Journal 94 Sadness, Snow, Housing

Hi girls.

It has been another unbelievable week in America.

Today it snowed heavily. It was a non-sticky but heavy snow. It had little balls of ice in it. My arms are sore from shoveling. But I will feel the actual soreness not tomorrow but the day after. Does English have a word for the day after tomorrow? Or the day before yesterday?

People are talking about what they were doing in 2016. For me, it was the start of a difficult time. I didn’t know much about housing or wealth. There is mostly false, misleading, bad, or no information out there on these topics. And even if you can find factual information from a reputable source, no one teaches you how to piece it all together.

I thought that it was a possible to buy a tiny house. Or if you couldn’t find an apartment or a house you could afford in an expensive region like the Northeast, you could just move a little farther away. Or get a good deal in another part of the country. This is not the case. Somehow, with housing, the price seems to always accurately represent what you are getting. Yes, you could buy a cheaper house in a cheaper part of the country, but you might live down the street from a chemical factory, your house built with lower building standards will poison you, and occasionally sewage will flow through your property.

But who knows what the future will bring. Maybe America will go through a cataclysmic shift and zoning laws, local government and other bureaucracies will be forced to become transparent and come under severe review from the public. Maybe we will have cute small towns again. And heal the suburbs, have road lanes for all modes of transport, plow the sidewalks not just the roads, and spend time at the parks, where instead of toxically fertilized neon green grass and nothing but grass we will have rewilded areas and mature trees. And kids can have challenging playgrounds again, and they can go there and to the library, grocery store, to their friend‘s house, and feel like human children.

No matter where in America they live!

Asya