Chaos Attraction

Noise And How I Hate It

2003-01-30, 6:09 p.m.

And the ranting continues, since most of us seem to be on that kind of a tear lately...

There's a thread on 3WA about those who can't sleep, and the various drugs they could be taking to make sure that they sleep. I've thought about posting to it, but my particular problem doesn't really seem like it would fit in with that.

I'm generally not an insomniac- I have my moments, but not that regularly. Mainly my problem is on any day that I have to wake up early- say, before 10 a.m. Early wakeup days are entirely different from non-early wakeup for me.

I am a born and bred night owl. Even as a five-year-old I didn't go to bed until eleven at least. I feel the most awake and alert at night. Which of course doesn't work at all when you have to go to work at 8 a.m. (or worse, earlier). When I should be going to bed, I am simply not tired. The only times I've ever been genuinely tired and sleepy before say, midnight are when I've been really sick or had to go to work at 7 a.m. (but that's a whole other problem we'll discuss later). It doesn't really matter when I go to bed, either. Even if I am really tired when I go to bed on a weeknight (or weekend night where I have to get up early the next morning), there's a bigger problem than my sleepiness or lack thereof to deal with.

You see, my body can't stand going to bed knowing it has a limited number of hours to sleep. Even if I go to bed at 11 so I'd get a full 8 hours, my body freaks out because it knows it HAS to make sure it's awake at the proper time. That "proper time" bit is the trouble, you see.

This sounds like an unrelated thing here, but it's not: I loathe computerized noises. Specifically, computer-type beeps and whistles and bleats and whatnot. They irritate the bejeezus out of me. The blatting of a car alarm or the garbage truck, the beeping of my computer when I click on things, the shriek of the cell phone- they all make me jump a mile. It's my version of fingernails on a chalkboard. People who use my computer complain "Why don't you have the sound on so I can listen to the music for the Sims?" Because the computerized music is AWFUL, that's why. Do you REALLY need to hear the sound?

The problem with waking me up in the morning is that nice ways of waking me up without a person being there to do it don't work. I can't just set my alarm to play nice music on the radio and have that wake me up, because I can totally sleep through music. (Comes from when I used to live with two dolts who would leave "Baby One More Time" on loud repeat in their room, then lock it and leave for the night.) My mind will go "Oh, hm, there's music on. I think that's supposed to mean something... zzzzzz." Doesn't work. So in order to be woken up at the right time in the morning, I have to set my alarm to the incredibly awful BLEAT BLEAT BLEAT BLEAT! buzzing noise. I HATE that noise. If I sleep well enough to need the alarm, I wake up in total shock, feeling like I just had a heart attack. It's bloody awful.

My body, which REALLY hates that noise, would like to wake up just before the alarm goes off so it can shut it off before the BLEAT!ing starts. Unfortunately, it's not great with the timing of this, so I end up waking up at 2 in the morning, looking at the alarm, going back to sleep, waking up at 3 in the morning, looking at the alarm, going back to sleep, waking up at 5 in the morning, looking at the alarm, going back to sleep, waking up at 6 in the morning, looking at the alarm, realizing that it'll take the entire hour to go back to sleep at this point and then the shrieking alarm will wake me up, so there's no point in trying to sleep again, but I'm too tired to actually get up and out of bed, so I lie there half-comatose and checking the alarm every 10 minutes.

And if you think that's bad, when I had to be at work at 7 a.m. my body just decided to wake me up earlier and earlier every day just to make sure the alarm wouldn't do it. After three months of that shift, I was waking up thoroughly exhausted at 4:30 a.m. and yet could not go back to sleep. It was probably a good thing I got laid off from that when I did, or I'd have soon ended up not sleeping at all for 5 out of 7 days of the week.

You can see why I just plain don't get sleep and rest on weeknights. If I don't have to be woken up by an alarm, there's no problem and I can sleep like a baby. I'm afraid to take sleeping drugs of any kind for this in case I sleep too long and go through the alarm, though, so I'll just have to deal with it.


I am feeling incredibly whiny about our anniversary.

Last night I got my bank statement for the last "month" (why do they only do it for half of one month and the other half of the other? Why can't they do it on a full month? Confuses the hell out of me) and was typing away, putting all the information into my new Quicken program. When I was done, I about had a heart attack because it showed that I only had $600 in my account. As the college students on 3WA pointed out on chat last night, that's a ton of money for them. Yeah, but when it's the end of the month, that $600 covers the rent and a stray phone bill or two. It turned out that thanks to the whole "shows half of one month and the other half of the other" thing, not to mention some confusing dates, I'd ended up putting in twice the reductions I needed to at some points. After fixing those it was better- about what I expected to see after paying Huge Heating Bill- but it's still lower than what I'd like to see. I usually leave a cushion amount in there just in case, and I am skating right at the boundary of the cushion amount. Which is something I am not comfortable with. At the rate my finances are going, the cushion WILL be sucked dry in a few months because of extra bills. Scares the crap out of me.

Of course, Dave is not getting his first paycheck until the day after our anniversary, and I'm not getting one until the same day either. So (a) all the celebration we can end up doing has to be funded by me, but (b) I really shouldn't be doing a humongous amount of spending.

And dammit, I really want to go all out for this. I've never had a relationship last (consistently, that is) for a whole year before. I want us to do the works. I want it to be just us. Dinner, dancing, hotel room, romance. In other words, what we did on our six-month. I want it to be special, and different, and NOT the same old thing we do practically every time I'm at his house. I don't want it to be just another ordinary day.

I especially want the hotel room above all else, since his grandmother's house has somehow become the family halfway house and every room but the bathroom and kitchen has someone crashing in it now on a probably-permanent basis. God, I hate going to the bathroom over there. There's REALLY nothing to eat. And every morning I'm there I'm woken up by a total racket. Several people are either screaming at each other or at someone on the phone in the next room by 9 a.m., and the phone is always ringing. And since his grandparents are mostly deaf, the phone is so loud I'm surprised people from the cemetary don't get up and come answer it. And of course, the walls are thin. Need I say more? I'd be willing to forego doing any other activity at all if we could just get the hotel room for the weekend. I really wanted to have him come here so we could get some relative peace and quiet, but after last weekend's debacle and the whole Hill really not wanting him over so much thing (at least, that's what I inferred) I think I should keep him out of our place entirely for a few months at least. Waaaah.

But, of course, can I really afford to blow $60-80/night on a hotel room, plus food while we're away, right now? Of course not. Can I afford to do much of anything exciting? Probably not. Plus there's transport issues- it's unlikely Dave will be allowed to borrow a working car so we can GET anywhere decent on our own. (I find it amazing that the other two under-50's in the house both have driving record issues (one of whom just got his license, the other ahem, doesn't have one) and are handed the keys without a thought, while Dave with no record and a license gets a fat NO.) If we go clubbing, we end up hiking across town for an hour to get home. The cheapest thing we could do is the movies (also across town), but there's not a damn thing out we both want to see. The only thing close to us to do is go bowling.

I was whining about all of this online with him last night, and he was all "We can do something different, we can stay home, go to the park, maybe go to the mall, rent movies..." I didn't have the heart to say that that wasn't different in the slightest from what we normally do (i.e. sit around bored most of the time). But what else can we do? I should not be going out, having fun and splurging. Period. Haven't I done enough of that already, looking at my small bank account?

He keeps saying "Well, then there's Valentine's Day, and I'll have been paid by then, we can each chip in," etc., which I know is true. But dammit, I'm not comfortable with him putting any money in either. Hell, I want to know what he's getting me and if I need to worry about him spending too much on whatever it is, but I know better than to say anything about that. And I want this day to be special, not just "we're saving it till Valentine's."

But I don't really get much option here, do I.

About the only thing it looks like we'll do different is that I'm going to bring the massage book and oil along with me. At least the pictures in it have a lot of inspiration.


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