Tension Headaches and Hypochondria

So I’ve had a headache for the past couple of days that’s only now starting to subside. 

It’s in the spot at the back of my head, you know, where your head and your neck meet (unless you’re an alien and your head and neck are completely separate for whatever insane reason). Usually I get headaches there only as the result of tension. Like, say, killer bunnies taking over the world. 

Also, I went apartment shopping, so that might have been a contributing factor.

Is it really called apartment shopping? Would that be the proper term? Looking for apartments seems more appropriate, but bulky word-wise. It sure felt like shopping, except instead of coming home with a bag full of books that I kind-of-but-not-really regret buying (see a hopefully upcoming blog post on buyer’s remorse), I came home with a bag full of flyers and a worsening of the aforementioned headache. 

If you’ve never had the joy of going apartment shopping, let me sum up the experience for you: you go into the office of a selected apartment complex and ask to see a sample apartment (like sample cheese, except less nutritionally valuable). The office people say, “Sure,” even though you know that they want to say, “May your internal organs combust for making me leave my desk.” And one of them leads you to a room, where you wander around oohing and aahing and noting details about the apartment, while said office person kind of stands around looking vacant. 

The actual wandering around the apartment part is the worst. It looks like every other apartment you’ve had to look at. And you just know that they’re not showing you the actual apartment you’ll move into, that, for all you know, the actual apartment you move into could have mold and a leaky toilet and mice tap-dancing in the closet, and you have no real way of knowing beforehand. Also, you don’t really want to say obvious things, like “This light fixture looks like it’s been around since roughly the nineteen fifties” or “Where is the door to the closet?” for fear of looking like an unreasonable jerk, the kind of unreasonable jerk that all the office people tell horror stories about later on. 

And then half of the places had no vacancies, and the half that didn’t were SO CLOSE to having no vacancies that if we didn’t sign RIGHT THAT VERY MINUTE we were in very good danger of not getting a room at all. 

So yeah. It was a tension headache.

Obviously I didn’t think that it was a tension headache, and kept coming up with different scenarios for whatever illness I probably contracted. I do this frequently, and it’s sad because I don’t really get sick all that often. The occasional cold, carsickness, but never the flu or the plague or any of the things that I think I’m getting. 

I think I may be an alarmist.