Coming of age

During the past couple of months, I seem to have made an unexpected and rapid transition to adulthood. Adulthood, it turns out, is not as hard as it seems -- mostly it just involves spending a lot of money that you don't have. I've discovered that I have quite a knack for it.

So, this week, I will be giving a check worth several tens of thousands of dollars that aren't mine to a lawyer in exchange for an apartment. And my new least favorite person in the world, Banker Bob, will be giving me a mortgage to pay worth several hundred thousand more dollars to pay for the rest of it.

All of this has been made possible by my financial planner. I ask her a question like, "Do you think I could maybe someday buy an apartment?" fully expecting her to reply, "Are you crazy?? You're a teacher. Maybe when you're 50 you can think about it." But instead she looks at my budget and runs some calculations, and shows me a few tables showing what my finances look like now compared with if I had several different types of mortgages, and becomes increasingly excited as she talks about all the deducting that will happen after I have an apartment. Then she tries to think of a pottery metaphor to explain what she's gone over, since I don't understand her sports metaphors, but her pottery metaphor doesn't really make sense and involves a lot of time spent correcting her false assumptions about pottery ["No, we don't paint our pottery. It gets dipped in glaze."]. Then she says, "Do you understand everything I've explained to you?" and I nod my head yes, even though I've actually been spacing out for the past fifteen minutes and thinking about what might happen in the last season of Mad Men.  But what I *do* understand is that not only would I be a fool not to buy a house, I'd also be a huge disappointment to my financial planner. And six months or so later, I find myself writing checks for sums so astronomical I never thought I'd see the day. She's really quite something.