feb 24 pt 2: the stream of consciousness edition

Stressed about school, stressed about grades. I've been skipping partly to get things done and partly because I don't care. I don't know why my relationship to academia has been this way for so long, but it has. Something to bring up in therapy, probably. It's not that I don't want a degree, it's that I don't care about academia or college or this program specifically, because I feel like I'm stagnant even though I'm moving ahead. I just feel like I'm not learning anything I couldn't properly learn in the film industry. I've kicked around the idea of leaving for a while this year, and although I would love to pack up and risk it, I also... really would not. Plus, the guilt of having spent time and money in college and having it not happen because I was bored or uninterested is already pressing on me just from thinking that. I'm vaguely worried that this is a sign of depression, because my sleeping and eating habits have been out of whack, too. It doesn't feel like the last time I was depressed, so I think it's just stress and unhealthy coping techniques combined with increasing self-protective apathy (bc if I wasn't apathetic I would be panicking and stressing 24/7). Again, for the therapist. I just haven't been doing homework for 2-3 weeks and even though it's week 5 and I can pull things together if I crack down and recommit, I'm still anxious about it.

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Sometimes I wish I was still in law, if only because I would go into renters' rights defense or something similar. The things landlords do around UWM's apartment areas are horrifying. So many act like they don't give a fuck and they really don't; houses are shitty and they get to raise rent on college students who have no choice but to pay it somehow, and they get to be cash cows for someone who doesn't care about them. My landlord lives in a mansion and still has the gall to charge me $533 a month for my share of a 3 bedroom that we had to legally force him to clean up, and we're the ones who repainted and cleaned and made it homey and livable. Our lease says we have until April 1 to decide if we want to renew or not, but he's touring our apartment anyway, either trying to strong-arm us into signing on for another year really early, or trying to sign the apartment out from under us so we have to move. We know we're going to be moving regardless, because it's so expensive and he's a genuinely horrible human being who lives in a literal mansion while his properties only get problems fixed if he's threatened with a city notice, but the point still stands. The whole deal is in that gray area of not being fair, but also not being illegal. We should have time to decide and be able to give a statement of some kind by that date, at which point he can look for leasers, not now. It's around a college campus, it's not like he's going to be lacking in prospective tenants. And yet tomorrow he'll be doing a second tour of the apartment like nothing is wrong. If I was a lawyer, I would be trying to make things more explicit and fair for college students, because this is ridiculous.