Where else does this show up in your life?
I'm sure you're utterly bored with tales of the house. Gawd-knows I am. But after getting shit yesterday from Joe about blogging about what's going on, I figured I'd give an update. That way at least I don't have to repeat myself.
We met with the agent yesterday to list the house. Thursday morning it's on the market, and for the first time since this adventure began I actually feel like it's real, and it's going to happen. That might be hard to fathom since I've done nothing else but talk about it for a year, and since we've done nothing but work on it to get it ready for sale for 6 months. However, it's precisely because it's taken so long that I never felt we'd get here. It's easy to get the feeling that the renos/cleaning/primping/fluffing will never actually end and you'll just be in a permanent state of 'getting ready' forever. But here we are. And as I looked around the place last night (and it's looking spec-fucking-tacular I must say) I felt a little twinge of 'something' a little longing or nostalgia. But that passed rather quickly t.g. I'm sure that on moving day we'll feel all that, we'll look around at the empty place as we leave for the last time and sigh and think of the good times etc. etc. And that's the time for that I guess. I'll also have strong memories of all the stuff we've put up with here that annoyed me.
But what I've noticed, and i'm a bit dense for coming to this conclusion so late I'm sure, is the strange inability to hold two opinions in your head at the same time. Here's what I mean. Once I decided to leave, once we'd decided to move, I could no longer care about this place. It's not that strange really I guess. It's just that you can't love your house and sell it. You have to stop loving it. it's like all those people you see on House Doctor who are devastated at the changes wrought by the brash American host on their weird cluttered English houses. "Sea-grass? I'd never have sea-grass in my lounge." (lounge, for you Canadians, is a room the english have with ugly furniture and which they never actually use - anyone with Italian relatives will recognize this - with the addition of plastic covered furniture). The thing is you have to already, in your head, move out. Easier said than done. But of course I did do it. and that's made it hard to kinda be here.
The painful part in any of this kind of thing, is what if it doesn't sell, or not for as much as we want etc. etc. then we're stuck living in a house we've already decided we don't want. It's damn hard to fall back in love with something when you've just spent 6 months or a year convincing yourself of the limits of it.
Because let's be honest. We do NOT as human beings gather evidence, weigh options and decide something. We (mostly) decide something, then gather evidence to support that it is the right decision, and make ourselves feel better about it.
Even my telling you about it, and how I tell you about it, is structured to make you agree with me (and your agreement is vital to my beleiving I did the right thing). So who knows. All I know is that I'm happy it's selling, I'm happy to not have to do any more fucking work on it. I'm happy to finally get to the next stage. The good news is that it will likely sell within a few weeks, we'll buy soon after that, and we'll be moved, likely, by Christmas. So getting it ready took 6 months, everything else will take 3. That's nice. Then I can get back to my real life.
I sometimes wonder if we (I) seek turmoil merely to prevent boredom. I mean wouldn't it be easier to have a job a house a car and whatever else and just enjoy life? But then again when i do that i'm bored out of my tree. And let's be honest, while the job situation has been as unstable as fuck these last 5 years, i've had one house for 7 years and one car for 4, and the same haircut for 3, so all things considered I'm not as much of a flake as I had thought.
Oh and (appropos of nothing other than the title of this bog entry) Eric's coaching SELP this fall.
