I know that I have things pretty good. I can afford to pay my rent, utilities, and eat out more often than is probably healthy.
My family loves me, and while I don’t get to see them often we have a good relationship. I have a wonderful boyfriend who makes me happy.
But I’m human. It’s hard to focus entirely on the good when there are a million little things that annoy me.
Mostly because they’re largely out of my control, and I’m absolutely nothing if not a control freak. Regardless, I have some gripes about the other things in my life.
School is kicking my ass right now. Working full-time and then going to class from the office is so much harder than I anticipated it being. Getting up in the morning is difficult because I don’t feel like I’ve fully recovered from the day before. The assignments and tests and chapters are hard to keep up with – especially in Spanish – because when I get home from class the last thing I want to do is crack another book to continue studying. But with another language it’s an evil necessity that you need to practice often if you want to learn.
My car is starting to fall apart. A windshield wiper broke off in my hand when I was trying to clear the ice from it so that I could drive safely. A headlight burnt out. The tires need their pressure checked; my car is starting to pull to one side. I need to find a way to get all of this done before I attempt to drive home to visit my family this weekend. If we don’t drive, Thomas and I will have to take the Greyhound and doing so means that I’ll be late for the show that I have tickets to Friday night.
My roommate is making me batty lately. She’s very…abrupt. Abrasive. Intense. I knew all these things about her before we moved in together, but I think we’ve reached the point in living together where we just rub each other the wrong way almost constantly.
I hate that I feel like I’m constantly cleaning up after her. I know for a fact that she hasn’t unloaded the dishwasher once since we’ve moved in (in AUGUST); she jokes about it! She rarely loads it either, and just leaves the dishes on top of the counter for me to do. She cooks a lot and eats at home a lot more than I do, but I find myself more often than not cleaning the pots and pans in the sink because they’re either beginning to smell, driving me crazy or both.
She can be so fucking stubborn. She won’t do a damn thing that she doesn’t want to do, and I feel like I’ve made dozens and dozens of concessions for her but she can’t reciprocate. I feel like a pushover and an idiot for compromising to the extent that I have without anything from her end.
She often shoots down my ideas or calls me out for saying something stupid or something I can’t follow up on. Her favourite is “Sure you will.” But I try my best to be supportive of her regardless of the situation. She’s going on a field study trip to Peru in May…I was tempted to drop the same bomb on her: ”Sure you will.” I don’t think she’s physically well enough to withstand the change in altitude and weather. It’s going to damn near kill her, but she won’t listen to reason and pick a place that would be more healthy for her to travel to.
She’s adamant on learning Spanish before she goes, so she puts off homework for classes she’s actually in to draft up cue cards with Spanish words on them. I come home from work or class (sometimes first one then the other) and start putting away the dishes or cleaning the kitchen and she’s sitting on the couch channel-surfing.
It’s so incredibly frustrating!
She doesn’t like my boyfriend. As far as I can tell, that attitude is based on one incident. She won’t give him another chance, and just outright refuses to be around us when we’re together. It can make for very tense and awkward moments in my house. He hasn’t been over in about two weeks because I don’t want to deal with the additional stress. But why should I have to tip-toe around her? She refuses to even be around him, so how can she possibly change her opinion of him?
I can’t bring this up, because she’s stubborn to the point where bringing up the issue won’t result in any change AND it will have the additional effect of making things awkward as as hell all the time. If I don’t bring it up, I get to watch her run to her room every time he comes over, and hear her subtly put him down when he comes up in conversation.
He makes me happy, why can’t you be happy for me? We’ve had our problems, but they’ve been addressed and we’ve moved on. Why can’t you? I have a solid head on my shoulders, and if he was doing me any kind of harm I wouldn’t be in the relationship. There’s a difference between fighting and a bad relationship. Couples fight, it’s what happens.
It feels SO good to get all of this out in the open. It’s hard to be stressed at work, stressed at school and then coming home to a stressful situation there as well.
My roommate once said “It must be exhausting to be you!”, because I was overtired and we were getting ready to go out. I was apologizing for nearly everything that came out of my mouth because none of it made sense anymore.
You know what? Yes. Yes it is exhausting to be me. I work fucking hard for everything I have, and pull your weight around here as well when your plate has about half of what mine does.
Fuck.
