(I have to stop looking at real estate listings.  It gets me too excited.  Maybe “excited” isn’t the word, though.  It’s more like focused.  Crazily, scarily, jealously, defensively, focused.  I won’t buy books.  I won’t go out of town to see my friends.  I don’t do anything but think about how it will or won’t get me closer to buying my house.  Which is why I got heated enough to write what you’re about to read.  Just so you know.)

I’m getting really tired of people bitching about living in St. Louis.  I understand that this city isn’t as hip, progressive, or sufficiently providing of non-psychotic weather patterns as some other places, but you’re an adult, right?  If so, there’s a very simple solution to your problem.  Move the fuck out.

For whatever reason, you didn’t join the exodus to Brooklyn with all your friends after high school.  Boo fucking hoo.  But really?  Aren’t you more capable of paying for a move and supporting yourself now that you’re an adult?  An 18-year-old kid knows dick about contracting a U-Haul or negotiating a lease.  You have the means and (I hope) the knowledge by now, so stop complaining about St. Louis and just fucking go.

Unless you’re lying, that is.  I saw this on Shmitten Kitten the other day and felt like angrily high-fiving the girl who wrote it.  Women talk about fake moving I guess, but it’s more men who never shut up about it.  St. Louis is a few years behind both coasts, so naturally, we’re in the Portland phase right now.  And I like Portland.  I might even consider moving there if I wasn’t so interested in buying cheap property here.  (I like Austin, too, but my ex-husband lives there and it would be unwise to court a situation that would result in my arrest for administering a deadly beatdown.)  But really?  All of you?  Couldn’t you be unique for a change and decide to shuffle your mass hipster exodus elsewhere?  Somewhere nobody’s thought of yet.  Utah.  Freak out the fundamentalists, man!

To be clear, I’m not bad mouthing those peripatetic folk who find real fulfillment in moving around, experiencing places, and doing it just because.  That’s all well and good.  If I weren’t so afraid of being broke (again), I’d be right there hitching a ride with you.  But I’m not talking about people who move as vocation.  I’m talking about the ones who talk a lot of shit and stay in one place forever.  Because dudes, it’s not that hard.  I did it when I was younger, back when I really didn’t know dick about anything and no one could tell me any different.  I was a kid.  Why is it so hard for you?

Staying here and doing nothing but talking about moving away is silly and kind of insulting.  You’re too cool to be here, but I’m clearly a loser who doesn’t want to spend more than $100,000 on a house.  How lame of me.  Listen, Chachi, I’m lame for a lot of reasons, but I’m not the whiny titty baby who spends his meager earnings on PBRs to cry into instead of getting his shit together and moving away finally.

(Okay, Coldwell Banker and Remax websites are down for the night.  Not like technically, but for my own sanity.  NO MORE.)