Creating Salivation In Your Fellow Man 101 a.k.a. The Agony of Defeat.

So here’s one of the interesting things about being a Grown Up™ that is in the midst of trying to sell their house: sometimes staying up late isn’t as much fun as you had envisioned when you were a kid.

For example, and this applies double when you are trying to sell your house sans a representing real estate agent, whenever a request to see the place the next day comes in one can be assured that one will be cleaning/tidying up/”trying to make the place look, you know, bigger” late into the preceding evening. One learns to just bite their tongue and do it, even if they are tires or cranky or just don’t really feel like it. The reason one just ‘soldiers on” is that one realizes that there is no other option and that this is just the sort of things that grown-ups do.

That still didn’t stop fear from worming its way into my heart when I emerged from our basement last night, after putting various items away in various places in order to help with the effort to create an overwhelming Spartan and thus spacious environment, and smelled paint. At 11:00pm. It seemed that Photogal had decided to touch-up the area beneath the windows with a bit of paint in order to erase the tiny dirty paw prints left from years of Betty/Lucy trying to get a better look at whatever they were barking at. This act in itself is quite forward-thinking however in Photogal’s hands I worried that a little touch-up might turn into a situation wherein I fell asleep only to awake at four in the morning to Photogal in overalls, floors blanketed by drop-cloths and fresh paint on every wall and ceiling. Of course that didn’t happen but the fact that I even thought it could, even for a second, should shed some light on the sort of behavior that can seize even the most reasonable person when they are faced with the daunting task of trying to make a complete stranger covet their property.

So that’s why I’m hoping the place sells quickly. It’s not because I want to really leave our house – because it is a great little house and I know that moving into our two-flat is going to end up requiring more work than is currently demanded from us – but because I just can’t take the repeated late-night cleaning sessions fraught with worry that something will be out of place or strike a prospective buyer wrong andr function as the fulcrum point that allows them to say, “Naw, I can’t really see myself living there.”

Maybe that’s it. At the base of all this is a continuos courtship laced with the fear of rejection and every night we clean the house is mirroring every girl’s pre-prom preparation that is doomed to end in tears when their date never shows up with that corsage to ferry them away to a dream-filled land of dancing and punch and glee and separated from terra firma in the loveliest of ways.