It’s odd. I should be seeing nothing but textbooks, notes, anything that will prepare me for my finals. Instead, everything I read is roughly equivalent to “W/D A/C BR BA BD BM 350/MO O.B.O. G/L. Call now! Will go fast!” or “Fishgutter needed. Must have interest in fish-gutting, grueling labor, and acid jazz. Will train the right person.”

That’s right. I have made the disastrous decision to start apartment searching roughly one week before I need it. I no longer have the time to ensure that “Male seeking roommate for 4 BR, $175/mo. O.B.O.” means that he’ll accept offers under 175, as opposed to, say, “orangutan body odor.” Then, to top that off, I need to find a spare job to keep my pockets lined with lint, as opposed to creditors.

While my week should be filled with intellectual considerations as to the role of American nationalism in the War of 1812 or Kierkegaard’s concern with the idea of true faith, my mind is occupied with the question of how long I could sit in someone’s front yard, guarding my possessions with a shotgun before I’d get arrested. (My current estimate: 3 or 4 days, particularly if I do it on Welch Ave. Odds are, no one would notice.)

But in comparison to my finals, the apartment/job search is an epic quest. After all, no matter how much time I may be considering my finals, they’ll all be over in a span of two hours. I have no such pleasant assurance in regards to finding a place to live or work.

In a way, apartment searching is a metaphor for life, or at least the part of life that is spent searching for apartments.

Exploitation becomes a way of life, and you can’t wait until you find a person who’s renting their apartment for $10 a month, just so that way they get something for it, while they’re off living their exotic lives beyond the realm of the city limits. The downside is that by that time, I’ll have had to spend enough on gas cruising around to visit apartments and apply for jobs that I’ll have to resort to prostitution (read: selling plasma) in order to pay for the apartment.

I wish I could say it only affected me. Everyone who knows me has probably been living in fear of me, worried I’d kill them just so I could squat in their place until the smell attracted the cops.

Of course, a good percentage of Ames is in my situation right now.

Almost everyone who’s not still under the iron fist of the Department of Residence and its not-at-all-applied Veishea policies is out there looking or else being price-gouged by someone so that they can live in security and spend their finals week like everyone else is – drinking heavily.

The rest of us have to simply claw our way through three newspapers’ classified ads, wishfully thinking that no one else has bothered to check them all with a fine-toothed comb.

If it’s this bad to buy, I don’t know how agonizing it must be to be sitting on a sublease. Not that I really care. I still won’t go one cent over my spending cap, and trust me, May will be free. Why? My empathy runs out quick. Just because I feel for you doesn’t make me a sap.

Really, I only ask one thing. Save me! Save me now (O.B.O.)!

Tim Kearns is a senior in political science from Bellevue, Ne.