. However, their announcement about it this morning included this gem: "You don't have to have read the book, you just have to have an opinion!"

Uninformed opinions: they're what makes America great.

There isn't much call for an "in_parentheses Endorses..." post this time around, as my Ward 2 ballot is mostly uncontested. C'mon, Somerville, be more divisive!

I am directed to vote for four Aldermen-at-Large out of a roster of five (it's Alderman musical chairs!), so let's take a look at the contestants (endorsements in red)...

( Your better politicians will hire someone with a basic grasp of HTML )

Do you have a favorite short scary story that would be easy for me to find in the next week? My 8th grade writing club meets the day before Halloween, so of course we're going to write ghost stories. I want to set the scene by reading one (by candlelight in a library study room -- don't tell my boss).

Any suggestions?

Does anyone have a lightbox-style fly trap that I could borrow, like right this fucking minute? Seriously. When I left the house this morning, there were maybe 4 or 5 flies in the kitchen. When I got home tonight -- after a fucking 12-hour day at work, mind you -- my kitchen and dining room were full of flies. There could easily be 100 flies in my house right now. These are not fruit flies. These are serious, big, disgusting, flies, coating every light fixture and landing on everything I try to eat. I have never been so grossed out in my life.

I rented a Zipcar and drove to Home Depot in a panic to buy some hanging sticky traps, but they aren't doing much good -- why would the flies fly into them instead of into something else? We hung them near lights, but still, the one or two flies they've caught don't even make a dent.

And of course, the worst of it is that I don't understand where they could possibly be breeding. Even if we manage to get rid of them all, will we just get a new crop in a few days?

Light is the only thing they're reliably drawn to, as far as I can tell, so a light trap seems like the way to go. But it cost $47 at Home Depot, and that seems like an awful lot.

Please, please help, if you have any ideas or anything useful I could borrow. I'm losing my mind a little bit here.

Also, if you live near me and you have a kitchen I could borrow this weekend, that would be amazing. I have a ton of food I need to put up before it goes bad, plus I told my friends I'd bring a dessert when I come to their house tomorrow night. Kitchen work was pretty much going to be my weekend. But I can't stand to be in my kitchen right now. (And I don't know how sanitary it is, anyway. If flies are actually landing on everything, are we likely to get sick?)

Hairstyle is the one part of being an adult I haven't managed to figure out (career), fake convincingly (investment), or sidestep (car ownership). Some days my hair looks great, most days it looks unnoticeably okay, and plenty of days it looks stupid. There is no rhyme or reason to any of this, as far as I can tell.

How my hair looks on any given day, of course, is a major factor in whether I look good that day. I have totally boring hair when left alone -- it is not shiny, it does not curl, it lacks an interesting color. So I keep looking for The Hairstyle that will make my hair -- and therefore me -- look more reliably attractive.*

When I was an adolescent, this involved contortions: the mall bangs, the shower-at-night-and-sleep-in-braids, the curling iron, the spray, the blow-drying. As an adult, I leave for work at 6:15 a.m. and don't have time for that crap. (Plus I don't want to look like a teenager from the early 90s -- shocking, I know.) So I fall back on the things that don't take time every day: cut and color. But these things, irritatingly, involve professionals.

It's like getting your car fixed -- you end up swindled if you don't speak the language. Only it's worse, because there is a general assumption in the culture that a lot of people (women, particularly) don't speak car mechanic. There are adult education classes and books that address this, if you care to have it addressed. Whereas it's assumed that women do speak hair stylist.

Well, I don't. Almost by definition, no one who chooses hair stylist as a profession understands people who want to look like me -- like a hippie with pretty, professional hair. A woman who leaves her house with her hair still wet? Who actually looks forward to her hair going grey so she'll look her damn age instead of like one of her students? For whom "product" is still a pluralizeable noun? There are many, many women like me in Camberville, but inside hair salons, we're like R.O.U.S.'s -- they don't believe we exist. And so every time, I end up leaving the salon looking like the sort of woman who works in a hair salon. They're good haircuts; they just aren't me.

I have a good twenty years of experience directing my own haircuts, and I still have no idea how to navigate this. Ladies, what do you do? I have a free account so I can't make a poll, but... have you found a hairstylist who gets you, and if so, how? Do you have a clear set of instructions that you can assert to any stylist with reliable success? Do you just accept boring hair for simplicity's sake? And the bonus questions, if you don't mind answering: how often do you cut your hair, and how much do you usually spend?

* This post is about me not understanding hair, not me feeling unattractive and unloved and waaaah. Slight post-break-up slump notwithstanding, I think I have a pretty realistic sense of my own attractiveness. So I'm not fishing for compliments, really. But thanks. :)

in_parentheses has updated her relationship status to "single" (for those of you not on Facebook). Oh god, it hurts. Three years is a hell of a lot to say goodbye to. It needed to happen, for both of us. We've spent more time "working on our relationship" than enjoying that relationship for awhile now. There's more to it, of course, but... we aren't the ones for each other, as much as we wanted to be. Okay.

If you got to know him over the course of our relationship, know that he cares about you, and that there are no hard feelings anywhere. We will end up friends -- we love each other too much and enjoy each other's company too much not to be. It will just take some time.

Distractions very much welcome. I still have a month of very empty summer to get through. I have my city and my family and my job and more than anything you, my friends, and it will be okay. The difference between now and ten years ago is that I know my life will be okay. It will.

Since graduation on Sunday, two of my now-former students have friended me on Facebook. I love them and will be happy to keep in touch with them, so thumbs up to this development.

The trouble? Sometimes they take tests entitled "What's your sex style?" And then I have to see the results.

I found winged aphids all over my tomatoes! My baby tomatoes that I grew from seed and which are now really more adolescent tomatoes but they will be my babies 4-ever! Oh noes! (It's possible I'm overly attached to plants, yes. Shut up.)

I squished all the ones I could find, and will attempt to blast the rest off with the hose when I water tonight. I don't have a handy spray bottle, but I might get one and try the soap-water-and-oil trick.

But the best thing, of course, is hungry ladybugs. I don't feel like I really need to buy 1500 of them (apparently the official unit of ladybug purchasing) -- that seems like sending the poor little things into a famine zone; my garden just isn't that big. Do any of you have an abundance of ladybugs in your yard that I could come collect?

So, um, school is canceled for the week. We had an emergency faculty meeting yesterday at which the Head said, "Some huge percentage of students are sick, faculty are also getting sick, the Health Department suggests we close if we're having trouble functioning. So we're going to do that."

The Health Department also said that there's no point closing for a day or two. It's 7 days or nothing. So we're off until Tuesday, then there's exam review week, exam week, graduation, faculty meeting week... and by June 12, I'm done. We can't extend the year the way a public school could because international kids have already bought their tickets home. What a weird-ass way to end the year.

(In case you're worried: no one is seriously ill; it's a quantity, not quality issue. Most boarders are going home. Sick boarders whose homes are too far away are quarantined in the Health Center, and there are 28 healthy boarders who are staying on campus.)

They asked for "all healthy hands on deck," but the place is dead. Most faculty do not share my opinion that it's better to be at work with friends than at home alone, so I think I'll see fewer and fewer people as the week wears on. We'll have to plan some sort of outing or I'll go bonkers.

Thanks in part to posting here, I managed to schedule my spring break pretty thoroughly, and my ratio of fun days to depressed days was about 14:1. Yay! But of course, that's all just a trial run for the real hurdle: summer. It starts in a month, and I'm terrified. Work has been so busy lately that I've planned even less than I usually do, which is why I'm up an hour past my bedtime posting about this.

So I'll extend the same offer I posted in March. I will happily:

* baby-sit!
* help paint your house, refinish your furniture, or do any other hands-on type projects you'd like to teach me to do.
* teach you to do anything I know how to do (make mosaics, cook, use assorted software packages...).
* run errands -- the odder and more out of the way, the better (bearing in mind that I don't have a car).
* fill in odd hours at the non-profit where you work.
* cook for you.
* organize the messiest room in your house.
* do pretty much whatever you'd like me to do for you, provided it involves leaving my house and/or interacting with at least one human being other than myself. Seriously.

I'd also love paying gigs. Ideally I would:

* copyedit
* tutor (writing, probably)
* work in a bake shop
* work in a garden store or do something else outside

If you have any leads or ideas, I'd love to hear them! My priorities are doing interesting things with interesting people and getting the hell out of my house on a regular basis. Anything that meets at least one of those criteria would be swell.

...becoming friends with my 15-year-old cousin on Facebook and discovering "cock" among her interests.*

...realizing that this means my students, many of whom I know way better than I know my cousin at this point, have equally terrifying things on their Facebook pages, and I just don't know. (Until they graduate and friend me. Eeep!)

*in among things like "glitter," "good conversations," and "spelling things correctly." She's actually an awesome kid. Whom I've known since she was born, so ack!

I finally watched the BSG finale last night, with spooky_thing, janet_carter, and my dear friend P who was visiting for the weekend. I studiously avoided all posts on the subject for the last 2 weeks, so if you wrote one, I want to read it now. Point me at it?

As for my thoughts, I don't want to get into a whole review, really, but here's the speedy bullet-point version:

• Too long with too many endings (spooky_thing: "Like Return of the King"). I expected 2 hours rather than 3, so I was exhausted by the end of the damn thing.
  
• WTF was up with angel/ghost-Starbuck and Imaginary Baltar & Six?
  
• So, so over the "ta-da, it was... EARTH!" "surprise" ending.
  
• I do not buy that all of humanity and Cylonity decided to just ditch all their tech and wander into the wilderness. Our heroes, sure, but I bet everyone else would have said, "Screw you! I'd like to be able to purify water and live in a house, thx."
  
• I'm not even going to get into all the plot holes you could fly a base ship through. This has never been a carefully plotted show; Moore and Eick have repeatedly said (too lazy to find a link) that they prefer to tell good stories and make decisions on the fly about where those stories will go. That's not my prefered story-telling method, but I can deal.
  
• By and large, I actually enjoyed it. The characters' endings were satisfying -- particularly Baltar and Six, who managed to get away scot-free with almost destroying the human race. I think that's awesome. And you kind of have to respect a finale as trippy as that, in which God, apparently, is a sadistic SOB who wants his creations to lead themselves into a recurring cycle of creation and holocaust (says P), and in the meantime, just wants us to smoke a bowl (says spooky_thing). Dancing robots spell our DOOOOOOM!
  

And now it occurs to me that it's maybe time to retire this icon.

...according to Michelle Obama, who is planting a freaking vegetable garden on the White House lawn.

From the NYTimes article:

While the organic garden will provide food for the first family’s meals and formal dinners, its most important role, Mrs. Obama said, will be to educate children about healthful, locally grown fruit and vegetables.... Twenty-three fifth graders from Bancroft Elementary School in Washington will help her dig up the soil for the 1,100-square-foot plot.... Students from the school, which has had a garden since 2001, will also help plant, harvest and cook the vegetables, berries and herbs.

It's kind of ironic (in an awesome way) that the first First Family of color looks the most like me.

(That was flip, but seriously? The crazy hippies lobbied for this, and now it's happening. Not because there was some huge public outcry that dragged the President kicking and screaming, but because, gosh, the First Lady cares about the health of her family and America's families, and having a vegetable garden sounds like fun! Let's all pull weeds together as a family project! I had no idea what it would be like to have actual respect for the people in the White House... but I have to tell you, it rules.)

Which is ironic, considering that I'm posting this from my couch on a snow day. But on Friday I started seeds indoors for the first time: four little starter pellets of Sungold cherry tomatoes (3 seeds in each pellet), plus a small pot with a semicircle of basil seeds and a semicircle of oregano seeds.

A month or so ago, my friend at work mentioned that he and another friend had discovered that a) the Science Dept. has a greenhouse, and b) nobody uses it for anything. He'd brought in a bunch of plants from his house, she'd started some herbs and peppers in various pots, and there was plenty of room for me. (Insert obvious series of jokes about using the greenhouse to bolster the school's finances here.)

So Friday after work I puttered around with dirt and water and seeds! I honestly got teary being in this warm place with green growing things. I pinched back my friend's basil, just to have an excuse to stay a little longer, some garden work to do. My fingers smelled like Thai basil for the rest of the evening.

I recognize that this makes me sound crazy, but I'm rather dreading Spring Break. Two weeks of unplanned time, with nowhere to go and no one to talk to and no one expecting anything of me, is a free ticket to Depression Island. (Multiply that by 5 and you have... summer. *shudder*)

I'd like to head that off at the pass this year, so I'm making the following offer/request. My empty Spring Break runs from March 17 through March 29. Fill! My! Time! I will happily:

* baby-sit!
* help paint your house, refinish your furniture, or do any other hands-on type projects you'd like to teach me to do.
* teach you to do anything I know how to do (make mosaics, cook, use assorted software packages...).
* run errands -- the odder and more out of the way, the better (bearing in mind that I don't have a car).
* fill in odd hours at the non-profit where you work.
* cook for you.
* organize the messiest room in your house.
* do pretty much whatever you'd like me to do for you, provided it involves leaving my house and/or interacting with at least one human being other than myself. Seriously.

I am also accepting suggestions for other ways to leave my house and interact with other people over the course of these two weeks. Yay for being proactive!

For everyone who asked about my acupuncture experience:

I'm not sure why it occurred to me to try acupuncture, other than that I'd tried everything Western medicine had to offer. And I'm a strong believer in holistic treatments in general. My understanding is that acupuncture is a good all-purpose treatment to try, if your problem isn't structural enough to be helped by one of the movement-based (Feldenkrais, Alexander) or spine-based (cranio-sacral) techniques.*

I found my acupuncturist through my health plan. They give a "discount" (it is crappy), so they maintain a list of approved providers. I picked one who said she specialized in IBS.

I started last July. My first appointment was just talking -- she took a detailed medical history. After that each appointment has consisted of a few minutes of checking in, and then me lying with needles sticking out of my body for 45 minutes or so. I went every week for the first month or so, and then switched to every couple of weeks, and now I'm at every month (right before my period starts; we've found that works best).

In theory I should be "cured" by now; my acupuncturist said it was likely that I would only need the most occasional maintenance after the first few months of treatment. I didn't go last month, and am still fine. Woot! But the truth is that acupuncture is so relaxing and wonderful that I don't want to give it up. It's totally worth $65 a month. (Besides, there's always something breaking somewhere that she can fine-tune -- my feet hurt, my circulatory problem is acting up, whatever.)

I have even less empirical evidence for this than I do for the rest of it, but I feel like it's had an effect on my overall mood, as well. This school year I've been the happiest I've been in years. Depression is seriously a faint worry, rather than a looming threat. There's other good stuff going on too, so who knows if acupuncture has anything to do with it? But I've read that it can, and I'm going to give it some credit, at least.

* This is me talking out of my ass. I would love to learn more about this, but right now I have only my usual conglomeration of half-knowledge from the internet and overheard personal experience. I'm sounding authoritative about something I only sort of understand... what else is new?

I've made a few purchases recently that have -- without hyperbole -- changed my life. So I thought I'd share, in case they might change your life, too:

1. My down coat. I got mine from Land's End, but they don't seem to have it available anymore -- they've already switched to cute raincoats. Their February is not like my February. Anyway, the point is: it's long, it's black, it has fleece cuffs so the cold doesn't get in, it has a hood, it's quilted, it's full of little puffy feathers, and it's awesome. It's made the difference between "Oh god oh god it's 7 degrees out" and "Eh, I guess it's a little cold." Plus, hood = no hat head!

2. My Mini-DVI to Video adapter. That and an audio cable (I think that link is to the right thing) connect my laptop to my TV's A/V cables (the red, white, and yellow ones)... which in this era of streaming television is effectively equivalent to having free cable, plus a TiVo. Best $25 I ever spent.

3. My slippers. I didn't buy them myself; they were a gift from spooky_thing's parents, on his suggestion. They're warm and fuzzy, and did I mention warm? My feet are always cold in the winter. This leads to some serious discomfort (as soon as I come inside, my toes turn bright red and start itching like crazy). But for the last month, I've been religious about putting my slippers on the second I take my shoes off, and this problem has pretty much gone away! (And when I need extra warmth: aspartaimee's Baraucktion socks. Ahhh, warm feet.)

4. Acupuncture. Goodbye, digestive problem which has made eating unpleasant for years!

I'm probably forgetting a few things -- I feel like my life has been unusually blessed with Wonderful Things lately. And now I'm curious: what would go on your list?

Man, it's been a long 8 years. I haven't quite dealt with that yet, I don't think. That's my entire adult life -- last semester of college and all that followed. For my students, it's their entire aware life.

That's 8 years of the involuntary president's voice shudder, 8 years of ridiculous internet clips, 8 years of the Daily Show. Almost 8 years of twitching at the date "September 11," and almost 8 years of war. 8 years of gathering with friends to laugh because it kept us from crying -- and 8 years of crying anyway.

President Barack Obama isn't going to solve everything, but at least (as my friend said tonight) he's going to try. I am hopeful. (And also sleepy. I have lost way too much sleep to this man already. Take that however you want; I'm going to bed.)