Today I'm observing a major milestone. And this is the one of the two times in the year (the other being New Year's), that I like to take stock of where I am in life.
There are two things that most people probably think a man should have at this point in his life. One is his own home, and the other is a wife and kids. But right now I don't have either. And I can honestly say that I don't feel particularly bad about not having the former, and I don't at all regret not having the latter.
In terms of my career, I have the best job I've ever had in my life. If anyone had told me 10 or 20 years ago that I'd be doing what I do for a living today, I'd have been thrilled. And I have a level of security in my job that most people in my line of work would be glad to have. But I had to work my ass off going to night school to get where I am, and I had to make a couple of pretty radical and income-wrenching career changes along the way, changes that almost certainly would not have been available to me if I'd had the kind of mortgage and family obligations that lots of guys my age are stuck with.
I have to admit that the only real regret I have in my life is that I haven't saved more money. But I'm not exactly broke either, and I have no debts (not even a car payment), so I am in fact saving some money. And I certainly don't regret the fact that I didn't wait until I was 65 or older to start having some fun in life.
Right now I'm priced out of the housing market. Even if I were to put $100K down, I still don't have a high enough income on my own to qualify for a loan on anything that doesn't suck. But that prospect doesn't particularly worry me right now, because this is the worst possible time to try to get into the housing market anyway.
The insane run up in housing prices over the last five years has been fueled largely by people who were taking out option-ARM-type loans, so they could buy a preposterously overpriced house with 3 or 5 percent down, and no principle payments for the first five years or so, and where the loan was based on "self-reported" income, meaning that they could just report whatever monthly gross they wanted on their loan application. So of course, many of them probably lied.
And that doesn't even take into account the credit card debt that so many of these people have racked up.
People who bought $800,000 houses built 70 years ago, with next to no money down, and without really having the income to qualify for the loan, were gambling that the market was going to continue appreciating 25% every year, and that they'd be able to flip the property before the teaser period on the loan ran out and the principle payments started coming due.
But the insane housing inflation of the previous five or seven years is coming to an end. And now, those chickens are coming home to roost. In the fourth quarter of 2006, Notices of Default were up 146% over the same quarter in the previous year. And it looks to be just as high or higher in upcoming quarters. My guess is that in the next three or four years, a lot of the people who bought houses recently are going to be losing them.
So currently I'm living in a great little rental unit that's in a much nicer neighborhood than anything I'd ever be able to afford on my own in this market. But it's obviously imperative for me to start getting a lot more serious about saving money than I've been in the last few years, so that when the time comes, I'm ready.
Meanwhile, there are a few guys I know who were working as clerks at Tower Records back in the 1980s, when I was working as a clerk at Tower Records, who were still working as clerks at Tower Records when the company went bankrupt and liquidated late last year. And so today, those guys are unskilled, uneducated, have no experience outside of retail clerking, and are now facing unemployment when they're pushing 50.
And while I'm on the subject:
By the time my dad was my age, he was divorced, broke, unemployed, and living with his mother. But he probably thought it was worth it to get free from my mom.
One of my best friends from high school married a woman who decided she loved crystal meth more than she loved her family. It took him years and cost him everything he had to get free from her and get custody of his kids, both of whom are pretty messed up because their mom was such a train wreck she made Britney Spears look rational and sane by comparison. And then he got laid off from the only real job he's had for the last 25 years. And on top of all that he never bothered to go to college.
And so today, my old high school buddy is divorced, broke, unemployed, uneducated, with two emotionally disturbed daughters on his hands, and living with his mother.
And one of my friends from college, who was married for ten years to his high school girlfriend, came home from work one day to have his wife sit him down and tell him, "Ken, I've been having an affair with Louise. I've found a woman who satisfies me in bed better than you do. So I want a divorce, and I want you to move out and leave our joint credit card open so I can rack up a bunch of debt on it and blow your credit rating to hell." Well, that's not exactly what she said, but that is the essence of what actually happened.
I, on the other hand, have managed to dodge a lot of bullets.
There was Karen, who was just looking for another guy to get her pregnant so she could have a second fatherless kid and another potential income source from this new sperm donor.
There was Jenny, who couldn't wait to go out with me so that she could spend the entire evening telling me all about how she missed her really rich, successful ex-boyfriend who had dumped her because she'd been diagnosed as a manic depressive and just couldn't seem to find the right medication.
And then there was Linda, who was over 30 and unmarried, but who really wanted a baby. So she decided that the next guy she could get her hands on who was handsome enough to knock her up was going to be the father, so she hooked up with some bartender, got what she wanted out of him, and then started shopping around for some other guy with a better job to support her for the rest of her life, which is when she started hitting on me. It took me a couple of dates to figure out what was really going on with her, and when I wouldn't go out with her any more after that, she started going around to some of my friends and co-workers and asking if I was gay.
So while it's true that there are a lot of guys my age who are a lot better off than me, it's also true that there are probably a lot of guys my age who wish they were me.
Physically, I'm in the best place I've ever been in my life. My career is going well. And I'm starting to discover that I'm actually pretty sociable.
So I've decided to try something adventurous.
First, I'm going to get a vasectomy to inoculate myself against women with baby rabies.
Then, I'm going to try dating again for the first time in about six years.
I imagine that a lot of people will think that what I'm about to do is insane. After all, if there really were some eligible women out there who were interested in meeting a guy like me, I'd be meeting them already.
But I'm going to go ahead and try my luck on e-Harmony and Match.com just to see what happens.
And I'm not going to be particularly picky either. I'll probably be willing to meet any woman who isn't fat or ugly, and who isn't a mental case, and who's life isn't a train wreck and who's willing to talk to me. Oh, wait, I forgot, that probably eliminates about 99.9% of single women in their 40s.
In fact, this blog is going to be a chronicle of those experiences. It will be the story of the ongoing battle between the two halves of my brain. The foolishly naïve optimist in me wants to believe that there should be lots of women in their 40s who would be delighted to meet a 50-year-old single guy who is physically fit, has a good steady job, hasn't fathered any illegitimate kids, hasn't been through any messy divorces, and isn't in hock up to his forehead in alimony and child support payments.
But then, the pragmatic realist takes over and remembers that women are so addicted to drama and turmoil and trouble that they actively seek it out, and that most middle-aged women are probably disappointed when they meet a single guy in their age range who doesn't have any of that baggage and whose life isn't at least as much of a train wreck as their own.
And the foolishly naïve optimist wants to believe that any single woman over 40 would be thrilled to have any man pay any kind of sexual attention to her at all. But then the pragmatic realist takes over again and remembers a recent survey which found that the average amount of time that women between the ages of 18 and 53 would be willing to go without sex in exchange for a whole new wardrobe, is 15 months.
So if all I end up learning from these experiences is that women in their 40s are just as self-centered and short sighted as they were in their 20s and 30s, except that now they've put on 30 or 40 pounds and have even more of an entitlement mentality, then I will simply have confirmed that staying single really was the right decision all along.
And I do have a history of having several false starts whenever I try something new in life, so I expect to have several of those before I see any sign of success.
So tune in to this blog from time to time, and read about all the false starts: the wack jobs, the cows, the nut bars, and the train wreck addicts.
The purpose of this blog will be to chronicle those stories.
