Housespotting

Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage.

Trying to find a place to live is a strange cousin of speed-dating. The basics are agreed by abrupt emails and hurried phone calls. Male/female, young/old, gay/straight. A time and location are set. If you're really interested, your email exchanges are longer; you send pictures. You dress up in anticipation of making a good impression (but not too fancy, in case they're gold-diggers); you pace outside, arriving early in eager anticipation but wanting to appear busy, fashionably late. You size up each other, and the place, instantly. Does the reality match the pictures? Will you hit it off? You might know already: the vague "I'll call you", the excuses that shouldn't be, the "other appointment" you need to make as you duck out discreetly.

Or maybe there's a possibility, maybe this might just work out, and you graduate to beers on the back porch or the playoffs on TV in the living room while you awkwardly cut to the chase. Where do you work? What hours do you keep? What music do you like? Where do you like to go on evenings, on weekends? Do you like to work out? Are you outgoing? Do you like to cook? All the while, probing for the questions you can't ask: are you anal or a complete asshole? Will you stiff me on the bills, leave a mess, embarrass me with your wild behavior? Do you have some intimately peculiar side of yourself you might reveal at the most inopportune moment? And then the always uneasy, unasked question of balance between siblings and strangers that roommates inevitably ponder.

(My college degree has played a strange role in this delicate dance. Normally, I avoid mentioning its provenance or specific subject, unless the question is asked specifically. I don't want it to influence what people think of me. But here, it seems to be my entrance fare into San Francisco's young, hip, professional world. Until I mention it, I'm just another face in the crowd. But pointing it out, their eyes light up: now I am worthy of consideration; now I'm reassessed; now - now, I might just work out. Odd.)

When it's over, if you're lucky, you make tentative plans for another date. Maybe there's a proposal to sign papers the next time around. Start moving your stuff in. Maybe you can leave, reassured, to make a few grateful phone calls to your backup list, trying to soften the blow as you cancel their appointments. But you have to be careful. You don't want to commit too early in the game, or look too eager to seal the deal, and neither does your counterpart. You have to see what's out there first. Especially during the Open House, which is a sanitized term for Housing Meat Market. You think you've made a connection, then here comes Mr. (or Ms.) Hotshot to steal away your object of interest. You're back to picking sides in a silent grade-school kickball game: "No, don't pick her! She sucks! I'm who you want! Pick me, pick me!"

The good news is that after weeding through some definite "no's" - the one who wanted me to cook us both dinner every night; the high-rise condo still under construction where, while I was there, a fire started and I was trapped by staircases leading nowhere, finally emerging into a crowd of firefighters and fire engines; the "great deal" all to myself...except the owner would sleep on the couch every other weekend; the woman who wanted to mother me - after all that, I found a terrific place at a reasonable price with a great roommate...someone who seems to like me as well. And simultaneously, I was contacted by the ideal renters for my house in Mobile, a couple who was as excited and surprised to find the "perfect home" as I was to find the "perfect renters".

Here's to a home sweet home for us all.