Bummed

I've been feeling really low today. A lot of it is probably that I'm really tired and therefore really cranky, but I'm also being gnawed at by an issue that I've thought about many times but that seems to be staring at me down a barrel of a gun lately.

I feel like I'm never going to be able to live anywhere in California but a one bedroom apartment.

I don't understand how people here live in houses. I don't understand how two income families can live in a two bedroom apartment. I don't understand how it's affordable at all. Oh, that's right, it's not. HELLO CALIFORNIA, LAND OF THE MIGHTY FORECLOSURE.

Edgar and I have recently had this idea floating around that we would like to be able to move into a house this year. Nothing fancy, just a two bedroom rental house somewhere in the Redondo Beach area, which is a convenient location for both of us near our jobs. Our original plan had been to live in our current one bedroom apartment through November of 2011. Our thought process was that even when we have a baby, since we have the loft space, that we would have plenty of room to live through that time with a child under one year old. But I just have really strong objections, that I'm hesitant to voice, about raising a child in an apartment.

I don't say that to disparage anyone that has children and lives in an apartment. My brother has children and lives in an apartment. But I just look back at my own childhood, where I always lived in a house. A house with a yard. And if I was living in an apartment with a child in Indiana, where I grew up, I would probably have no problem with this, because in Indiana, apartment complexes have grass and playgrounds and for not that much money at all, you can live in a place where you're not worried about gangs and bad schools and if the people in the apartment below you are smoking crack. You know what California has? CONCRETE. And dirt. And gangs. And middle income families being priced out of rentals in safe suburbs.

And forget about buying a house unless you win the lottery or work in the entertainment industry. I just don't understand how people that make the same amount of money that Edgar and I do can afford $800k for a 1200 square foot house with no yard and no privacy and still have any income left to pay for other important things, like, you know, groceries.

Part of me just wants to say fuck it, pack it all up, and move back to Indiana where life is affordable and a down payment on a nice house doesn't cost two years worth of salary. But I can't do that. I can't ask my husband to pack up his life, find a job in another state, and leave his family and friends behind. He doesn't have that much family here that he sees, only his parents and his brother, but since we're the only potential for grandchildren in his family we can't just leave his parents. I say this in the most loving way as possible, but meeting Edgar and falling in love with him really fucked up my plans. When I moved to California, I figured in the back of my mind that I was only doing it for the life experience, that I would live out here for a few years and then go back to Indiana where life as a whole is affordable. But that went out the window with meeting Edgar (and don't get me wrong, I wouldn't trade my husband for a chance to move back to Indiana).

But as I look parenthood squarely in the face, California just becomes uglier and uglier and uglier for me. I hate the concrete. I hate the fact that people here don't live in neighborhoods, just rows and rows of streets where houses are interspersed with broken down businesses and the crime incidence link of the residential/business mix that I learned in criminal theory in college won't get out of my head. I hate the traffic. I hate the bars on the windows. I hate the stupidity. I even hate the weather. WHAT I WOULDN'T GIVE FOR A GODDAMN THUNDERSTORM, YOU HAVE NO IDEA.

So I feel stuck. And sad. And hopeless. It wouldn't matter if we didn't have a car payment and a few credit card bills a month, because even if we had those to put towards rent for a house, we would still live in a shithole house.

I apologize for what has been an entirely self-indulgent post of me being a whiny mess.