So you know how sometimes life is just too good and you think to yourself “wow, I really wish everything would turn to shit so I could get back to living in hell”?  Well, when you get that feeling I recommend taking a few steps to remedy the situation.

 Here’s what to do: Break up with your longtime significant other.  Then decide you must sell the condo you share with him and move to a new one ASAP.  Tell your real estate agent that you want to buy before you sell but let her brow beat you into selling at the speed of light.  The agent for the buyers will be a complete imbecile and will screw up the paperwork for the offer and it’ll be mildly amusing but also worrying.  You’ll immediately start to feel uneasy about the sale because of the uncertainty.  You won’t have bought a new place yet so you’ll be nervous about where you’re going to live and you’ll only have 2 months to find a place. This uneasiness will get the ball rolling towards feeling like shit.

 For some reason you’ll decide to get major eye surgery around the same time.  So you’ll be uncomfortable and have blurry vision when you come home to find the buyer’s inspector in your place.  He’ll take about a million years to do his inspection and he won’t know what he’s doing.  The buyers will have to point out certain defects to him and he’ll look stunned like the delayed moron he is. You’ll sit there on the couch willing the buyers/inspector/agent to leave so you can go to bed and recover but they’ll simply linger in your home, chit-chatting about their collective idiocy. It’ll turn out that the inspector isn’t even credited and is carrying around a card from a company that went out of business years ago.  But no matter, it’s the buyers who lose out on that deal.  They’ll also choose a really stupid notary though.  You’ll ask the notary if your brother with whom you originally bought the property should sign a power of attorney so someone else can sign for him at the closing since he doesn’t live in the country.  He will come home for Thanksgiving and be available for signing a POA but the notary will say this isn’t necessary.  This will be important later on. 

 Next, you should go house hunting and discover that everything on the market is a piece of dog dropping.  You’ll start to feel discouraged right away.  Eventually you’ll find a cute little place and make an offer on it only to be outbid by someone else.  This will be very disappointing ‘cause it was such a lovely little condo and you’ll have handled a fuckload of paperwork which you had to run around to submit because you don’t have a fax machine or printer at home so you had to go to the office at night to deal with it.  It’ll be a serious pain in the ass but oh well, back to the drawing board.  You’ll be a bit shaken up so the next condo you make an offer on you won’t even go back for a second visit, you’ll just make an offer and hope for the best.  But the current owners won’t want to move out by the date you need and the whole thing will fall apart.  You’ll have gone through more paperwork and you’ll start to feel desperate.  At this point you’ll only have a month left to find a condo so you’ll go back to a different condo you saw in the same area and you’ll make an offer on that one, even though it has a few features you’re not too thrilled with.  This time your offer will be accepted and you’ll be relieved about that.  So with renewed hope, you’ll schedule an inspection of the property. 

 Now here’s where everything will really start to get good.  You’ll go to the inspection only to discover that the seller’s agent doesn’t have the key to the basement and the current owner will be nowhere to be found.  The inspector will inform you that he can’t complete the inspection without seeing the basement but he suspects it won’t look good ‘cause he sees some signs that the building is shifting.  The seller’s agent will be a complete tool who seems to give no shit about your predicament but he’ll give you access to the current owner’s inspection from two years ago which reveals that the foundation is craptacular.  You’ll hope she took care of the problems and will wait around for hours, hoping she comes home and when she doesn’t you’ll have wasted an entire day.  A day you should have been at work preparing an important financial report for your boss.  You’ll eventually go back to the office and work late so you can complete that report.  Just to make things extra fun, things at work will be really tense and uncomfortable.  Everyone will be running around like chickens with their heads cut off, paranoid about getting fired because the new Chairman of the board will be a nutball dipshit who is ruining everyone’s lives and interfering with their work.  That stupidly useless financial report you worked on will have been requested by him and it’ll really be a pointless exercise in the end. 

 You’ll more or less bury your head in the sand where work is concerned. You’ll shelter yourself from all the politics and drama and concentrate on your living situation, or lack thereof.  A few days later you’ll go back to that crappy condo for the second part of the inspection only to discover that the building is indeed structurally unsound and you can’t buy it.  This will be awesome ‘cause you’ll be super depressed.  The current owner will seem completely unbothered by the situation and will admit to having tried to sell you a lemon.  You’ll curse her name and go see a few more condos but they will all suck and you’ll have a little breakdown.  Breakdowns are great because they really help to drive home those feeling of panic and desperation. 

 Now if you’re weak, you might turn to alcohol but if you’re strong you’ll pull yourself up by the bootstraps and keep looking for condos.  Of course by this point you’ll only have three weeks until you need to move out of your current condo.  The buyers will be completely annoying pieces of shit who keep pressuring you to move out even sooner and you’ll take pleasure in telling them to fuck off and die.  They’ll want to come over and measure their new home and you’ll pass off that bullshit to your ex ‘cause you just won’t be able to deal with it.  You’ll come home one night exhausted and drained and they’ll be hanging out, shooting the shit and you’ll just want them to leave so you can shower and eat and plan your suicide in peace. 

 Now things will get really interesting.  You’ll find the condo of your dreams.  It’ll be gorgeous and exactly your style.  You’ll start to feel hopeful and happy.  It’ll almost seem too good to be true and naturally that’ll turn out to be exactly the case.  You’ll get another inspection and this condo will turn out to be even worse than the last one.  Completely structurally unsound.  Your heart will be utterly shattered.  This will have been your ideal home and you won’t be able to have it.  It’ll turn out to be all style and no substance, just like the work of Frank Miller.  Fortunately you’ll get to savour a little bit of schadenfreude from the current owner being shocked and dismayed by the news and the look of horror on her face will warm your cold, dead heart because it’ll be what she deserves for having bought a condo without getting it inspected first.  Fucking tardsprocket.

 Now you’ll have spent about $1,000.00 on inspections and both properties will have turned out to be shitholes.  Your realtor will laugh and marvel at all the useless paperwork you’ve gone through.  She’ll inform you that this has never happened to her before in over a decade in the business.  Two bad inspections?  How incredible.  How hilarious.  It’ll be really awesome to have her laugh at the situation when all you want to do is cry.  Obviously you’ll have another meltdown.  You’ll feel broken, you’ll feel depressed, you’ll feel like you’re drowning.  You’ll be emotionally and psychologically exhausted and you’ll only have two weeks left to find something.  Clearly you’ll have to come to terms with imminent homelessness.  It’ll be really awesome how all your friends and colleagues will constantly ask you about your living situation.  You’ll have to tell the same depressing stories over and over again.  Each time you tell them you’ll need to relive the horror, which will go a long way towards helping you reach that goal of experiencing a nervous breakdown. 

 At this point, you’ll still be living with your ex.  He’ll be packing up to move to an apartment and you’ll notice all the shit about him that always pissed you off.  You’ll be extremely resentful that you’ve had to do all the work to sell your condo and he just sat around and waited for everything to fall into place.  He’ll keep expecting you to do everything and will offer no help in your direction.  He won’t clean up after himself and he’ll keep using all the stuff you buy and you’ll wake up one morning to find absolutely no toilet paper or Kleenex in the house.  On the day he moves out he’ll leave the place in disarray, littered with trash bags that you’ll need to rush down three flights of stairs before the garbage trucks pass.  You’ll have to work hard to keep the anger at bay so as not to blow up at him, making things that much worse.  People will tell you that you shouldn’t expect him to be helpful or useful since you broke up with him but you’ll remind said people that you only broke up with him because he failed to deliver on a promise and that’s enough said about that. 

 Just when you will truly believe that all hope is lost and you’ll have to move into the cardboard box on the corner, you’ll be contacted by the owners of the second condo you tried to buy and they’ll reopen negotiations.  You’ll want to tell them to fuck off just out of spite but your desperation will spur you on.  Fortunately it’ll still be a seller’s market and you’ll have to offer more than you think the property is worth, which will be totally awesome because at this point you’ll really be starting to feel the financial strain. 

 Throughout all of this there will be days of emails being thrown back and forth between your agent and your buyer’s notary.  You’ll get sick to death of playing go between for them and your ex and you’ll insist that they include him in the email chain.  The notary will claim that she needs a power of attorney from your brother and your agent will lay down a righteous smackdown to shame her for having previously claimed not to need it.  Smackdown or no, she’ll still need the POA and so forms will have to be sent to the States and your brother will need to get a lawyer and it’ll all cost a pretty penny and of course you’ll have to swallow those fees as well.  It’ll be infuriating how you’ll have to literally pay for someone else’s incompetence.  The notary will continue to frack things up by doing some questionable math to determine who earns what in the sale.  Everyone at the table will contest her calculations and it’ll actually be slightly amusing to see her struggle to understand logic and non-dumbassery.  As you’re leaving the closing the buyers will ask to come by again for more measurements.  You’ll tell them to call you, knowing full well they don’t have your number and when they email asking for it, you’ll ignore them and hope they contract H1N1 and go the hell back to France to infect that shit-ass country.  But your ex will give them your number and they’ll hound you endlessly and inform you that they have scheduled deliveries to occur before their possession date (!!!!!).  Yes, seriously, these buyers will be so ignorant and/or greedy that they will actually try to move in before you are out!  You will need to inform them in no uncertain terms that they cannot get the condo before the official possession date and hells no, you will not hang around the condo during work days to accept their deliveries.  I mean… WHAT?  They will seriously be hounding you so relentlessly to take the condo before they are entitled to it that the hounding will reach harassment levels and you will need to tell them quite clearly to leave you the fuck alone.  They will respond apologetically and you’ll think you’ve finally fixed that particular problem but then they’ll actually start hounding your agent and she’ll forward all their messages to you.  You will be pissed as hell and will need to engage in deep breathing exercises to keep your calm.  In truth, you will be moving out before the official possession date but your resentfulness will almost make you keep that information from those fantastically finked out fucktards.  In the end you will do what is most convenient for you but trust that you will burn effigies of those asswipes before you hand over the keys.  Trust.  TRUST!

 Meanwhile you’ll schedule another inspection for the latest condo you’ll be trying to buy and you’ll be running on nothing more than momentum.  You won’t have any hope left and when you go to the inspection you’ll be stunned by how tall the seller’s agent is.  This will not be the least bit relevant to anything at all but it’ll be remarkable all the same.  Now things will actually start to look up so if your ultimate mission is death by stress you should probably pull out at this point.  But if you want to swing back towards sanity you’ll be cautiously pleased by the news that this condo is in tip top shape.  And your agent will even pay for the inspection!  You won’t be able to move into the new place in time but you’ll have an awesome friend who offers to put you up for a few weeks.  Your ex will help you clean your current condo and you’ll give him his cheque for the sale and agree to hold his condo fee cheque the buyers will make out ‘cause oh yeah, they’ll screw up the first cheques they give you and you won’t be allowed to cash them, ‘cause they really will be just that wacktarded.  Have I mentioned that you will burn effigies of them?  TRUST!  And then, THEN, weeks later they’ll inform you that oh yeah, those original cheques are still good after all, go ahead and cash them.  So you’ll have to go out of your way to get your ex’s cheque back to him and ARGH!  BUYERS MUST DIE!  BURN EFFIGIES NOW!  KILL, DESTROY, WRATH OF KHAN!

 You’ll pack all your stuff and hire professional movers ‘cause you ain’t no fool.  The closing of your new purchase will go relatively smoothly, even though you’ll have to wait over half an hour for the vendor to show up ‘cause apparently your time won’t be as valuable as hers.  You’ll move in with a relatively new friend and you’ll give her your old appliances and it’ll actually be pretty fun to hang with her and her boyfriend.  You’ll even start to think that the entire ordeal was worth it just so you could enjoy the highly enriching experience of living with them for two weeks; an experience that will help you grow as a person and teach you the true meaning of Christmas. 

 You’ll be eternally grateful for this person’s friendship, not least because she’ll have introduced you to a man who will support you emotionally throughout the entire ordeal.  It’ll be genuinely awesome, not Alanis Morissette ironic awesome and you’ll realize that even though you had to wade through a whole pile of velociraptor vomit, you’ll come out the other side possessing a strength you didn’t know you had and feeling an intensity of emotion you didn’t know you wanted to feel.  Of course you’ll go through some turmoil with that budding relationship as well, since it’ll be a largely long distance relationship and there will be some more financial strain due to Rogers fucking you over, but you’ll also acknowledge that you’re sitting pretty financially if you compare yourself to others of your ilk.  In spite of inspection fees, agent fees, moving fees, notary fees, buyers are stupid asshole idiot fees and welcome tax you’ll have made a pretty penny on your condo sale, having completed your mortgage payments in six years, which will be rather impressive considering you were working for minimum wage with no benefits during two of those years.  Your new place will only take about another six years to be paid off, which will be pretty sweet so even though you’ll be feeling discouraged and bedraggled and stressed out, you’ll know that you’re actually doing decently well in the game of life and that’s Why You Will Be Better Than Everybody Else.