I used to work closely with a guy who was always coming up with these lofty 5-year plans. First, he would go to the Olympics, and then he’d get married. The next year, he’d do this, and then that. He’d have kids. Become an engineer.
Check all the boxes like a scantron test.
He’d have one house, then two, then a fleet. A fleet of houses.
Each one creating passive income while he reaped the benefits. According to him, in five years he would be diving in to mounds of doubloons like Scrooge McDuck.
Taking “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” to heart, he had schemes upon schemes to become super-wealthy, mega-successful. I never bothered to read that book. You see, this guy already had a rich dad. I didn’t need any more reminders of the juxtaposition of our situations; once I had a poor dad and then I had a dead one.
Purely by comparison to him and his big, big plans, me and mine felt like we would never be in the same league. Everyone knew that he was the smartest-nicest-most talented, and I…purely by comparison…
(sshhh, comparison is an act of violence against thyself)
Well, I have always been a sucker for acts of violence against myself, so purely by comparison…
I fell short.
Well I mean, I used to fall in a lot of ways, but short was one of them.
Let me explain, picture me like Margot Robbie in “The Big Short”, except instead of discussing the collapse of the 2008 housing market, I’ll be going over the flaws in these silly little plans.
He had this one to buy couches at low prices and flip them for a high-ticket market value. Where would he get the couches? How would he manage to flip them? What about the necessary manpower – the trucks for pick up and drop off, the cleaning supplies for refurb, the time to even accomplish all of this?
He didn’t think of those things, but I did.
If reality ever hit him, it would have been me, dubbed ‘domestic dispute’.
It wouldn’t work, that couch thing, it would never work. It wasn’t a get rich quick scheme, it was stupid. When I told him that, it became a point of contention.
If we ever had a point between us - it was that of contention.
His next scheme was tiny houses.
The phrase still makes me grind my teeth.
Tiny houses. Say it slow. Break it down.
🏠 Ti ny hou ses. 🏠
On the eve of my biggest break down, I cried in the passenger seat of his car, and said “I don’t want to be here anymore”
Make of that what you will, but I meant more of a Neil DeGrasse Tyson-esque “here” and less of latitude and longitude “here”. The great beyond, “here”.
I didn’t want to be here, there, anywhere.
This is where his new plan, his new life purpose - Tiny Houses comes into play.
My problem, he said, was that I lacked a life purpose. That’s why I felt the way I did. If I just tried, put in a little effort, tried to be more like him.
If I only tried to find something…something like…
Tiny houses.
My new life purpose at that moment became to throw myself out of his car as soon as humanly possible.
It really doesn’t matter what his plan included. It never came to fruition. All you need to know is that it was about tiny houses.
They would be houses, and they would be tiny.
I’m sure he was going to rule over them like the grand puba of miniature homes.
One thing was for sure - he didn’t give a shit about what was going on in his passenger seat. He was tired. He was tired of my dramatics; it had been nearly 8 years. 8 years of me.
If he was tired, think about how I felt.
I was tired too, tired of couches and tiny houses. Tired of sitting in rink bathroom stalls to catch my breath. Tired of allowing and forgiving.
Tired of closing my eyes waiting for it to be over.
Take a deep breath. How long can it last anyways?
I became tired of chewing on my lip like bubblegum to stop from saying things better left between the lines of a blog written 4 years later. We were, at our core, two people who shouldn’t have ever spent more than a few days together, nevertheless a few years.
We now sit one year shy of the end of his 5-year plan.
As far as I know, neither of us are diving in to piles of cash but if he sat in my passenger seat crying about his tiny houses, I would like to think that I would find the compassion to stop and listen.
(shhh…comparison….well, you know.)
I always insisted that it was important for me to feel heard.
He insisted that he didn’t understand why.
We don’t speak much anymore, so I don’t have to worry about that now.
And by ‘much’, I mean ‘at all’.
I’m not sure if I have found my life purpose, and I’m not sure if he has either.
All I know for sure is that…
It sure as fuck isn’t tiny houses.
Enhance your reading experience with today’s Blog pairing menu:
Light bev: Best to stick with water for this one
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