Tuesday, February 05, 2008

What's Keeping Me Up at Night

So the good news is I no longer have any signs of my stuffy nose. The bad news is my hacking cough kept me up most of the night last night. I didn’t have my handy dandy cough syrup with vicodin that helps me sleep when I get that really bad cough because I didn’t stay at home last night, and the regular old cough syrup where I was staying just wasn’t cutting it, not even when I doubled the dosage. Eventually I got a few hours’ sleep.

I’m worried that my lack of sleep is due to a recurrence of my insomnia, which bothers me at stressful times of my life. The longest bout was a semester of undergrad in which I averaged 2 hours’ sleep a night. Two nights ago, I got about four hours’ sleep (not too bad) and last night even though I was coughing all night, I also wasn’t tired in the least, despite the fact that I had three glasses of red wine while we were out (which is partly why I ended up staying over) and then took cough syrup—usually a surefire ticket to passing out.

I do have a few big things on my mind right now that I’m sure are what’s keeping me up. Even though it’s two weeks into the semester at school, I still haven’t registered so I can officially graduate in May, and I haven’t done a thing on my thesis in probably three months. There is no excuse for that, and there is no excuse for me not to graduate by May. I know all this and yet for some reason I can’t make myself do anything about it.

Then there is the thing I am most embarrassed to admit: I’ve got some serious financial issues right now. When I started my new job, I had to wait a month to get my first paycheck, and of course during that month I was no longer getting my unemployment. Suddenly, all the bills I had been able to manage for two years without working full-time were no longer manageable. In January, my father paid my rent for me—the first time I have asked him for money since I started baby-sitting at 13 to earn my own money. I was able to pay one credit card last month, but that was it. Besides that, I paid nothing.

Then of course my first paycheck wasn’t for a full two weeks because I started in the middle of a pay period, so now I don’t have all the money for rent. I know by the next paycheck, I’ll start catching up, but last night I had to ask my sister to borrow $300 to cover the rest of my rent in the meantime. Also, since I paid no bills last month, I of course owe double this month because they don’t just go away. I think I’m going to have to ask my dad for a loan to catch up with things, and I know I shouldn’t feel bad about asking him for money because if he has it, he’s always happy to help me, and I could list tens of thousands of dollars he spent on my sisters (mostly Stacy) for things like harps and pianos and riding lessons that he never spent on me, and that’s not to mention his continued support of them while they were in college and after.

And this is not their fault, and it’s not him playing favorites. It’s my own doing that he and my mother never helped me out. From the time that I was old enough, I worked usually two jobs so that besides living under their roof, I took nothing from them. I saved up and bought my own car, paid my own car insurance, bought my own food, clothes, etc., until the day I moved out. I never asked for help and when I turned sixteen and started working, I made it pretty clear that I didn’t want it. It’s that incredibly independent streak in me that makes it so hard for me to swallow my pride and ask my dad for help. But if I do, then I will catch up and within a month be financially solvent again. The financial problems have been on my mind for weeks now, and the thesis stuff has been on my mind for months, but both of them are coming to a head right now and I can’t seem to kick myself in the ass hard enough to get on top of them.

The newest thing, of course, is the thing with the MF. I’m still mulling it over right now, and what makes it incredibly hard is that I like him. I know I want to keep seeing him but the conversation we had on Sunday is troubling and something that isn’t settled, at least not for me. If I didn’t like him so much, I would walk away like I do at the first sign of trouble with any other guy I date. We’ll have to have another conversation about this, I know, which pisses me off. I don’t like to talk about this stuff and I wish things could just stay simple like they are the first few weeks you are dating someone: All you know—and all you need to know—is that you like spending time together. I’ve been spoiled these last few years by never having to get past that initial period but now here I am two months in and it’s getting messy. And I can’t walk away, not yet, because I still like him too much. Aside from this one thing (which is, of course, a fairly big thing), he has been so nice and so sweet. Why can’t he slip up once in awhile and be a jerk?

The fucker.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The last line made me grin.

Sigh. Men. Can't live with them. Can't commit heinous crimes upon them.