The Seed of Want

I can pinpoint the exact moment when I began lusting after a house of my own. After much screaming, angst and anger, my boyfriend and I had just broken up for the third time that year. Drowning in the tail end of our seven-year relationship, we took the next logical step: we got engaged and began house hunting. It made a crazy sort of sense at the time that a 30-year financial commitment built around brick and mortar would bind us together in a way that love and stardust couldn’t. I know. Don’t ask me what the hell I was thinking.

In 2005, the real estate market in California was hot, really hot. Houses, even Psycho-vibe ones with a body in backyard and REDRUM scrawled on the walls, were commanding top dollar as long as it had at least two bedrooms and a working bathroom, vengeful ghostly presence optional. The interest rate was low, Adjusted Rate Mortgages (ARM) offered easy affordability and new construction was popping up like resurgent daises after a heavy snow. You would think that after the heady days of the tech boom and bust in the early 2000s, Californians would have learned to exercise caution. If everybody plus their grandmother and Strudel the bichon-fritz wants to get in on the game, the Titantic is more than likely due for a rendezvous with an big, market chilling popsicle. But, the thing is, Californians are suckers; we believe in magic. Proximity to Hollywood and near constant sun brings a propensity for goofy, contagious, completely unfounded optimism. How else to explain the re-election of our Govenator?

I was ambivalent about home ownership even though I was 26, had no debt and was vested in my job at a high-flying Public Affairs firm. Raised in a culture where a female child didn’t leave home until she married, the concept simply never entered my mind. I’d only barely begun to question tradition by moving out to an apartment of my own when I turned 25. (I’d stayed close to home for college) My parents didn’t speak to me for a year and still refer to the decision as the Aiya-Disgraceful-American-Daughter-Bring- Shame-to-Ancestors incident. Really.

M. and I had a great time looking at a half-dozen houses. I was intrigued not with the houses themselves but with the staged décor. They all looked like budget Martha Stewart on Prozac. People actually decorate powder rooms and make striped orange paint work? Who would have thunk? But, it still didn’t inspire me to part with close to half a mil. Until, that is, I saw the one house that made me go all gooey.

It was a two-story sandstone colored house built with soaring ceilings, rounded archways, a ridiculously spacious master bedroom suite and a gorgeous tiled bathroom with a whirlpool hot tub. Oh Lordy, the bathroom alone made my knees weak. The house was also full of secret nooks and crannies, unexpected, whimsical space that made you want to linger to enjoy the surprise and go around the corner to find the next discovery all at the same time. I fell deep in unexplainable, rushing-to-your-head, put-your-head-between-your-knees, Romeo-and-Juliet type love.

I purred in M’s ear, “This house is so sexy.” He looked at me with wide eyes, not fully comprehending. I’m usually the demure Asian girlfriend stereotype. I pushed M down on the master bedroom bed which, of course, was a sham display frame that almost collapsed under his weight. “I want to jump your bones. Right N.O.W,” I said throatily.

He drove us home very, very fast.

We didn’t buy the house. Our relationship came to its inevitable end just as the real estate bubble burst. I’m lucky that I wasn’t burdened with an inflated mortgage and a disgruntled man at the same time. But, the seed of want was definitely planted. The desire gnaws at me like a dog niggling at a bone.

This is the chronicle of my journey to become a single female with house.

Some women are stimulated by hormones, food, Prada, whatever. I salivate at the thought of an affordable, 3 bed/2 bath with hot tub. I’m weird but also one of the new women of this age. World, watch out.