broker/therapist

Normally I don't just comment on press pieces, but this one hit pretty close to home. Since Camille & I are right smack in the middle of buying our first place, the headline "My Broker, My Therapist" naturally attracted my attention.

The article's definitely accurate in its contention that buying a home brings out the absolute worst in everyone involved. Anything that can be dredged up, will be. But, that said, a few quick things:

1) What kind of person (and especially what kind of spouse) complains, when her husband is buying a $3 million summer home for the family, "I wish you had a good job so we didn't have to live like this"? What would a "good job" be, exactly? And when you say "like this," what horrible circumstances, the result of your husband's sucky job, are you struggling to conceal? This doesn't seem like an instance of real estate offering a quick glimpse into someone's dark side -- this woman is suffering from compulsive greed and I doubt real estate has anything to do with it. Unless, of course, she was being sarcastic, which would be pretty funny.

2) What kind of person chooses an open house to reveal that she's pregnant? And who would do it in such an oblique way? It's one thing to keep it a secret for good reasons, but why decide, on the spur of the moment, to insist that you need a bigger apartment and then rub your belly in a significant way while saying nothing, like Charades? That's bizarre.

3) Somewhere in this article, it should have been mentioned that these people need actual therapy.


In other news, the Georgia Supreme Court is fine with you being a bigot, but you need to parse your bigoted arguments with a little more subtlety. What they really need to pass in Georgia is a statute that allows voters to hold utterly hypocritical views, thereby avoiding this "single-rule" nuisance.