Dear Landlord With the Beige Jeep

You may have recently noticed, when backing into the middle parking space in front of our house, that you stopped. You probably thought this was due to your brakes, or hitting the curb, or some other such reasonable and responsible explanation.

Alas, no. In this instance you stopped because my car's pesky license plate jammed itself onto your trailer hitch. The rest of your SUV managed to avoid touching the top of my hood by mere millimeters, while you remained a casual 2 feet from the car in front of you. I'm sure there is a reasonable explanation for your careless parking job. Perhaps you were rushing inside to fix the problems in our apartment, like the busted doors or the backed-up sink or your child's tantrums (though I haven't seen the results yet...). Whatever the reason, please avoid parking so poorly in the future. It would really be great.

Sincerely,
The blue Civic with the square-dented license plate, owned by your patient tenant downstairs

On living beneath one's landlords

My room is probably the quietest in our apartment, being completely isolated from everything else and its walls being filled with sand, but it also tends to amplify the noises I can hear: those through the sandless door and above my head. Mostly generated by the landlords' 9-year-old daughter, The Child.

I have learned her routine so thoroughly that I only half-wake at 7:15 every morning when she begins clomping around and bouncing a ball. The only exception being The Child's thankfully less routine tantrums, which involve a great deal of door-slamming, stomping, screaming, and the occasional throwing of things. I am not a light sleeper (I slept through earthquakes and a massive oak tree falling in our front yard as a child) so it's a little jarring to wake up regularly to outside forces that aren't, you know, natural disasters. Which is probably why the dreams I've been having lately are about The Child, including one in which she falls through the ceiling and this morning's where she enters my room and wants to play.

Weird!

Negative Nancy

I feel like I should start blogging again, but I'm afraid that little I have to say these days would be positive, and I just feel like a broken record complaining about the same things.

Let's give it a shot.

The things I contemplate hourly:
-A 3BR apartment does NOT include "2 bedrooms and a partitioned living room." That's a 2BR with a partitioned living room.
-Why can't I pack until I get an apartment, and why can't I get an apartment until I get a job, and why can't I even get a job where my college degree is merely "preferred"?
-If you're merging in traffic, you still have to use a turn signal. It's like asking if I'm using the empty chair at my cafe table. I know you want it, but I'm less likely to let you have it if you don't ask.


...yeah, maybe I should stay on sabbatical until I have a regular income.

So done, I don't even feel like posting.

So there.

The cruel and bittersweet truth

I'm supposed to graduate in a couple hours, but I still have two large papers due tomorrow that I have barely started. LAME.

too brain dead for title or grammar

I wonder if the reason we call it "senioritis" is because there is a point in finals week during which you become physically incapable of re-memorizing facts, and it becomes worse to the point where you can barely bring yourself to care about re-memorizing facts. Maybe it appropriately bears the "itis" suffix, meaning "inflammation," as some indication of brain sufficiently swollen to the skull's capacity. And yet none of this pondering is really getting to the crux of the matter, which is, I am 7 days away from never having to experience this again and why does 7 days feel like centuries?

I apologize to any friends, family or acquaintances I will encounter this week. Most of my normal brain functions are currently muffled under a haze of regression lines, normal curve approximations, and expected values (for sum AND percents!). It doesn't help that I currently harbor enough enmity toward my Statistics book that selling it doesn't sound half as much fun as watching it burn.

Senioritis for overachievers

Over my academic career, from kindergarten to the present, I would not be exaggerating to admit to intentionally skipping fewer than 10 classes. Ever. Counting illnesses or field trips, that number goes up only as high as 20. And if I had my druthers, those numbers would be lower, but I am really adamant about missing class only when I absolutely have something more important to do. Like jury duty. Ha.

I think this places me in a special category of Nerd, but at the same time, having opted for a 21-unit final semester, I'm sort of tired. I have 20 days until graduation, by which time I will have written 20 pages worth of final exams, memorized 20 chapters of statistics and applied for 20 jobs (maybe).

I know I'll buckle down and do it, most likely as close to my deadlines as possible, but every single thing I do feels like such a chore.

In my first palpable symptom of senioritis, though, I've been late a couple of times to the class I'm auditing because I wanted a bagel on the way. Also, I don't think it's possible for me to stay up all night anymore. Apathy is better than Ambien.