I Do Have Reasons For My Dislikes...Sometimes

I really, really, really dislike SUVs*. I argue with people about this frequently. My mother drives one, which I will fully admit to having borrowed when things needed moving. My car's pretty small.

That's part of the disconnect I feel, I think, is knowing that I have borrowed one from friends or family when I need to move things and I'm sure I will do so again in the future. I recognize that they can be a logical choice for someone that has a huge family or frequently hauls large objects...or both. They certainly have functional bonuses for those of us who move every year or so. Still, I just cannot stand them.

There are all the common reasons to dislike SUVs: they're gas-guzzlers, they have bad emissions track records, people spend way too much money on them to look cool, people think they actually look cool driving them, a driver's need to compensate...

But I have one major reason that I trumps all of these; I drive a small Volkswagen. I know my choice in cars in no one's fault but my own but I LOVE my car. It gets good gas mileage and has been infinitely better than the lemon that was my Cavalier (may it rest in peace).

The problem? When I'm on major highways, most days I cannot see anything in front of me. Or behind me. Or to either side of me. I will be surrounded by a brigade of SUVs whose sole purpose seems to be to confuse and disorient me. I have had several incidents of being behind an SUV and not being able to see the traffic jam/accident/shopping cart in the road ahead and have had several near-misses when said SUV very suddenly stops in the middle of the road and I almost rear-end them. While I have much faith in my car's design and sturdiness, I'm pretty sure rear-ending an SUV would hurt the Volkswagen greatly.

But one of the things that irritates me most happened just a few weeks ago and I still remember it because it happens all the time and it irritates me every time it occurs. When I park in parking lots at stores or wherever I happen to be in a large parking lot, I always try to park between two cars more on my level of size**, even if my walk to my destination is longer. Why? Because when I do back out, I can actually see if someone is coming. When I'm between two SUVs I cannot see a thing, no matter how adept I am at using my mirrors. Sometimes I have to just take a deep breath and back out slooooowly.

While in a grocery store parking lot a few weeks ago, I was doing the slooooow-back-out-and-crane-my-neck-into-an-uncomfortable-position when a car suddenly came barreling by blaring their horn and visibly screaming at me. It would have been nearly impossible for me to have almost hit them (believe me, I am not that talented) so the only thing I could think of was that it was their right of way and I was clearly ruining this moment for them. Which would have been acceptable except for the fact that I could not see a damned thing because of the Tahoe that was to my right! So I reacted like any normal, human adult would...I screamed back. ("IF I HAD SEEN YOU, MOTHER*@&#!&, I WOULD HAVE STOPPED, WOULDN'T I? HUH? YOU'RE SOOOOOO IMPORTANT, AREN'T YOU??!?!?") And then I seethed for a good long while, then treated myself to a Dr. Pepper because I deserved it.

The moral of this dry, long-winded story? I drive a small Volkswagen. I'm a good driver. If I'm pulling out of a space and I don't stop to let you go, it's probably because I can't see you. A lot of people in smaller cars are having this problem now. Also? Get over yourself.



*When I say SUVs, I mean mostly the ones for show. Though I live in a big city where most of them are for show. This term (SUVs) contains, but is not limited to: Lexus SUVs, Mercedes SUVs, BMW SUVs, Tahoes, Suburbans, Hummers, stupidly large trucks such as F350s or any truck that is raised/has ginormous tires, minivans, etc.

**Obviously, there are times when I park in a spot between two smaller cars and when I return to my car, an SUV has taken the place of one of them. Trust me, I take as many precautions as I can but I can't help what people do when I'm not around.

These Are The Things That Keep Me Awake At Night

I have a very long, semi-documented history of sleep issues. Insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, you name it. Sometime between my 24th and 25th birthdays, I suddenly discovered sleep. More like my body suddenly discovered it needed more sleep than it used to. This causes problems when I have a job and school and whatever else that keeps me busy. Being a zombie waitress is not only no fun but also not good for income. When I have even a little bit of free time, any semblance of a sleep schedule goes straight out the window.

Take this week, for instance. This is the second week of my summer vacation. I've had things I should do...I do have a To-Do List written up in my composition notebook that I carry with me everywhere. But I decided that I may take some time to rest this week and be a bit lazy. What has happened is that I've been up super late every night for no real reason. I know that House DVD will still be there tomorrow and that I don't have to watch ALL of the episodes right now, and yet I find myself doing just that. I peruse the internet for dining room tables or to try to figure out what the hell the name of the flower is that I saw at Target today. (It looks like an upside down bell and it's driving me crazy.) I eat way too much food and lounge on the couch in my pajamas with my laptop, food, a book, and a bottle of water. I literally have nothing that needs to be done at this very moment and so I'm letting myself have some time off. But that doesn't mean I should be staying up all night.

I guess I should mention that I work nights? But only on the weekends, mostly. If I pick up shifts during the week, it can be days or nights. Its most often nights and on the nights I close at work, I'm often not home until well after 3am. I've also always been a night owl. When I was 7, my father caught me under my covers at 1am with a book, an apple, and a flashlight. He was furious that I was still up but I couldn't sleep and do I delved into the world of Ramona Quimby and the freaky people that were the residents of R.L. Stine's Fear Street. The latter likely didn't help me to sleep.

Even when I have a day job, I can't sleep. I worked in one bar where I was the morning bartender and had to be there (from my apartment, 20 minutes away) at 10am. 10am is reallllly early for bar people. (Some bar people.) Nevertheless, I still couldn't sleep before 3am most nights.

Unfortunately, my pseudo-obsessive nature keeps me awake many nights. If I have any kind of numbers problem (bills, debts, etc.) I will lie in bed for hours working it out in my head. If my mind becomes set on finding something out, I will not rest until I do. If I decide I want to look something up on Wikipedia, I will become so link-lost that 3 hours later I will have no idea where I started.

Which brings me to tonight and why, at 4am, I'm still awake when I need to be up in 6 hours. You see, like many other individuals in their mid-20's, I lost my job a few years ago and had to move back home. Which is where I'm currently living. I love my mother and my sister, I really do, but my job and school are about 30 minutes from where I currently live and I want to move closer so that when I'm taking 13 hours in the fall and working about 35, I can simply roll out of bed, brush my teeth, attend classes, and roll back into bed. I'm sure I'll eat somewhere in there, too. Any way you slice it, I need an apartment.

Apartment hunting is one of my favorite things in the world. So much so that I have been known to spend almost an entire day off on the internet looking at apartments or even out looking at them in person. I'll make a whole day of it. So tonight, I decided I needed to start up my search again (I've been searching on and off for the past 8 months). That was 4 hours ago. I've been so furiously clicking between rent.com and apartmentratings.com that I may have given myself tendonitis. I've got a large list of places I want to visit in person, as well as a list of things I have learned from apartmentratings.com. I will share the latter with you.

Things I Have Learned From Apartmentratings.com

-The more illiterate a person is, the more likely they are to be melodramatic.
-If you're not the heir to a vast fortune, you will not be able to afford anything with a rating higher than roughly 62%. Curve accordingly.
-Pick your battles. Yes, I realize your mother likely told you this many times in your childhood. It still stands. If you can deal with sub-par parking and loud neighbors, but cockroaches and crime make you want to cry, read the (coherent) reviews and see which places have things you can tolerate over things you can't. No apartment is perfect. You have to make choices.
-Notice the dates on the reviews. A lot can change between 2008 and 2010. ESPECIALLY in apartments.
-Don't panic. These websites serve as a handy guide but really the best thing to do is scout a place out at night (preferably with a friend) and see what goes on. I would suggest doing this 3 or 4 times before you even set foot in a leasing office. That way, if a good look-and-lease special is offered, you don't have to dig your toe in the ground and wonder if you should snap it up or risk losing it to check the place out at night.
-Realize that everyone is going to have a different experience. Maybe the overly-hostile man that wrote the review about that one place DID have a bad experience...but that doesn't mean the sweet lady that loved the place is crazy. Or a liar. And it doesn't necessarily mean that she works for the complex, though that had been known to happen.
-Use your common sense. If one place has many awful reviews and the only good reviews are all around the same time period and use terms such as "sprawling landscapes" and "spacious interiors", they were likely written by that complexes' staff.
-I think apartmentratings.com is one of those review sites that you really have to get the hang of to understand.

My point of this whole post? I'm still awake. I need to go to sleep but I have wasted time and now have decided I want to set my monthly bills into an official budget (I already have an unofficial one). These truly are the things that keep me awake at night.

Hello, My Name is Stevie and I'm a Cheeseaholic.

Okay. I've decided that I want to bring this blog back, and so here I am. I feel like I should do an introductory post (which I realize is not necessary) because there are three of us writing here and we're all very different personalities. An "introductory post" for me would give a little taste of what goes on in my head and what I'm likely to write/whine about in the future. I'm not very good at introductions, so bear with me.

I'm Stevie. I'm an undergraduate psychology student, a waitress/bartender, a feminist, a Dr. Pepper junkie, and a Celiac. I'm also an on-again, off-again insomniac and a cheese enthusiast. All of these things (and more) make me the supposedly high-strung, odd individual that I am. I have a lot to say about several of these things, in particular Celiac disease and feminism.

Due to my (sometimes) grueling work and school schedules, I'm often exhausted. I like to use parentheses a lot. Also, sentence fragments. I realize these are flaws but hey, no one's perfect.

I am fortunate to have many wonderful friends, even more fortunate that they still like me considering that I'm a lousy friend during the semester and some won't hear from me for weeks. (Facebook has made my social life marginally easier.) Two of my closest friends are Jess and Sarah, with whom I've started this blog. We took on this task because we're all three writers who have pretty wicked senses of humor. This was meant as a creative outlet for us but also as a chance to collaborate for the first time in our (roughly) decade-long friendship. These women are amazing and wonderful and made of rainbows and I am incredibly lucky to have found such women.

And hopefully we will all now start writing together. I plan on writing as often as possible because, as previously mentioned, I have a lot to say. The three of us all bring different things to the table and I think our collaborative efforts will, at the very least, be a spectacle of insanity. ;)

Okay, enough about me. I'm going to go relax and watch some episodes of House now. It's summer vacation and I have NO homework. It's lazy time!