It’s been my experience that once you settle on a house, you’re immediately struck with a premature and hyperactive case of buyer’s remorse. It’s a perfectly sensible and understandable reaction; a house is an enormous purchase with all kinds of repercussions in the realms of taxes, credit, and one’s ability to chastise the people living upstairs by slamming a broomstick against the ceiling. But for me this sensible doubt was also tinged with a little anxiety-fueled irrationality. As the last day for backing out of the purchase approached, I became obsessed with the possibility of getting the house and finding out too late that it didn’t match us.

“Matching” is my term for the popular but little-voiced opinion that a house should be reminiscent (physically or symbolically) of the person who lives there. As a home-buying concern, matching is only applicable to people who don’t recognize the “potential” of a place. My husband, who is the sort who sees everything through a film of Home Depot possibilities, thinks that matching is a crock. Regarding its more refined manifestations — including my own belief that I could never match a two-story house because they are inherently fancy and I am inherently not — I tend to agree with him. Or rather, I agree with him whenever we aren’t personally in escrow

But even in times of rational thought, matching has some undeniable appeal. A proper match has to satisfy present circumstances as well as future plans; a house should have a sufficient number of rooms and parking spaces to accommodate the people and cars that will live there. As someone who just moved out of a three-bedroom house where two of the bedrooms were categorized as space for as-of-yet undetermined hobbies, I can’t stress this enough. Of course, the danger involved in planning for the present alongside the future (when you’ll be filthy rich, professionally successful, and rife with hobbies) is that the present is often a bit less picturesque.

When I was still actively looking at houses, I saw a house owned by a man who had obviously ignored the theory of matching. Structurally, the place wasn’t remarkable; it was a rare specimen with hardwood floors in our price range, but the porch sagged and the garage walls had several gaping holes where the yellow fuzz of insulation showed through. I knew the house wasn’t right for us — there was a pervasive, musty smell and the bay window lauded in the advertisement didn’t shed much light into the dark living space — but I was curious, so I held my breath a little, feigned enthusiasm, and continued the tour.

With the exception of the living room (which sported the funky-smelling carpets and a big screen TV) the house was set up like an exhibit at some low-budget, period-ambiguous museum. Maps, magnifying glasses, and other outmoded scholarly tools crowded display tables in a dark “study,” and the walls were covered with gaudily-framed prints of medieval people engaged in fox hunts or famous beheadings. On the bathroom counter, a Victorian vanity set was arranged beside a safety razor covered in cobwebs; modern hygiene was represented by a cheap plastic toothbrush crowded to one corner of the grimy sink. Scarier yet was one the dark guest rooms featuring a child’s brass bedstead: a baseball mitt, stiff with newness and dust, sat smack in the middle of the comforter.

The owner and sole resident was a guy in his mid-forties who spent the duration of my visit pacing the overgrown backyard with a lawnmower. Home-owner mismatching makes people nervous — think Girl Scout with a Rottweiler — but I was determined to give this guy the benefit of the doubt. Sure, he might be a serial killer. But he also might be a hopeless romantic who never got married, had a kid, or grew enough facial hair to need all of the room and antique grooming supplies his optimism had furnished him. The mismatch between his projected needs and his real ones created an illusion of craziness which would have prevailed even on the slight chance that he wasn’t completely nutso.

During escrow I thought a lot about that house and the man who lived there. As my own negotiations settled down and I regained some semblance of rationality, I was able to admit, yet again, that matching is a fairly silly concern. Houses, after all, can change almost as quickly as circumstances and pretensions; the sad fellow in the musty house could have filled his spare rooms with pinball machines and keg-fridges as easily as he filled them with antique linens and creepiness. Matched or mismatched, buying a house is a commitment to a space and structure and has no bearing on sanity or identity.

The house we’re buying is a little small, and the owner’s financial situation is complicated; we aren’t sure when, if ever, we’ll be moving. The delays aren’t ideal, nor is the fact that the lighting fixtures look as though they came from some Trekkie’s clubhouse, but I console myself with the knowledge that the house doesn’t yet resemble the set of a Bergman film. Because when I think about walking through that musty house, I’m still a little surprised that every door only revealed more dust and more misguided décor. Matching may be a crock, but in a house like that I was expecting to find someone more tragic than a guy with a lawnmower.

Photo by kafkan

Unfortunately, there are few things that make this prospective homeowner jumpier than advice — more particularly the brand of conflicting advice that real estate tends to generate. One of the earliest decisions involved in buying a house is deciding whether or not you want to tell people what you’re up to. The advantage of being open is that most homeowners (and all casual watchers of Extreme Home Makeover) are eager to advise a first-timer. The downside is the sheer volume of advice that you’ll receive, and in the case of people younger than 30 — especially those of us who look younger than twenty when not taking drastic hair-spraying measures — how often that advice will begin with a misty-eyed tale about the transformative power of homeownership and end with a diatribe on the advantages of renting luxury condos.

Being the chatty sort, I elected to be open about my house search and was immediately treated to an avalanche of feel-good phrases and cautionary advice; even my closest friends went back-and-forth between apocalyptic predictions and an enthusiasm that smacked strongly of the American Dream. Tales of homemade bread cooling on brick hearths intermingled with stories about sinister Dickensian bankers, the sort who enjoy making people pawn their pocket watch to avoid eviction on Christmas Day. This disconcerting combination — all the more unsettling for its strangeness — made me very nervous.

During those months, every tale about faulty homeowner’s insurance and busted pipes reminded me of the permanence of the purchase and the need to balance a house’s charm (read: age) with its potential to collapse around me. Similarly, stories about predatory lending sent me paging through my loan agreement, searching for loopholes that I couldn’t have recognized even if I had seen them. And every time someone told me to ignore the crime rate in a neighborhood because memories, not statistics, make a home, I became acutely aware of how choosing a house can be an intuitive voodoo-logic thing, and how likely I was to screw it up.

Like most people who are in a little over their heads, I became a bit defensive about receiving advice. Proverbs and platitudes I resented most of all — probably because I felt corniness was the only technical subject in which I could hold my own. The following four statements comprise a list of the most startlingly accurate generalizations that I’ve heard in recent months. I like to call it, “Four Surprising Truths Learned When I Thought Someone Was Patronizing Me.”

1. Set a budget, but your taste will go up.

When my real estate agent told me that everyone readjusts their initial budget to include more expensive houses, I dismissed it as a polite disapproval of my very conservative price range. A few weeks of viewing homes where previous tenants had stripped the hardware and left hobo nests in the garage changed the mind of this fair-weather-DIY-er; I adjusted my budget to allow for houses that were slightly more expensive but also a lot smaller, in hopes of getting a house in better shape.

2. There will be a house that haunts you.

I heard this statement often and never believed it until I met a little stucco house located — literally — on Main Street a few towns over from where I live. The backyard was overgrown and the kitchen held the dark-wood gloom of the ‘70s, but the house had a mudroom and a lot of potential. I debated the commute too long, weighing the extra driving time against the inlaid cabinets in the dining room, and eventually made an offer that was both too little and too late. I’ve seen quite a few houses in recent months with creaky porches, dusty mirrors, and feral cat colonies, the kind of house that I would secretly believe to be haunted, but the Main Street house is the only house that haunts me.

3. You have to see 30 houses before you know what you’re looking at.

The number changes, but this sentiment stands. It’s only now, with several dozen houses and a new vocabulary under my belt (siding, raised foundation, and API) that I’m starting to feel comfortable viewing homes. When I first started looking I was so distracted by the awkwardness of wandering past someone else’s half-filled hamper that I couldn’t focus properly on the condition of the house. Only time and more viewings can desensitize you to the strangeness of quantifying your admiration for someone’s home while they wait patiently at the neighbor’s house.

4. Escrow is terrifying; you’ll get cold feet your first time and chicken out.

Having just gone into escrow for the first time, I can attest that is indeed terrifying. Looking for a house has been a drawn-out process, like an odd high-stakes scavenger hunt without defined prizes or time limits, and the more involved I became in the search the more removed the end result seemed. Now, just as I started getting comfortable with the process of searching, one of my offers was accepted, and I have a whole new game and vocabulary to memorize before I decide to sign a contract. Whether my first time in escrow (with all of the signatures and meetings with sinister bankers that escrow implies) will be terrifying enough to scare me away, however, remains to be seen.

But, if I do manage to brave escrow and jump through all of the legal hoops with mild grace and artfully notarized signatures, I may enter into the final stage of buying a house. If that is the case, I will be done with searching and I’m a little ashamed to admit that the whole of my wisdom on the topic can be condensed into four teeny paragraphs — paragraphs that read suspiciously like a twine-embellished sign on the wall of someone’s country-style kitchen. Fortunately, the shameless nature of the statements doesn’t make them any less true. As it turns out, when doing something as marvelously clichéd as buying a house in the suburbs, all kinds of platitudes apply.

Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institute.

Actually, “unfair” hardly seems harsh enough; at best I’d been hasty, and in some cases, I was fairly certain that I’d been mean. When I realized this I was sitting in front of a loan officer, sporting a pair of shoes that I usually reserved for funerals and trying to charm my way into a mortgage. Sweating profusely and surrounded by multi-lingual posters declaring that a penny saved was a penny earned, I suddenly regretted all of the perfectly respectable houses I’d written off for little infractions like river-rock walls, chain-link fences, and kitchen sinks shaped like kissing cherubs. It might seem a little crazy, but sitting in front of that loan officer in a bank attached to the local supermarket, I felt like one of those houses.

I was visiting the loan officer on the advice of my brand-new real estate agent, a charming fellow full of platitudes about multiple bathrooms being the secret to domestic bliss. A loan officer, simply put, serves as gatekeeper to the bank — he examines the credit, debt, and capital of the applicant and decides whether she is likely to pay back her loan. I didn’t relish the idea of discussing my expenditures and turbulent job history with a stranger, especially a stranger with the word “officer” in his job title. However, my real estate agent assured me that a consultation like this was a necessary part of financing a house, so I donned my most responsible ensemble and followed his advice.

Whatever my misgivings about the nature of the meeting, I did hope that it might give my house search some direction. Every morning I scrolled through pictures of people’s homes and expanded each thumbnail, ignoring the captions and descriptive paragraphs as I tried to imagine my furniture on the owner’s carpet and my face in her picture frames. I was admittedly short-sighted and unsympathetic; I rarely exerted myself to visualize what a room might look like with new wallpaper, and I never tried to empathize with what the owners might have seen in their old stuff. I clicked systematically through the updated listings, flippantly dismissing houses for broken windows, ugly carpeting, and rusty bathtubs. Occasionally a picture would catch my eye — usually some pornographic full-length shot of a pantry — but most mornings I didn’t see a single house that I liked well enough to arrange a viewing.

In the loan officer’s cubicle, I started to wish that the idea of viewing and potentially buying a house had never crossed my mind. I was nervous and I’d spent the morning practicing the kind of small talk that I imagined financially secure people made. I’d even worked out a heart-wrenching story to explain my recent departure from “professional” work and the subsequent pay cut, hoping to give an undercurrent of heroism to the morbid tale told by my paycheck stubs. I knew that I wasn’t a hopeless case financially; I had a steady job, some savings, and decent credit. I was eager, however, to give a back story to the numbers, to explain away decisions that might seem illogical on paper, and maybe give myself something of a human-interest edge. And if given the slightest opportunity, I might have done just that.

As it happened, during our twenty-minute meeting, the loan officer never asked me for a personal statement. In fact, besides a terse question about whether I was really married, in a tone that suggested having different last names was simply too bohemian, the loan officer didn’t ask me any personal questions. He merely took my driver’s license, hen-pecked my name into his computer, and in complete silence, scrolled.

As the silent minutes passed and I realized that there would be no further questions, I became frantic. If the loan officer never asked me anything, I couldn’t explain myself. There would be no time to air my endearing crackpot theories about homeownership, or to mention that I haven’t overdrawn my checking account since I was sixteen and that even then I never overdrew to buy things like drugs and condoms, only the sort of lame, responsible purchases that herald a lifetime of frugality. He’d never know that, despite the alarming number of W-2s in my file, I wasn’t the kind of person who leapt nimbly from job to job. I stared at the loan officer while he stared at the screen, certain that I could never qualify for a loan without prefacing my financial realities.

I spent the rest of the consultation in despair, thinking about the assumptions that the loan officer must be making about me and wondering whether he could see my bank statement and knew that I order my deodorant from Amazon. But as the silent meeting wound to a silent, unrecognizable close, I noticed something familiar in the intent stare and violent scrolling of the loan officer. It was a pose of power and indifference, tempered with the knowledge that there might be something or someone better on the screen tomorrow. I realized that if the loan officer didn’t ask me any questions, it was no better than I deserved; he was looking at me in the same clinical way that I’d been looking at houses.

To attribute feelings of vulnerability and embarrassment to a house is silly, I know, but when I emerged from the loan officer’s cubicle into the florescent lights of the supermarket, I felt a strong sympathy for houses. In a way, hunting for a house is an endless barrage of rooms that you wouldn’t have painted that color, couches you wouldn’t have placed there, and windows that you’re pretty sure you wouldn’t have cracked. In the midst of all the things that you might not have done, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that someone did do them, and that they would probably jump at the opportunity to explain themselves. Unfortunately, when we look at houses we have to make our decisions based on the same kind of disembodied factual residue as a loan officer.

And, finally, silver lining: A few days after our meeting the loan officer called me and explained the results of his evaluation, which was based on my own factual residue. Despite having taken a long leering look at my broken windows, and never having heard any of my crackpot theories on homeownership, the loan officer approved my application. He not only approved it, but approved an amount generous enough to get me into the perfect house, provided that I can look closely enough to find it.

Photo by Laughing Squid

To be clear, I’m not one of those anti-materialistic chumps who don’t care where they live as long as they’re healthy and happy. On the contrary, I nurse an obsessive concern over my living space. I suffer seizures of embarrassment when admitting that I once rented an apartment with a wet bar in the living room and palm trees in the parking lot. I’ve lived in the same rental for two years now (a little house with a gate à la The Secret Garden in the backyard), but I still spend hours online peering at pictures of linen cabinets and loitering on the kind of blogs frequented by people who frame pieces of vintage wallpaper. 

But through all of the years I spent packing and unpacking, searching for the next adorable bathroom or picturesque alleyway, the idea of buying a house never occurred to me. Renting, I thought, was liberating. It was the choice of the artistic and intellectual as showcased in Woody Allen films; it allowed one to be adventurous and transient, always ready to move from one furnished brick warehouse to another. In college I imagined riding a bicycle up to my rambling seaside (rental) home, where I would drink toddies and smoke cigarettes in something called a turret. Later, when my obsession with Virginia Woolf subsided slightly, I imagined myself living in a pre-war apartment above an organic produce market. I never achieved this dream, but I’m sure if I had, the proprietor of the market would be jaded and arthritic and save me all of the best oranges.

I wish I could say that my decision to buy a house was entirely an emotional one, that I woke up one day and the romantic clichés cluttering my brain had been replaced by a strong, reasonable nesting urge. I could pretend that I was transformed by NPR into the sort of person who gets — really gets — what an interest rate is and doesn’t feel the least bit tempted to change the station when the word “foreclosure” comes up. I could even blame the fact that I’m married to someone who occasionally uses words like “escrow” and can fathom the elusive financial equations of homeownership (house + x^2 = good), but even that wasn’t much of a factor in my change of heart.

The real reason that I want to buy a house is part financial and part fantastical. I’ve lived in California my whole life, and I understand that overpriced real estate is a tax on the right to be self-righteous when telling people from other states that you don’t live anywhere near LA. However, when I renewed my lease and calculated the percentage of my income that went to my landlord last year, the majesty of renting started to fade a little. This disenchantment melded with my feeling of relative financial stability, and I began to wonder if buying a house was really the cultural betrayal I imagined. And every time a nosey family member or frantic newscaster credited the collapse of the housing market with giving people in my tax bracket a slim chance to buy a home, my curiosity grew.

The second, fantastical part of my reasoning is harder to explain. I’ve spent years searching for the perfect rental without ever finding it. Sure, there were close calls; there have been apartments with crank windows, shaded balconies, and tile floors that I’ve schemed to inhabit, only to find that there is a strange smell in the pipes, a broken oven in the kitchen, or a crazy homeless man who pounds on the door at night. My rental resume is filled with fabulous doorknobs on cheap doors and centrally located 600-square-foot cottages that seemed so much bigger during the hurried walk-through. No place is perfect and when you rent you have to choose between making due and moving on. Typically, I’ve moved on.  

That, I think, is what finally convinced me to start looking for a house of my own. As much as I’d like to fancy myself a rambling artist and adventurer, I’m a fairly boring person with a fairly developed interest in my living arrangements. And while I’ve accepted the fact that no place is perfect when you walk in the door, I haven’t given up on the idea of a perfect house. Owning a house gives you options beyond resignation and moving; it gives you the opportunity to change a house, to paint the shutters, hammer nails willy-nilly into the walls, and create your perfect home through sheer will and well-informed textile choices. When you think about it that way, buying a house is both a responsible and sentimental thing to do. It’s not quite as romantic as perpetual renting, but it comes close enough.

Illustration by wackystuff.

That reflexive niceness was the hardest thing for me to swallow when I took my first retail job six months ago. At 23 years old, I was a pansy recently cowered by a year of corporate bludgeoning. I had quit a salaried position for reasons that I felt were heroic and artistic but that most of my friends agreed were sentimental and suicidal. With a degree and five years of office experience under my belt, I had no idea what I wanted to do. It was November, so like anyone looking for an immediate job during the holidays, I cruised the outlet mall.

When I was hired later that month at a shoe store, I doubted whether I could do the job. First, I’m not exactly a natural salesgirl — I’m an epic failure at schmoozing, and smiling for eight hours a day is hard work for someone who is used to squinting at computer screens. Second and most important, I was used to offices. I was used to the snarky politics and alliances forged in the copy room, to the late nights and corporate-funded coffee machines. And I was definitely used to coworkers who were as likely to throw you under the bus as to invite you to eat at their table in the caf.

I’ve worked in good offices, of course, the sort with real humans in the cubicles and cupcakes in the break room, but when I took the sales job I was straight from a year of technical writing at a small, competitive firm. It was the kind of place where deadlines always loomed, conference calls always ended in shouting, and my coworkers were always casually asking me to define the exact “purpose” of a liberal arts degree. I left the firm because I am, at heart, a sissy — a shy, awkward sort who wasn’t suited for the cutthroat nature of the job. But that didn’t mean that I was ready for large-scale friendliness.

In retail, like most jobs, the trick is submerging yourself in a work-time persona. Before leaving for work you change your clothes, slap on that perma-grin and hitch up your customer-service voice. (A customer-service voice is a bastardized face-to-face version of a “phone-voice,” a sickly-sweet tone unlike your regular one.) My customer-service voice was everything I wasn’t: calm, cheerful, and vaguely reminiscent of the Disney version of Snow White. At work I used it all of the time, even with my coworkers. When I was promoted at the shoe shore, I thanked the manager in a lilting tone even my closest friends wouldn’t have recognized.

For me, the voice was the most important factor in my (modest) success at the outlet mall. It doesn’t matter if the phrases are dictated by some corporate handout or if you are trying, by way of eyebrow tilting and the rakish angle of your name tag, to project ironic detachment — using a customer-service voice makes everyone else feel a little guilty and bend to your will.

“Would you like to join our rewards card program today?” I asked each customer in my simpering voice, holding their credit card between two fingers like a hostage.

Most people declined but rarely without some kind of excuse. Usually they pled too many membership cards in their wallets, and I would nod knowingly as they pulled out a stack and spread them before me like a magician asking me to pick a card. I listened gravely to their stories about inboxes full of ads from Amazon and claims of infrequent shopping. I wasn’t trying to make them feel bad — as someone who can’t turn down even the creepiest door-to-door salesman, I admired their reluctance — the guilt was in the voice.

A customer-service voice allows you to wield guilt and summon goodwill in other ways too. I watched in amazement as empty-handed shoppers were chased from the store by the sincerity of my “Have a nice day!”, convinced that they owed me something, if only the discounted price on a pair of novelty socks. It pacified old ladies with bunions when I told them that we didn’t carry wide shoes; it calmed mothers with screaming babies as I apologized for our lack of booties. With a slight change in pitch, my customer-service voice intimidated children crawling under the dressing-room doors and kept caffeine-deprived hooligans from completely losing it when I explained that I couldn’t open the register to give them change for the Red Bull machine outside.

A few weeks before I gave my notice at the shoe store, an ex-coworker from my cutthroat cubicle days came in, searching, I suspect, for a juicy tale of pride coming before the fall for the weekly staff meeting. My customer-service voice firmly in place, I smiled insipidly as she told me about the raise that she’d received in my absence. She revealed the rumors about my suspected whereabouts and how someone had sighted me eating lunch in parking lot of the outlet mall, thus blowing my unintentional “cover.” I made sympathetic noises and interrupted her periodically to bleat a cheerful “hello!” at a customer coming through the door.

Standing there, I wondered if she felt triumphant, assured that I was making minimum wage and only got a 30-minute lunch break. Strangely, behind my cheerful mask I felt only relief. I’m not trying to say that there is no competition in working retail (though because of the largely female demographic these political schemes are usually dismissed as “drama”) or even that these shenanigans are inherently bad. I do doubt, however, that these feelings are ever so entrenched that people search for former rivals once they’ve parted ways and canceled their Facebook friendships. Dry-eyed and grinning, I told my ex-coworker and ex-rival that I should probably get back to work.

She left and I can say with the slight vindictiveness of a recent retail retiree that she didn’t make any pretense of shopping in the store. As I watched her walk towards the exit, I congratulated myself on my newfound ability to navigate uncomfortable situations — the strange passive-aggressive sort that would have had me tripping over my tongue and shaking in my brand-appropriate boots a year ago. Oddly, working retail gave me a confidence and battle-plan that would have served me well in my office career and that I hope serves me well when I return to the cubicle realm next month. Despite everything that retail has given me, the fact remains that an eight-hour day in a shoe store is equivalent in pay to a four-hour shift in an office; until that ratio changes, my path to financial security will be strewn with automatic staplers and the occasional office rivalry.

As my ex-coworker got close to the door, I inhaled deeply and hollered the standard “Have a nice day!” at her. It might be wishful thinking on my part, but she looked a little guilty as she ducked empty-handed through the exit. It was probably just the customer-service voice, though. That’s what it’s good for.

Photo by Holtsman.

The vanishing of the busybody is shocking because she has long been an essential member of every small town ensemble. She, alongside the town drunk, small-time politician, and obligatory girl-next-door once dominated fictional small town life. Armed with her binoculars and her nimble fingers for parting curtains, the busybody has been a timeless vehicle for anxieties about privacy in a neighborhood.

Why would the busybody, so comfortable in her housecoat and hot-rollers for the last hundred years, choose this decade to disappear? More importantly, who is handing out apples at Halloween and calling the police to report young hooligans skateboarding without helmets? I can hardly believe that she would have left all of this (her television programs, her geraniums, and her bottomless supply of caramel candies), to take up permanent residence with her daughter and no-good son-in-law in Cleveland.

If this stock character is vanishing from pop culture it’s because the elements that she satirizes — the judgmental attitude, the gossiping, and the obsession with domestic conflicts — do not apply to her demographic in modern society. With the impending retirement of the Baby Boomer generation, this decline can hardly be blamed on a lack of old ladies. And the continued popularity of gossiping is unchallengeable, a fact that makes the disappearance of the busybody as a character all the more mysterious.

I have a hypothesis, but I’m almost certain that you aren’t going to like it. The busybody isn’t gone from our midst; she has merely expanded her ranks so quickly and surreptitiously that we haven’t noticed. The satire isn’t flawed because the social elements embodied by the busybody are gone. The satire is flawed because the busybody is everywhere and everyone.

I have no desire to beat a dead horse, so I’ll be brief in my broad rationale. The internet is dripping with stories about old flames reunited through social networking and adults confronting bullies from their youths in 140 characters or less. The writers of these articles tell us that society is growing more interconnected all the time and then argue amongst themselves about whether this is a beneficial or apocalyptic development. The rest of us read these arguments on our cell phones and mull over the possibilities — after updating our Facebook status to say “is mulling.”

I’m not interested in approving or condemning (and it is never wise to condemn something so addictive), only to add another layer to the metaphor. The going cliché is that the internet, and social networking in particular, is making the world a smaller place. I would take that a step further and suggest that social networking is roping our personal worlds — all of our acquaintances spread across our lifetime and the globe — into one blue-and-white small town. And peering through the blinds at our neighbors and crushes from middle school isn’t some old lady. It’s me, you, and everyone we’ve ever met.

Every day, we sign into various little neighborhoods and stare at each other. The traditional busybody was crucified for taking too keen an interest in the housekeeping of her neighbors, but we modern gossips set our sites on deeper dramas. Where the old broad might speculate maliciously about the troubled marriages in her neighborhood, we track their demise. We monitor the pre-break-up wall-flirting, moody statuses, fatal change to “It’s Complicated,” and even see pictures of the new squeeze before the break up is final. The busybody, our patron saint, was ostracized because she was just too interested. Well, we’re interested and we aren’t likely to stop being interested any time soon.

I don’t want to indulge my love of metaphors too much. Reading the status updates of someone who has knowingly accepted your friend request is a far cry from training your binoculars on an unsuspecting neighbor. And passing off information discovered through social networking isn’t exactly privileged gossip — oftentimes it’s nothing that couldn’t be discovered with a little Google-sleuthing.

But every time I start a sentence with the phrase “I saw on Facebook…” I remind myself that I’m sporting the verbal-equivalent of a housecoat and hot rollers. Repeating information gleaned from Facebook without bothering to couch it in some ambiguous “I-heard-somewhere” statement is the new format of gossip, and it’s becoming more prevalent everyday. And like most sources of juicy gossip, Facebook, through the miracle of the News Feed (the default setting that prioritizes the most “interesting” content) and various privacy settings, is telling us exactly what it wants us to know.

The purpose of a stock character is to act as shorthand for a common personality type; stripped of her identifying features — her age, her curtains, and her bingo halls — the busybody no longer serves that function. Gossip is the province of everyone now and until it reverts to being a negative character trait our blue-haired pal won’t be returning to pop culture. As far as we are concerned, there is nothing hilarious about a middle-aged lady crouching over her computer giggling at her own status update — at least not yet.

First-time passengers are usually too preoccupied with wiggling past seat belts or disengaging themselves from the woolen arms of the cardigans stored on the floorboards to respond; either that, or they assume that I am referring to the “hits of the ’60s and ’70s” blaring from the radio. It isn’t until I start backing out of my parking spot, which takes me about five minutes, that they start to process my warning.

My performance deteriorates from there. I engage my blinker prematurely and merge hesitantly; I yield to cars plastered with confrontational bumper stickers, and allow myself to be bullied by tailgaters or anyone in a truck. I will always take a longer and more indirect route, provided that it allows to me avoid unprotected left turns and short onramps.

My claim of resembling an old lady behind the wheel is not based on the aforementioned characteristics, nor derived from sexist or ageist prejudices. My comparison is grounded solely on my own observations. When I slow down to 45 miles per hour on the freeway because it’s raining and I’m worried about hydroplaning, I invariably observe that the majority of the other hydro-phobes keeping pace with me are firmly in the females-over-fifty set.

For two brief years in my adolescence, I was a normal driver. Then, right before I left for college, a mail truck made an unprotected left turn and failed to yield to oncoming traffic — in this case, me. The resulting accident took away my beloved Chevy Blazer (color: faded black) and left me terrified of driving.

From that point on, I felt trapped inside of cars. When I left for college, my parents encouraged me to borrow their car for weekend trips, but I had little desire to drive. I had no intention of becoming a pedestrian, so I did what any red-blooded college freshman would have done. I bought a bicycle.

The hideous light blue beach cruiser I bought after my accident was the first in a long series of bikes. I was living in a town that prided itself on bicycle accessibility and, consequently, was home to a thriving bicycle theft and resale industry. In four years, I owned one new bike, four used or refurbished bikes, and one lender bike that I borrowed from my boyfriend for an entire year. By the time I graduated, all six bikes (including my boyfriend’s) had been stolen.

I biked as much as I could, and the benefit to my nerves far outweighed the embarrassment of showing up at work in the winter with wet hair and sopping sneakers. When I needed to travel outside of peddling range, I got into the shameful habit of bribing friends and family for rides with gas money and dinner.

My younger sister Meghan was my primary driver for several years. At the meager price of one Value Meal per venture, I considered the situation ideal. But after a few years, my nervous backseat driving began to wear on her.

“Don’t text while you drive,” I whined one afternoon when we were driving back from the 85th birthday party of an obscure relative. I was sitting in the passenger seat of her car with my feet firmly planted on the dash to ward off head-on collisions. She ignored me and started texting in earnest with both hands.

I managed half of a sentence about preliminary wheel etiquette (i.e., at least one hand should remain in contact with the wheel at all times) before she briskly informed me that I seemed to know a great deal about driving considering that I refused to drive myself.

As Meghan’s withering glance took in my dirty sneakers and jeans (torn in many a bicycle chain and then stapled discretely together), I questioned the logic of our arrangement. Though she might not be the most attentive driver, I had more faith in my sister’s skills than in my own. If I was driving I would be responsible for dealing with hundreds of inattentive drivers, and if this situation was any indicator, I couldn’t handle one. The two of us spent the remainder of the silent ride counting the months until our youngest sister turned 16.

In my biking and ride-slumming days, I was frequently told that the best way to master fear was to “get back on the horse.” I always gave those distributing this unwanted advice the same answer: if I had been in an accident on a horse, I would have gotten back on — if someone could guarantee that I wasn’t going to be sharing a trail with a bunch of other riders eating breakfast sandwiches and doing their makeup while galloping about at 60+ miles per hour.

But the time came when I could no longer avoid driving. I moved from a bicycle-centric town into a city where the faulty public transportation system and lack of job opportunities within peddling distance made it clear that I needed to surrender my bicycle bell and basket. I loved my bike, but I needed a job; short of moving to Portland, I didn’t see how I could combine the two.

I set about re-learning to drive in a borrowed Monte Carlo that let a piercing shriek every time I turned the wheel. My progress was slow, further hindered by the fact that I’d learned to drive in a rural area where parallel parking was more frequently a punch line than an expectation. I was 22 and learning to use a parking meter.

One afternoon, when I had exasperated my boyfriend with a series of spontaneous U-turns between intersections, he insisted on taking the wheel.

“This isn’t the country,” he said.

After a year, I’m beginning to see his point. I recently bought my first car, and I chose it with city driving in mind: decent gas mileage in traffic, small for parallel parking, and a hatchback to impress my fellow urban liberals. It’s the next best thing to a bicycle for someone with a 30-minute commute.

I feel like I’m moving backward through the life of a driver. I may not like driving and I may drive like an old lady, but I’m just getting started — or, more accurately, starting over. I hope someday to drive like a cautious but confident middle-aged driver, halting my regression before I reach the recklessness of teenagers. And if I can’t manage that, I suppose I will just have to continue as I have been, invest in a pair of driving bifocals and gloves, and wait for the world to become accessible by bicycle.

I know what you’re thinking, polite reader with your leather-bound, gold-leafed copy of Great Expectations on the mantle. You are wondering what sort of silly illiterate claims that there is no “good” book to call your favorite.  And I agree wholeheartedly.  There are many books worthy of the title, but that fact does not make me any more eager to name a favorite. 

Unfortunately, I can’t lay my reluctance at the door of sentimentality and claim that my adoration of novels is so impartial as to exclude favoritism.  I have buckets full of favorite books. My bookcase is organized to include two shelves devoted entirely to favorite books, on which the books are further organized by depth of affection and attractiveness of cover. 

No, my reluctance comes from a quaking social squeamishness.   Great works of fiction often evoke equally great assumptions about their enthusiasts.  Therefore, unless you are lucky in the obscurity of your tastes, this very personal piece of information allows the questioning party to label you as an established “type” based on the rumored characteristics attached to that particular novel’s followers.  Through a process that I like to refer to as literary stereotyping, your favorite novel becomes a social calling card, a veritable status symbol.  

Certainly the more earnest readers of this diatribe (the aforementioned Mr. Great Expectations among them) are throwing up their hands in protest of such scheming and self-consciousness.  Scoff if you will, literary stereotyping is a real discriminatory practice. Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is what Nike sneakers were in the mid-nineties: instant cool. 

No work of literature is too exalted to fall prey to literary stereotypes. Even a fondness for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream can be interpreted as a fondness for pre-Protestant culture, a partiality for recreational corset use, and a weakness for necklaces featuring fairies perched on bottles full of glitter.  

In the face of these stereotypes, I consider lying about your favorite novel an entirely justified falsehood. I see no reason to subject so personal a choice to the rigors of public scrutiny. I’ve developed a system for selecting an appropriate decoy novel for situations when the question cannot be politely avoided.  

An ideal decoy novel is generally innocuous: vaguely suggestive of your intelligence, widely recognized, not too sexy (read: Nabakov’s Lolita or anything by Joyce Carol Oates), and preferably being sold at Urban Outfitters with a trendy new cover.  Of these criteria, being widely recognized is the most important.  No novel, no matter how beloved and perfectly crafted, can stand up to an awkward verbal synopsis given to an acquaintance. Take it from someone who always wants to talk about E.M. Forster after a few beers: the subject is better avoided.

To dodge the awkward discussion of plot summaries, my stock answers read shamefully like the photocopied syllabus of a lower-division undergrad English lecture.  Yet even these texts are not without considerable associations.  

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, for example, implies a certain morose disposition and the ownership of several pairs of black tights.  Similarly, Hawthorne’s House of The Seven Gables suggests serious sexual frustration, while a love for Hemingway belies a weakness for the sauce. The choice of Frank Herbert’s Dune or Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy insinuates that you were too ashamed to admit your first choice, Ender’s Game, because it involves non-satirical spacecraft and is not yet vindicated by being “retro” or “classic.” As for Milton’s Paradise Lost — well, no one was going to believe that was your favorite anyway.

Political implications are also important to keep in mind.  A declaration for Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is a firm indicator of socialist leanings. Similarly, a fondness for Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway shows a soft spot for feminist theory. The prize tomatoes of any modernism lecture, Joyce’s Ulysses and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, are also rife with political associations; however, these are generally overlooked in favor of the equally damning hipster implications.  

It goes without saying that Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand is shorthand for a certain social demeanor (that is to say, being a jackass), so if you value your reputation as a sympathetic person this decoy is best reserved for the company of other Rand enthusiasts. On the off chance that you mistake the fondness of your friends for Atlas Shrugged, instant recovery is possible by evoking Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a text that implies a kind heart and acts as an effective repellent for Rand junkies. (A handy primer for deciphering how your friends feel about Ayn Rand: Are your friends cruelly indifferent to you? Is anyone smoking a cigarette with a dollar sign on it?)

Like any good premeditated judging device, literary stereotypes do create an opportunity for the bolder sort to harness these associations to project a favorable image.  While this trick can be employed very successfully (especially among young women professing a love for Salinger’s Franny and Zooey), it is not for everyone.   For example, when done correctly, telling some young fellow at a party that you adore George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss can imply that you are (attractively) jaded and worldly. Incorrect application of the same novel, however, could result in that very young man mistaking your charming declaration for a hint that your taste in men is inclined toward ill-fated hunchbacks/painters and (provided that he is neither hunchback nor painter) is his consequently being less likely to ask for your phone number.  

In the face of this difficulty I offer the decoy novel that I have found (through entirely unscientific research) to be the best choice when one desires to answer this question respectably while concealing the true inclinations of one’s literary desires.   Though an acknowledged classic, this novel has inspired a feature film, thus allowing you to preserve your pretense of intellectualism while carefully transitioning the conversation to the less dangerous but equally impressive topic of “Why Adaptations are Bad.” 

With suspense sufficiently built (and all of those Pride and Prejudice freaks on the edge of their imitation-Edwardian seats) the ideal decoy novel can be revealed. Obviously, and undoubtedly, the answer is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

I have found that The Great Gatsby is frequently name-dropped by two demographics.  One of these, the firmly qualified literary types, can call The Great Gatsby their favorite novel and be considered learned, even modishly intellectual.  A reply of the same from a member of the second group (youths with clunky plastic eyeglasses and purposefully weathered messenger bags) is generally accepted as earnest, but chalked up to a mandatory summer reading list and a placating personality.  

Regardless of these distinctions, the irreproachable quality of the novel neutralizes any implications and therefore evokes no literary stereotypes.  The Great Gatsby has all of the earmarks of a marvelous novel — arresting prose, patriotic suggestions, contraband liquor, and class commentary — yet remains the equivalent of professing a love for The Beatles amongst music enthusiasts.  In short: a partiality for The Great Gatsby is a confession obvious to the point of being a virtual non-statement.  

Though I have discovered the ultimate deterrent of literary stereotypes in The Great Gatsby, I occasionally question my purely defensive tactics.  Perhaps my time would be better used proactively, encouraging people to embrace those stereotypes and denouncing other stereotypes as utterly unfounded.  Someone must take a stand against such untruths; after all, Chuck Palahniuk novels do not always make a pervert .   

Whether on the defensive or the offensive, in the battle against literary stereotypes no resources will be committed to convincing those of you who consider this theory totally bunk.  In this instance, I think, skepticism is its own punishment.  Just keep admitting that your favorite novel is Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and the rest of us will keep assuming that no one asked you to the junior prom.