I’ve spent countless weekends now looking through other people’s houses. I think it will go on forever; I can’t imagine finding a house that is just right for both of us.

The world of home opens is a strange and usually unnerving one for me.

So many people come through the house because they live on the same street and have always longed for a stickybeak. But have no interest in getting to know the occupants. Just their house. This seems like a significant social failure on the part of our modern suburban living. And I tend to dislike these people.

Lookers don’t greet other lookers. They walk past them as if they’re passing them on a busy street. It’s a horrid unfriendliness. The real estate books, I’m told, instruct you to project a confident buying vibe. I AM GOING TO BUY THIS HOUSE AND YOU CAN’T HAVE IT.

I feel for the occupants’ vulnerability in having their home open, especially when they’re renters. These strangers come through and pass judgement on their stuff. So I try not to pass judgement, but I still find myself thinking, this person has such bogan taste; or, my goodness they have bad taste in books. (I’m yet to go through any house with more than a single bookshelf of books. Every time there are books, they are recent bestsellers. This surprises me, somehow. Do people read only bestsellers? Do they need everyone else’s excitement about a book to ignite theirs? I MUST NOT JUDGE, at least not when I’m looking through their house.)

You get, inevitably, sucked into the myth and lie of real estate. You start checking real estate listings on the internet too often. It becomes a pastime, a game, an obsession, one that leads a bad taste in your mouth. Because these agents, they want prices to keep going up forever. These people looking, they want to be millionaires, they want to climb up the ladder quicker than everyone else. They want to make their fortune, they want to make a killing. Greed is in the air.

Everyone should just want a house to live in for their own sake. There shouldn’t be all this scheming.