5am Weird Thoughts #WhateverItis5amJesusChrist
I own a house.
The house is pretty small, just 1200 square feet, but the yard (not pictured) is right around half an acre. I have weeping willows and everything. Also my mortgage payment is only $530 a month.
It was officially “mine” at about 5pm yesterday. I got to the Title Company about nine-thirty that morning. I’d been awake since three, so I was plenty early. Had to dig my car out of the snow to get there, too, which was fun. Gave me that invigorated feeling I get where I get to go “Look! I am doing things to accomplish a goal!”
I stuttered a bit at the receptionist desk when I first got there and mumbled after that, then finally made myself understood that I was Andrew Peterson and I was there for an appointment. I was a little bit terrified to realize I was “actually doing it” even though I’d been preparing to “do it” for about five months now. Then I shook it off and decided to be excited instead.
Because I really actually did it.
I bought a house.
Lots of handshaking in the actual conference room. Then I kept having to sign a bunch of documents that referred to me as “Andrew Peterson, An Unmarried Man.” Which was… that was the only time yesterday I got a strong BC Woodsy feeling, but I just pushed through it. Still weird to see yourself referred to that way on a legal document. I think I’m going to make a joke out of it and introduce myself to people that way going forward.
Last two thoughts, as I have to work soon:
1. You know that scene when Andy first shows up at Shawshank prison? When everyone starts chanting “Fresh Fish!” and placing bets on who will cry first? And then you see Andy alone in his cell staring at nothing and Red wonders why he’s not crying? Watch it if you have not. Anyway, I think I can understand a bit of what he was feeling. Although it wasn’t a negative feeling by any means. More of a “this is actually happening” and “now this is what is front of me.”
It’s actually probably more like at the end of the movie when he crawls through the sewage pipe and comes out clean on the other side.
2. When I was in college I spent a weekend at a marine life research lab. We dredged the bottom of the ocean and brought up all kinds of critters. Some of the critters that came up just kind of died. I knew why already (but it works better if I tell this as a story and not as “You know, this is a fact I happen to know) but one of the students with me asked the professor.
“Sudden change in pressure. They live their whole life at the bottom with the weight of all the water on top of them every day. So when they get up here, where there is no pressure, they explode internally.”
I really hope that doesn’t happen to me.
Damn, that house looks real. It will seem even more ridiculous and wonderful and precipitous when you’re lying awake the first few nights with the house all looming around you. There’s something about being in a new place that can make you feel either invigorated or lost, with nothing set up yet and the air too echo-y and nothing really feeling like yours. It passes and then you start noticing all the stuff you didn’t really pay attention to at first, or at least not with the same sense of possessiveness. Congratulations!