When Owning a House Is a Fantasy

The kind of energy that many people put into pursuing sex and romance I put into looking at, thinking about, and occasionally attempting to buy real estate. I look at online listings with the self-loathing compulsion of a pornography addict looking at Pornhub. I hate myself, but there I am, again and again refreshing the page to see if a new listing has popped up in the last 10 minutes, doing deranged mathematical calculations in which I hope to arrive at a different answer than the correct one, which is that I am nowhere near being able to afford a house in Los Angeles, where the median home price is close to a million dollars.