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.