Sleepless in Seattle

In the fourth episode of the first season of How I Met Your Mother, Ted Mosby reviews his past relationships in search of a lost gem. Just like I love this shirt I used to overlook, he says, perhaps I've overlooked the right woman just because she came to me at the wrong time. I won't tell you how that story ends, except to say that no, she was not in fact Ted's lost gem. All the things he didn't like about her came back to the surface, probably even stronger than they had before. She was not a bad girl, just not a girl he wanted to commit to.

That's the way I felt about the Space Needle, and the way the Space Needle felt about me. Our first relationship was great, and we both got what we wanted. I got a paycheck, and they got a dedicated employee. The Space Needle came to me at just the right time -- in between a marriage and my admission to a 4-year university, and when we parted ways it was with both confidence in the future and thankfulness of what we had been able to give each other. One of my close friends came out of that job, as did an architectural reminder of the beginning of my life in that city.

So when I went through my period of remission, the Space Needle is unsurprisingly what came to my mind. Just like Ted's ex-girlfriend, I wanted to rekindle my relationship with it with the expectation that it would give me what it did before. And at first, it did. My supervisor was still there, seven years later (and had been for 34 years), and she welcomed me with open arms. She spoke of coworkers we had both known -- women who had passed through the system on their way to achieving higher education. I'm so proud of my girls, she said, You guys are all so smart.

I was happy to be back until I stepped back into the uniform room. Sure, the job had been great back then, when I was young and getting on my feet. But the smell of the room brought back memories both good and bad, and I felt like I had stepped back in time. Current uniform employees proudly introduced me to our clients -- current Space Needle employees -- and while it felt good to be so appreciated, I couldn't also help but feel a little bit like a failure that I had returned to this entry-level job after seven years of schooling. Not all of it was bad though, and most of it was good. It felt good to get up in the morning, take a shower, and take the bus to work. It felt good to leave work and traipse about the city as a wage earner. It felt good to have a reason for an ipod, a backpack, and a coin purse for bus fare. But unfortunately the Space Needle wanted what I couldn't give it. It wanted double shifts and frequent early mornings, and the ability to walk an hour each way to and from the bus. The double shifts and early mornings weren't part of the job description, and despite my best effort my body shut down and I lost the job. But, just like Ted realized that his ex wasn't right for him the second time around, I realized that the Space Needle was not right for me. I have frequently set my bar too low in the jobs I'll take -- jobs that don't coincide with my education and experience. I looked to the Space Needle at my lowest and most lonely point, but the universe knows there is something better for me out there.

Four days after losing my job at the Needle, which I worked for a total of two days, my sleep study revealed that I do in fact have sleep apnea. I wake myself up 10 times an hour due to shallow breathing, and the test showed that I got 70 minutes of deep sleep in the 8 hours I slept at the center. This knowledge should help me get to where I need to go, which is a) a state of normal functioning with a CPAP machine, or b) a diagnosis enabling me to receive social security if the CPAP machine doesn't help enough. Just how bad my particular case of sleep apnea turns out to be and just how much it is contributing to my symptoms remains to be seen, but I go forward with the hope that I will once again wake up on an early (or late) morning and make the commute to a job in the city that I love. The Space Needle and I may have broken up, but the right working relationship is out there somewhere.