7 days

So. I've had a weird 7 days.

In general -- I am not my sister -- in general, the weirdness in my life comes along at decent intervals. Something blows up. I reel. I recover. I move on. Something else blows up, lather, rinse, repeat. If I were my sister, this would not be the case. Her weirdnesses have the quality of life in a trailer park during tornado season. Someone's shih-tzu just blew in through the window? Pfft. There's a Buick parked on the ceiling? Bah. Old man Parsnip just got blown right into the anal cavity of a standing cow? C'est la vie. Her life is managed in clusters of riot, interrupted by the occasional, errant moment of calm.

The difference between her strange blowups and mine are that hers make for great entertainment after the fact. Mine are just sordid and depressing. Other people's lives are always much more interesting.

(Of course, it might not be fair to compare my life with my sister's. My sister makes friends with tree poachers in Malaysia, goes to live in Guatemala for a month to pick coffee at 25 cents a pound, hangs out for three months in Europe on $1000, and owns her own machete. Me? I carry 1.2 pounds of change in my wallet and complain when we have to go to the grocery store to buy milk.

Our lives are not, shall we say, comparable.)

Death

One of my mother's friends is dying of cancer. I got a text message from my sister the other day that she was expected to die the next day or the day after. That was late last week, and so far she's still hanging in there, but so it goes. Living a little longer might be considered a victory. Then again, it might not. Cancer's one of those odd things where the cost of living longer is sometimes more than it's worth.

I realized just today that I know more people who have died of cancer than any other cause -- which is not really a surprise in this day and age, but certainly enough to make you stop and think. There's a curious separation in my mind, set in the early '70s, between cancer deaths and not-cancer deaths. The first and earliest death I was aware of was a playmate at the age of 3. She drowned in her bathtub one night, which is one of those tragic deaths that parents have nightmares about. I believe that was the first and only accidental death I have personally known.

It may have been the Age of Aquarius, but it's the Age of Cancer now.

Strangely, it is the people who are the most alive and the most vital who get taken out that way, as though by being larger than life, they somehow attract the attention of a malevolent and jealous lower power. Perhaps it's simply death that makes them seem more memorable in that sense; permanent and irrevocable separation makes shared memories brighter, even while it fuzzes out the boundary lines.

It's also quite possible that I tend to know people who live their lives in primary colors. Musicians, who have composed the majority of my acquaintances and friends, are flamboyant personalities as a rule: more neurotic, more expressive, more explosive in their emotions than normal people. (Though 'normal' only makes sense when used as a scale to measure people who are so patently ... not.)

My mother's friend is one of those primary color types. She's famous in her own way, and in the circles that my mother works in. Yuko Honda is incidentally an alumni from my own college, in fact, though that doesn't really weigh into the equation at all. She's a musician, an activist, and a pedagogue, though these are all secondary to the fact that she's one of the diminishing number of people who have shared life experiences with my mother.

At her age -- at any age -- that's a precious and increasingly rare thing.

My sister, who is currently living in Seattle in order to finish her prerequisites for nursing college, reports that Mom has been speaking wistfully of going back to live in Japan. "Which I think is a great idea," Sako says. "I think she should sell the house and just do it."

Of course, you have to put my sister's worldview into perspective. She considers you grossly over-burdened if you require more than a single duffel bag to pack all your worldly belongings.

My mother, who has more than a bit of my sister in her, is fortunately (or unfortunately) possessed of a ruthless common sense, sees no likelihood of moving. She raises objections almost before she finishes voicing the notion of leaving.

"It's apparently her dream," Sako told me. "Did you know Mom had a dream?"

"No kidding?"

"Oh my God, you have to get me out of here. Yesterday she told me where to find all the paperwork when she dies."

"Morbid."

"I think she's just being prepared. Or something." She sounded depressed. "Mothers aren't supposed to get old."

"Hang in there," I said by way of encouragement. "You're almost done with school."

"Nngh," my sister said, and hung up.

The next day, she sent me an email.

Did you know if either you or me have kids they can be
buried for free at dad's grave? 

       Sako.

What a deal.

House

We've been talking about buying a house for a few years now, and at the end of last year, decided it was time to actually do something about it. Our timing was not the best in the world; approximately half of Silicon Valley came to the same conclusion right around the same time. The first house we made an offer on (the one referred to in the earlier entry) eventually sold, I'm told, for over $705k. We were naive. If we'd realized that this was the thin end of the wedge, we would've bid up.

For the next four weekends, we went looking at houses with our real estate agent, Jane. (Incidentally, anybody out there looking for an agent to buy or sell a house in Silicon Valley, allow me to heartily recommend Jane Wang over at Coldwell Banker in Saratoga. Because she is unbelievably awesome. Incredible.) On a typical day, we managed to look at 8 houses in the course of four hours, which sounds far less exhausting than it actually proved.

In the course of four weeks, we made four offers on houses. We lost three.

Let me lay this out for you.

Week 1: Santa Clara townhouse, 1700 sq ft, 3 br, 2.5 ba. Listing price: $664,900. Sold for: $705,000+.

Week 2: Sunnyvale single family home, 1200 sq ft, 3 br, 2.5 ba. Listing price: $729,000. Sold for: ...not sure. We dropped out when the next bid higher than ours turned out to be a ridiculous $835,000.

Week 3: Didn't find anything we wanted to bid on.

Week 4: Campbell single family home, 1250 sq ft, 3 br, 2.5 ba. Listing price: $749,000. Sold for: $781,000.

Also in week 4: Sunnyvale townhouse, 1700 sq ft, 3 br, 3 ba. Listing price: $700,000. Sold for: $752,000.

To us.

Real estate is a strange and wiggy business. If you are anywhere else in the continental US, excepting New York City, you will realize that these home prices are a little insane. You will also notice that there every single one of these homes sold for more than the list price.

Housing slump? Yeah, right. We do things a little different in Silicon Valley.

The first two bidding experiences were incredibly stressful. Jane ordered me to stay by my phone between this hour and that hour, and I did so religiously. All higher brain function shut down during the designated hours; even if we'd recovered from sticker shock after the first week, there is still a big leap between imagining a monthly mortgage and having a monthly mortgage. The commitment is not insignificant, and each phone call from her meant that we'd either have to sit and wait longer, or think about bidding up a little higher.

Deciding how high to go on a house is a complicated procedure. Consider the house. Consider its location. Consider its school districts, its rooms, its size, its space, its proportions, its condition, and its age. Consider how long you'd like to live there. Consider how much money you're able to afford.

And then ask your husband for his opinion.

"How'd you like this one?"

"It's okay."

"How about that one?"

"It's okay."

"And this other one?"

"It's okay."

...or better yet, just ask a Magic 8-ball. They're more useful.

By the time week 4 rolled around, I'd learned my lesson. No more ulcers. No more stress. The third house we bid on was a place I wouldn't have minded living in, but it wasn't my first choice, and the bidding for it was on a Tuesday. Jane called to apologize for the failure to win that evening.

"I should have suggested $781," she said. We had bid $780, and the owner of the house had decided not to allow counter-bids because he just couldn't be bothered. We'd lost out by $1000.

"Pfft," I said. "No biggie." In fact, I was more inclined to laugh than not.

The next place was the one I really wanted, and offers for that were scheduled to be heard the next day. Jane called me right as I was leaving Aikido for the night.

"Congratulations!" she said.

"Oh, yay!" I said, and actually heard my checkbook whimper like a stomped rat.

That was on Wednesday.

Taxes

On Thursday night, it being one of the few nights when I don't go to Aikido and end up sweaty and gross afterwards, the Guy and I went out for dinner. We met up at the restaurant, driving separately from work; as a result, I was in the garage unpacking my car when I heard him from inside the house.

Not to cast aspersions on my husband's manliness (he really is quite, quite manly) but he wails like a little girl.

IThere are certain household jobs that are divided between us. He is responsible for garbage and picking up the mail. I am responsible for-- anyway, he does the mail. And inside the mail that day was a letter from the IRS.

According to them, we owed them money for our 2005 taxes.

$25,000.

My response to certain stimuli is not, perhaps, emotionally mature. I started to laugh.

There was something absolutely hilarious about the situation, and even now I can't quite put my finger on what it was. Irony, maybe? Expected poverty is one thing -- once escrow went through on the house, we would be living, if not hand-to-mouth, at least with tightened belts for a while. On the other hand, to get a bill like that out of the blue the day after we bought a house?

You have to admit, it was a little bit funny.

The problem, according to the IRS, was that the Guy had misreported stock purchases made in 2005. As is usually the case in these sorts of situations, the Guy immediately started calling the IRS every name he could think of. His argument was that the IRS was incompetent and didn't know what they were talking about.

Then he sat down to review the 2005 taxes in order to prove them wrong.

Except he couldn't find the taxes.

Well.

The rest of my evening was spent putting our papers, all our papers, into order, and trying very hard not to get upset. The Guy has a unique filing system, wherein he takes any papers that might be lying around and shoves them all into a drawer, under the sunny assumption that if he ever needs it, he'll be able to find it by sheer force of will. Simply put, paperwork was a chore that needed doing, so in that regards at least we came out ahead. A couple of hours in, I located our 2005 taxes and he started reviewing them.

The Guy talks to himself. After the first few rounds of dismayed, "Oh, no," and, "How did I miss that?" I stopped listening. At around 1:30 AM, I finished filing all our papers away.

At around 2 AM, he established that the IRS was wrong. "We don't owe $25,000," he said triumphantly. "We only owe about $7,500."

Yay? "Great," I said.

"It's better than $25,000."

"I suppose."

"I'm pretty sure it's only $7,000 or so. It's all the fault of those fuckers at UBS. They never sent me my forms."

"Right."

"It is. I would never have made that mistake if they hadn't--"

"For the record, you're not allowed to do our taxes ever again," I said.

He did not argue.

We put out a request for a CPA that night, emailing pretty much everybody we knew who had two coins to rub together, on the off chance that one of them might have an accountant. While we didn't land a regular CPA, we did hook the father of a friend, who happened to be an accountant living down in San Diego.

The Guy did not sleep all night. I slept like a baby. Go figure.

The next morning, he sent copies of our taxes down to San Diego, and spent the rest of the weekend worrying. This being the first weekend in over a month that we hadn't had to look at houses, he got to contemplate our impending mortgage payments instead. It was a pleasant couple of days for him.

On Tuesday, the news came back. We didn't owe the IRS $25,000. They owed us $600.

"Huh?" I said. "How on earth?"

"I'll write the IRS a letter," kindly accountant man emailed.

"Take that, you IRS fuckers," the Guy said, and puffed up like a territorial parakeet.

"How the hell do you go from owing $25,000 to being owed $600?" I asked.

The Guy poked me. "Should I buy TurboTax?"

The masculine mind is beyond comprehension.

Employment

Thus we hit Wednesday again.

Yesterday. On which day I got laid off.

Bummer.

It was a long time coming, and I suppose it was only to be expected, though that made it no less of a shock when it actually did happen. It was not a personally motivated layoff, which is always good -- I was, in fact, offered glowing recommendations, and possible leads by my boss and some other executives. Insofar as layoffs go, the best kind are the ones that aren't a result of something you did, but rather due to circumstances beyond your control. It's good to know you were valued.

There's not all that much I can say about it, for reasons of prudence as well as politics. However, I will say that I probably have at least another month of employment, which means an ongoing paycheck while I look around for another job.

Yesterday I was fine about it, or at least far enough in shock that it failed to make much of an impact. Today, I find myself faced with a mostly empty office and the beginnings of a crashing case of depression. The Guy, who was out at the new house yesterday to meet the inspector (like Sarah in my comments, he believes that one doesn't buy a house; one buys a structured collection of entropy and rotting wood, a viewpoint shared by the termite inspector who looked at the place) only said, "I TOLD YOU SO!" four or five times before apologizing this morning for being tetchy.

In retrospect, there's a lot to be grateful for. Not in being laid off, per se, but the fact remains that the timing could have been a lot worse; the package could have been a lot more sudden; and my boss has gone out of his way to try and make a transition for me as easy as possible. And I've been here five years. It's about time that I moved on to someplace new before I got too stagnant and complacent. On my own, I might never have done that. Inertia's a wonderful thing.

No excuses now! I spent last night getting words down on a page for my resume, though my mind after three hours of post-work stress Aikido may not have been in the best of shape. Still, the words are down, and now it's a case of editing. I have to find a job, and soon, because without a job, I do not have money for mortgage. We have to decide what to do about the house. I'm not entirely sure we can get a mortgage if I'm unemployed, so that's a big factor.

And dammit, I have to get our taxes done.

As I said, it's been an interesting 7 days.

Posted by yhirata at March 22, 2007 9:10 AM