My quest for a bad little house

I really want to own a home. I want a place where I get to be the one who says "sure, sleep over." I want to be able to take people in if they need it and I want to have a cozy landing-pad in the world.

I've been saving up. I've been working hard, squirreling away my stipend while running a small business on the side. I paid off my student loans last November and now I have a heap of cash that's just about down-payment-sized. "I'm ready now," I thought to myself.

"Stipends don't count as income," said the mortgage companies. "Technically, you're unemployed, and since your business isn't registered as an LLC it doesn't help. Registering it now won't help either, because it won't establish the kind of history we're looking for."

I switched gears and went to my university's affiliated credit union for a personal loan. "I might not be able to afford a NICE house with a personal loan," I thought, "but if I put it together with my savings, I can get a bad, little house. With enough hard work it might become less bad over time, and perhaps even less little."

"We don't recognize student loans as credit history," said the credit union. "You're not eligible for a personal loan because you've only had a credit card for like three months, so even though you have excellent credit and no debt and never made a late payment on your student loan, it's not enough." This is a university-affiliated credit union, I say again. This probably hits a lot of their potential members. I'm truly disgusted.

If I see another thinkpiece mocking or castigating millennials for not buying houses etc, I'm going to be seriously angry. I'm thinking about where I could publish a counter-thinkpiece about this now, in fact. I mean, it's not like I could have done this differently. I applied for a credit card right out of college, and I wasn't able to get one because I didn't have enough income and I didn't have any credit history. It's exactly like those "entry-level" jobs that prefer at least three years of experience.

I've done everything I can. I'm doing it as correctly as I can. It's not good enough. I just want a bad little house and I can't even have that. I asked for less money than most people drop on a wedding, and they wouldn't lend it to me, a person who paid off a student loan in less than half the projected time.

Their loss. I'm going to make a cash offer on that house with the cash I've got in my literal pocket, and if it works it works, and if it doesn't I guess I'm looking for a new sublet where I can save up even more cash until it does.

I will get there.

I thought about posting this as its own story, but couldn't think of a title, so here we go. I met and matched with a guy online, and you can probably already tell where this is going. So there's this guy, and he stood me up, and then I was like, fuck this, and fuck him, but then he reached out, and I felt bad, so I started talking to him again. We took turns playing hot and cold with each other. I couldn't decide if he really liked me, he saw me as a booty call, or what exactly was going on, and maybe he was just as confused as I was. I'll probably never know. The last time I talked to him, he told me that I had convinced him to do something crazy. We had been talking after he reached out, he had told me that a female friend of his had asked him out, and I thought that I would never hear from him again, so I decided to let him go. But then he came back.

We stayed up late talking. I asked what had happened to the woman who asked him out, and he said that they were still friends at the moment. I told him to go ask her out, and he said that he would have to wait because she was out of town. I told him to book a flight, and surprise her, and to my total shock; he did. This probably sounds like the end, and not a very happy one, but in a way, it is a good story. He could have ghosted me. He could have been dishonest about what was going on in his life. I would have been none the wiser. When I left, I did so because I felt as if he was pulling away, and I wasn't sure why. Rather than ask, I assumed she was the reason. I was really not sure what to do with him when he came back, at one point he admitted that he didn't know where he stood with anyone. When he told me he was flying out to see her, I told him that sometime we need someone to give us permission to follow our hearts and dreams.

***

In other news I quit my job. Today I went to the dealership where I purchased my vehicle, stood in the office of a man I had met before, and spoke with him and a couple of other people that I'm going to be working with soon. I hadn't wanted to disclose the fact that I was no longer at my past position, but I wanted to be honest. I value that, and sometimes I end up looking bad because I am very willing to tell people all the bad things about me as a way to prove that I am an honest person with integrity. It was strange to tell him all the things I hadn't previously, and even though I ended up not getting the guy in the end, maybe I got something that was better in the long run. I don't know, I have mixed feelings about this whole thing. We are both scared, but we are both trying to be braver in our own fallible ways. I said a lot, and he listened. I didn't tell him about the job situation other than I had been offered one. He was there on a bad day when I needed him, and I will always love him for that if for nothing else. Rather than thinking of him as the one that got away, I will remember him as the one I helped to set free. Call it semantics, but so far, it's working for me.

Xoxo,

J

P.S. People talk about love being the one thing that multiplies when you give it away, I wonder if the same can be said for courage and bravery when matters of the heart are concerned...

j

***

El Shaddai, El Shaddai, El Elyon na Adonai, age to age, you're still the same..., today someone on Twitter asked what music people would want played at our funerals. Wasn't on my mind before then, thinking about it now though.

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