Maxigumee

I haven’t been able to sleep very well recently. A lot of it has to do with my roommate staying up until like five in the morning every night and keeping the overhead fluorescent light on while he does it. Fluorescent lights are the most evil form of lighting ever created by mankind and my pure hatred for them has caused me to think that anybody who does not think this way has absolutely no emotion or feeling. How can people function with the buzzing, harsh, pulsating photons POUNDING down onto their skin?? I certainly can’t function or sleep.

On top of turning the horrible fluorescent lights on every time I leave the room, my roommate and I have started to have another kind of passive-aggressive war. This one having to do with the temperature in the room. I think it’s because I’ve grown up with totally cheap parents who will not spend anymore on heating than they absolutely have to, but I can not sleep or breathe if the heat is above about sixty degrees. I try to open the window as wide as it can go to get some cool air circulating in here, but as soon as I leave the room and come back, I find my roommate has closed the windows. It has continued like this for a few days and every morning that I wake up after a night of HOT, HOT sleep, I feel like my throat is made of sandpaper and as if my skin is about to flake off because of dryness.

A few nights ago, after trying for an hour to get to sleep, I came up with a list of things I need in order for me to be able to get to sleep:

• NO LIGHT. I wear a sleep mask at night which might lead my roommate to believe that I can sleep with the fluorescent lights on, but that is hardly true. I wear that sleep mask so that the tiniest bits of light can not reach my pupils and keep my up all night. These tiny lights include the faint light from my printer and the crack of light below the door.
• NO SOUND. Along with wearing a mask, I also use ear plugs. But this does not mean that I can’t hear anything. It simply means that I can’t hear people’s tiptoeing footsteps outside the door or the humming of cars passing by on the street.
• THE RIGHT TEMPERATURE. If it’s not about 53 degrees while I’m asleep, I can’t sleep. I also wake up drenched in sweat and with a sore throat.
• PRESSURE ON MY BODY. I can’t cool down by taking my heavy comforter off of my body because on top of needing the correct temperature, I need to feel weight pressing down on my body. I can not sleep at all if all I’m using is a sheet. I need a warm, heavy blanket over my body, but cool air circulating around my head.
• A BREEZE. At home, I sleep with a fan next to my head. There is no fan here. It’s awful.
• NOBODY AWAKE. This is probably the most unfair out of all of my sleep criteria considering that I have a roommate, but I simply can not sleep even if somebody in the same room as me is awake. This means that even if I can’t hear or see my roommate watching TV in our room, I can’t get to sleep simply because of the fact that HE IS AWAKE.

Obviously, I need some help. I went to Target yesterday and bought some over-the-counter sleeping pills but they didn’t really do anything. Except make me sleep until one in the afternoon when I actually did get to sleep. Anyhow…. To celebrate me not being able to sleep in a dorm room, here are some pictures of my dorm room: