Purchasing a home means phone calls?and late-night worries about gentrification Last year I decided to engage in the truest, purest act of banal suffering: I bought a house.
Buying a house isn?t one action; it?s a series of actions: frantically scraping together every penny you have, talking to strangers (real estate agents and lenders), fighting with plumbers, and filling out paperwork. It?s a process that poked at each of my anxieties, from the sharp, short-term suffering of making phone calls to the bigger question of whether I had become my own worst enemy: a gentrifier.
Until the age of 25, I wouldn?t call for a pizza. Middle school sleepovers or high school study parties went snackless until one of my less-fearful friends or exhausted parents would begrudgingly pick up the phone to ring for a medium with extra mushrooms. If forced to make a call, I?d find myself choked up with nervousness, afraid I?d forget why I had called or how to pleasantly greet the person on the other end of the line. Every call I make, to this day, begins with shaking hands and deep-breathing techniques. Every call ends with the internal question: Did I hang up too fast" Nobody tells you that when you buy a house, you spend a lot of time on the phone. And you?re not just chatting. You?re calling strangers to talk about how much money you have, if that smell is something dead or ?just how the house smells,? or if someone could come to look at the roof for less than a million extra dol...