You usually don’t get the opportunity to get to know them as well as you’d want to. But it isn’t all bad. The rent is cheap, the location is convenient and whenever it rains, water pours through little leaks in the glass roof and forms a dark pool 30 floors below like in the movie Dark Water. Romantic. Anyway, it seems like in most movies featuring haunted houses people die simply because they can’t afford to move out. It’s a tough real-estate market. Even if you do survive the evil spirits living in your Indian-burial-ground basement, the mortgage payments over the next 20 years might just as well kill you. Good, then, I don’t even have enough cash in the piggy bank to start worrying about being considered for a mortgage application. Oh, the sweet freedom of financial insecurity.

The way I see it most of us have about four years of relative bliss before our wrong career choices catch up with us and the burden of steady employment and added responsibilities start to bear its weight on our tired backs. It begins around high school graduation when you’re about to make an uninformed guess on what to study in college and do for the rest of your life until the day of graduation when you wake up to a world of limited opportunities. Good times!

Dreams can’t be followed by studying a four-year undergraduate business course. Only if you really were a six-year-old girl playing real estate developer after class, tearing down little Lego houses in poor, urban neighborhoods to subsequently building low-quality housing at a high profit. Or an eight-year-old boy practicing at being a Mergers & Acquisitions lawyer in the school cafeteria, negotiating the hostile takeover of his seatmate’s lunch box.

The dreams we have as kids of who we want to be when we grow up might be unrealistic but, at least, they are dreams. When I was a boy I wanted to become a professional skier, but I abandoned the idea pretty fast when I started to consider the serious discomfort terrible skiing accidents would have on my body after I saw some bad injuries on TV. Just one of the many times television ruined my life.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that dreams, opportunities are taken away from us so fast we don’t even realize it, sometimes before we even have the chance of dreaming those dreams. My little cousin, influenced by friends and reality-TV shows, is now more concerned with wanting to live in a big house, driving a nice car and buying things rather than actually planning to do something useful with his life. "Daddy when I grow up I want to be either a doctor or a lawyer!" "That is great, son, is it because you want to help people?" "No, dad, it’s just that they make mad dough and drive a big Benzo." "Do’h you say, son?"

D’oh, exactly. Now I may not have put as much thought into career development as I ought to, but if I take Bart Simpson as some kind of a role model then even I can strive to one day be a lard salesman, burlesque house bouncer or Chief Justice of the United States. And because I don’t want to forever live in a place I could only call a dump if they would actually start fixing it up and the cockroaches won’t be persuaded to chip in with the rent, I need to makes some decisions, consider the true cost of my lifestyle choices and whether they are sustainable. Do you really need those things that you think you can’t live without? Whenever in doubt I like to remember what Run-D.M.C.’s DJ Run, who turned Reverend Rev Run, said to his daughter on the MTV reality show Run’s House when asked to throw her an outlandishly lavish birthday party. "How much did y’all think I was gonna pay for this now? Keep it funky!"