Defeated

Yes, I think a lot of this is stress-related. The apartment thing, the dentist thing, and this week a mishap with the check for my 401(k) plan rollover from my old company. (I dragged my feet submitting the paperwork, doing so last August, but then it took them eight months to issue the check, and it arrived made out to the wrong payee.) So I felt pretty defeated today.

I started thinking seriously today about taking some parental advice and hiring a real estate agent to set up apartment viewings for me, despite the expense this would entail (probably about half a month's rent - considerable, out here). But I'm also immensely frustrated with my basic inability with being able to look for an apartment. This is a skill I ought to have; looking for housing is just basically something that one should be able to do. I've always been pretty lucky with my housing searches and haven't had to really look very hard, and I guess in a karmic sense it's all catching up to me now.

It's basically at this point become a vicious cycle of needing to find a new place, not being able to really look for one, and getting depressed over that. I dread weekends because it means I spend more time at home. (Actually, I don't mind being home at night - when it's dark out - for some reason. It's when it's daytime that being home depresses me.) And I don't want to spend all my time out somewhere, because I want to spend some time with the cats, who I think are getting upset with me over hardly ever being home. It's a bad situation.

I was explaining to Lucy tonight that when looking at ads for apartments to call I feel somewhat paralyzed about which ones to call. I can't look at the Mountain View ads without thinking, "But maybe I really want to live in Menlo Park!" or the Menlo park ads without thinking, "But Mountain View is probably a lot cheaper!" Part of the problem I think is that I have a lot of trouble getting past thinking that calling about a place is almost tantamount to a commitment, when of course it isn't. But it's tough to invest the energy in calling and the time in going to see a place when I'm not reasonably sure ahead of time that I want to take it. And I feel kind of silly calling about a place and deciding not to go see it, even if I'm pretty sure it's in an area I don't want to live in.

I'm just not making much progress here.

Plus, I went to Stanford today to the student union and did not see much in the way of rental advertising there (mostly just rooms for rent). Probably most rental information is recorded at some student-only center on campus which I couldn't get access to. So, so much for that idea.

Gah.

Not a whole lot else to relate, unfortunately.

Well, okay, I did put up some more comics for sale on eBay. But that's not really all that exciting.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that on Thursday we went out to lunch for a member of our department who's leaving, and I had pretty much the worst pizza I've yet had in the Bay Area. Really, really bad: Too much cheese, hardly any sauce, and totally lame crust. Yuck. I think I ate about 2/3ds of a slice and stopped there.

Not a banner week.