Tests

Tests seems to be taking up the majority of my life right now, in more ways than one. The first, most obvious way is that I begin my comprehensive exams on Monday, and my degree depends on my passing the written exams, as well as an oral defense sometime in April. These exams, if you're not familiar with them, work like this: I receive one multifaceted question from the professors of 8 classes that I've had during my grad school career. 2 are required (Theories and Research Methods) and I choose the other 6. Then I study and prepare responses, which I've been doing since the beginning of February. Then over the course of 10 days, I am given one hour to write my response for each question, sequestered alone in an office or other available classroom with the department laptop. For 2 of the classes, I'm allowed to take in an outline, but the other ones I pretty much have to memorize. The professors are then given my responses, read them, and then if they find it necessary, tell me to re-write them to include anything that I missed or didn't explain well. Then I have to meet with my committee of three professors and defend, for two hours, my responses, and I've heard that they throw in other, unrelated questions from those classes to make sure I was mentally present during my four semesters. I am so freaking nervous. I think I'm more nervous for the oral defense than writing, though, because I've never been good with being put on the spot and I've always thrived with writing things down after giving them some thought.

Another way that tests are a part of my life right now is the chaos that Jake and I have gone through during the last month that has put our relationship and our mental and physical strength to the test. You probably recall my last post that was a letter to our next-door neighbor. Well, it didn't end there. In fact, it got worse. It's a really, really long story, but basically the week after the warning, there were parties and loud music almost every night for a week. Two nights in a row we had to go to Jake's brother's apartment (once at 4 AM when the party started) and each time the cops showed up after we called, the people next door would turn off the music, stay quiet, and not answer the door. We had to stay in a hotel that weekend because we just didn't know what was going to happen those nights. The Monday after the hotel weekend we told the apartment management, and they put an eviction notice on his door. Apparently the guy next door went over there, furious, and insisted that he wasn't doing anything wrong. In fact, he was "hardly ever at the apartment," but his cousin uses it sometimes. His cousin is not on the lease (so as we interpret things, since the actual tenant is rarely there, the cousin is using the apartment to throw parties, and since he's not on the lease, that is why he doesn't answer the door, because no one actually knows who is there). The actual tenant's mom even got involved and since then it has just spiraled out of control, with the eviction on hold because I guess they can't legally evict him if he argues it or something like that, a threat from the tenant of a lawsuit on Jake for "harassment" (seriously? We've never even made contact with him!), and the management giving us the property manager's personal phone number to call in the middle of the night if a party starts so she could go over with a key and bust into the apartment, yet she doesn't even answer the phone or return messages... We had to stay in a hotel AGAIN last weekend because a somewhat quieter, but still noisy gathering was accumulating in that apartment, and we just didn't know if it was going to go on all weekend. We are trying to get the management to pay for our hotel stays too. THEN Jake talked to someone from management on Sunday, and she told him that the property manager wanted to set up a kind of mediation meeting the next day (Monday) with the tenant and Jake, so Jake took off work because he didn't know what time it would be, but they never called him in. So we've gotten all the police records of every time we've called about that apartment, Jake has done research on leasing laws to know our rights as tenants and the responsibilities of property management, and we've been kinda of looking for other places so in case this continues, we would break our lease early.

MEANWHILE, the first hotel weekend I started coming down with a cold, and have since been trying to get over it. The first week of my cold, there were no parties, but we STILL could not sleep because I was up coughing all night for a week. I needed to study for my comps so badly but was not getting any sleep. Then as if all this wasn't enough, the first morning of the second hotel weekend, I woke up with pinkeye in both eyes (if you've ever had it, you know how gross pinkeye is). The only urgent care center in town that took my insurance was closed on the weekend, and after seeking advice from another urgent care that didn't take my insurance, I decided to tough out the pinkeye until I could go to the Student Health Center on Monday. By then, my pinkeye had gotten better on its own.

Thoughts and prayers of encouragement are appreciated at this time. We are doing everything we can at the moment, and this apartment situation is kind of in limbo right now. For the time being, it has been quiet and I've been focusing on comps and Jake and I have been doing a lot to get our mind off things, like going on walks and out to dinner. But we have many options and amazing support from our families, who we know would give anything to be closer to us right now (and frankly, we want to be closer to them too). Even my brother-in-law was wanting to drive the 5 hours down here and wait outside our neighbor's door for him. Haha.

This has been a REALLY long post (sorry!), and I know that other people have gone through much worse in their life than what we're going through. The whole point of this post was not to get anyone to feel sorry for us, but to show that no relationship is speed-bump free, and that marriage is not always happy and perfect, and that life WILL test marriage. This has been a major test for Jake and I. It's taken a major toll on our mental well-being. Due to lack of sleep, anxiety over not knowing what is going to happen every night, and anger with the apartment management over seemingly not doing enough, we have had moments when we lash out at each other and times that we feel helpless. However, overall we both agreed yesterday that this test of all tests has made us even closer and has caused us to lean on each other even more. Every marriage goes through tests, and I know this won't be our last one. These tests will either break a relationship down or make it stronger. This one has definitely made ours stronger. Just like I know I can pass my tests during the next two weeks, I know that he and I can pass this test (with all the sub-tests in between). I love my husband so much and can't imagine going through this alone. After all, it's not the problems that you go through, but how you get through the problems together than matters!