FINALLY, A PLACE TO CALL HOME

Fewer than two months after my 30th birthday, I bought my first house!!

I am now the proud owner of a tini-tiny, two-bedroom "townhouse". It is more like a two-level condo, but the Home Owner's Association considers it a townhouse, so HOORAY for no condo fees!!

Circa 2007, I started to feel the effects of having no home, no roots, no family; and after a decade (my twenties) of posing as a working-class vagabond, I got my life together enough to purchase a little piece of the planet.

This means something.

• It means that I don't have to fight with the rental office because my rent just increased by another seventy-five dollars a month.


• It means that I cannot call the rental office when my toilet refuses to flush, so I have to keep a plunger and the Yellow Pages on standby.


• It means that I can paint my walls any color I want!!!


• It means I won't owe 2008 taxes! YAAY!!!
• It means I have a home.
  
  I suspect owning a home will bring into my life a much-needed sense of stability. But, there is something bigger here that I can't quite put my fingers on. Somehow my life has changed--even though I feel the same. Perhaps I will be enlightened when I make my first mortgage payment in July or when I actually paint and get some furniture.
  
  Feel free to post comments about what owning a home means.
  
  -rzl

The Moving Finger

I used to think blogs were for the faint of heart--those people who were too pusillanimous to write real books or have real conversations with real people.

I have changed my mind.

I no longer think that blog authors are lonely and narcissistic (although some are); I have decided that blogs are popular (and necessary) because blog writing and blog reading have taken the stealth out our collective search for authenticity and given us the courage to act upon our primordial desire to know people more deeply.

Let's face it: We want to emotionally connect with other people. Blogging is a way for us to share ourselves and build community; most people want to do this safely, with as little chagrin as possible. Blogging (I will henceforth use the term blogging to mean both reading and writing blogs) is a way for us to unashamedly present ourselves to everyone and no one without fear of being punished, ridiculed or rejected.

Gone are the days when we locked our Selves in the pages of diaries (termed "journals" when we became too cool to have diaries) so our snooping mothers, snooping accomplice fathers, voyeuristic sisters, and blackmailing older brothers could not see what we had written. Through blogging, we have, in a sense, reclaimed ourselves and abandoned the spirit of secrecy that is still alive in our elders, many of whom think blogging is farcical and that bloggers should never be taken seriously.

Blogging exists because we have always secretly wished that someone would care enough to discover us--the REAL US--the one who is smart, charming, cool and, most of all, lovable. We blog because we no longer have to exist in dark closets, under mattresses, in shoe boxes or wherever else we chose to hide our true stories.

Bloggers have used the Internet to lead us to a simple truth: We want to hear, and we want to be heard.