This I Vow To Thee

I hereby declare to post something on you, dearest blog, every day henceforth or at least Monday through Friday, excluding major holidays.  I owe you that commitment and, let's face it, I could use the company.  I can't promise every post will be of any certain length or value, but I can guarantee it will show up.  That's what matters, right?  Here we go!

I live in an apartment in a pretty nice neighborhood.  There's a few things to walk to, but it's also nice to just walk around the residential streets.  I've done that a few times over the last couple months and it's really got me thinking about lifestyle, expectations, the future, etc.  Growing up, I never lived in a house, yet it still seemed to me a very normal, regular thing that just kind of came automatically with adulthood.  This was in Long Beach, not LA, and all of my friends lived in houses.  No one struck me as particularly wealthy, just normal, middle-class people with decent jobs and kids.  Walking around my neighborhood now, with the exception of the occasional huge, mega-house, it reminds me a lot of those same Long Beach streets I played wiffleball on and chased the ice cream man down.  I have a decent job now and feel mostly like an adult, and yet even the average 2.5-bedroom, 1000-sq. ft. house is utterly unattainable.  The house that I knew to be home to a single-income household of a cop or a factory worker here and now costs over a million dollars.  Unless my career trajectory takes an unexpectedly sharp new incline, that's never going to be possible for me.  Not here.  It's a humbling, glass-ceiling type of feeling to realize that the middle-class American dream of a modest house with a tree in the front yard, a basketball hoop over the garage, and a relatively safe school nearby is now the life of the millionaire.  I feel like going door-to-door to ask, "Excuse me, what do you do?"

Sure, I could move, and maybe someday I will, but in the meantime, it feels somewhat surreal to live in my neighborhood and at the same time feel like a complete outsider there.