I know I’ve complained loads about my roommate all year, and I can deal with a lot of those issues, but this one has just brought me to my last nerve. She makes it nearly impossible for me to get a good night of sleep, and I’m getting pretty freaking tired of it. Excuse the pun.
Every single night, I go to bed between midnight and 1am. This is pretty late by most people’s standards. And then I lay in bed, trying to fall asleep despite the glow of her laptop screen and the sound of her typing and clicking her mouse constantly for one to two hours until she decides to go to sleep, or realizes that she should maybe go downstairs because she doesn’t want to go to bed. And then, when she either shuts her laptop and goes to bed or leaves and closes the door and doesn’t come back up to grab things she forgot eight times, I am able to fall asleep.
Every single morning, her ridiculously loud alarm clock (the girls living across the hall hear it every morning) goes off at least two hours before she needs to leave for class, usually around 8am. If she wanted to get up early so she could take a shower and go to breakfast, that would be okay with me because it allows me to go back to sleep. Instead, she spends those two hours on her laptop or walking back and forth in the room or clipping her toenails at her desk two feet away from my bed, making just enough noise to keep me awake until she leaves for class at 10am when I either go back to sleep until she comes back an hour or two later or I just freaking get up because I don’t care anymore at that point. I’m lucky that my classes don’t start until 2pm, or else going back to sleep wouldn’t even be an option.
Since you’re probably asking, yes, she really doesn’t get sleep. Luckily, if she still hasn’t gone to sleep by 2 or 3am, she does relocate to the living room downstairs, but I have been woken up by her coming in at 5:30 or 6am to go to sleep, followed by her alarm clock at 8. People keep telling me that I need to talk to her about this, but the truth is, I have. Two weeks into us rooming together, I was already sick of not being able to sleep and I talked to her about it. I let her know that I can be a very light sleeper and asked her very nicely if she could move downstairs if she wants to stay up late or get up early. She did it for a little while, but eventually went right back to it again as if I only really wanted sleep for the first month of school, and the request did not apply for the rest of the year we’d be stuck living together.
Last week, she fell asleep around 10pm one night. I got super excited, brushed my teeth, washed my face, changed into my pajamas, and was in bed by 10:30 for the first time in I don’t even know how long. Immediately after I got settled, she was up again and did not go back to sleep until five in the freaking morning. There have been times that I’ve just gotten out of bed, grabbed my pillow and a blanket, and set up downstairs on the futon. She usually apologizes when she sees me doing this, but that hasn’t been enough of a reason for her to, you know, let me sleep in my bed during normal human sleeping hours. Midnight to 9am is all I ask. Maybe even 10am every once in a while if I’m up late doing work (which, by the way, is never what she’s doing when she’s up all night).
I’ve been falling asleep in nearly all of my classes for the past few weeks because I can’t catch up on sleep and it’s impossible to nap during the day because she very rarely leaves. Just because she doesn’t need sleep doesn’t mean I don’t either. Unfortunately, she doesn’t seem to understand that people don’t all work on two hours of sleep the same way she does, and from what I’ve gathered, the only way to get her to realize that is to ask her every night and every morning if she can go downstairs because I’m trying to sleep. That is not something I’m okay with doing, so I guess I’m stuck with this for another month and a half. I’ll probably continue to go home or to Rhode Island on the weekends, where I can actually get a full night of sleep, and maybe even a morning if I really need it.
With that said, she is very nice and very quiet. She is extremely preferable to the Hannah Montana-blasting child who threw a tantrum at even the slightest mention of headphones who I had to live with for one semester of my sophomore year. It’s just getting more and more difficult to motivate myself to do work as it is, and being exhausted all of the time is just making that more impossible. Graduation please?
