mahiwaga

Tomorrow is my first day off in 12 days. Without question, I believe that this has had a negative impact on my emotional status. This morning I had to all but drag myself out of bed and get into the shower, and I showed up to work 15 minuntes late, thinking of nothing but of the hour when I would get out and free myself from the shackles of daily drudgery.

The pathetic thing is that I only have one day off and then I get to go back to work on Sunday for 30 hours straight. Yipee.

There comes the question of "quality of life."

I reminisced about what was possibly one of the hardest months of my life. Dealing with death. Feeling responsible for death, even when realistically, there was nothing I could do. How I have willingly allowed my soul to be scarred. Like standing in front of the avalanche, trying to stop it with brute force, even though I know that it is utterly hopeless and futile.

And yet mental anguish has never managed to kill me. Debilitate me to the point of uselessness, perhaps, but I have never been able to take the knife to my chest and end this suffering. For better or for worse.

What I wonder is how you can lose something that you never had. It is with a heart-wrenching, sinking feeling that I have come to one of those moments that are simultaneously a hello and a goodbye. Those brief few hours spent with each other, exchanging inanities. Dreaming to myself what will certainly never be.

I didn't even have time to descend into my morbid self-doubt.

But yeah. Before I even got to know her, she's going to be gone. I doubt that the cumulative amount of time I've spent with her has equalled up to an entire day in these past three months, enough to make me wonder, but certainly no where near enough to know.

I suppose I should be content with potentiality, rather than demand certain hopelessness.

And I can't help but feel my life is going in neverending circles.

And still, I persist in claiming that I don't need anyone, and I'm perfectly fine here on my own. Which from a purely rational perspective is entirely true.

And yet there's this feeling of aching emptiness which I can't help but curse as ridiculous.

I suppose it's like being an emotional amputee. Feeling pain from a phantom source.

There's nothing to see here, folks. Just a tired young man who thinks he's a 109 years old.

Cryptic, I know. It's the best I can manage at 2am.

I should've known better than to go to sleep drunk and without taking my meds.

One: having to wake up early enough to drive down to San Diego from L.A. and go to work. For some bizarre reason, I was on an OB-GYN rotation, and the hospital I was working at reminded me of Cook County Hospital in Chicago (minus the ER)

Two: in my dream, I learn that an undying but hopelessly unrequitable love is not entirely unrequited.

Three: me and my oldest friend have moved to Chicago, and we are wandering around Wicker Park, looking for somewhere to eat breakfast.

I hate it when I wake up more tired than when I went to sleep.

So I've disabled trackbacks since some bastard has started pinging pr0n sites at me, which is not that great of a loss since no one has pinged me since I started using Blosxom as my blogging engine. I wish I could eviscerate these spamming scum.

He arrived at the club two hours late, hamstrung by his own scatter-mindedness, without any real hope that he would still find her there. But he headed out anyway into the night, amidst the teeming swarms of barhoppers and thrillseekers. There was a time when he would have revelled in the illicit goings-on of the night, the whoring and the drug-dealing, the generalized debauchery. But in this strange place, he only felt desolate, having been gone too long from this lifestyle.

He was unsure he would recognize her face on the barely lit dance floor, couples bumping and grinding to the sexually suggestive beats, the bass mimicking the undulations of lovers fucking. And then he spied her at one of the tables on the edge of the dance floor. But elation was quickly followed by ice-cold self-recrimination and self-loathing for his stupidity. She was wrapped around some guy with a tight, built body. Ah well he thought to himself, not really surprised. So this was probably her friend. He toyed with the notion of simply not approaching, then realized how ridiculous he was being. Indecision won the moment, so he bought himself a drink. “Shot of tequila,” he told the bartender absently, and without salt or lime simply slugged it. Nothing he thought to himself. Not even a buzz. He ordered one after another and almost went for a fourth when he finally decided to pull himself together, nearly tripping in doing so. Here it goes, and he walked grimly to the table, swaying a little…

This season has traditionally been a time of giving up things, but perhaps because of Vatican II (when hippies apparently infiltrated the Catholic Church), when I was growing up in Catholic School, the emphasis was on making a life-affirming change. Instead of negative reinforcement, the idea was to do something positive. Instead of giving something up, the idea was to do something new to make oneself a better person or make the world a better place.

So in that spirit, I have vowed to not wallow in my dingy apartment on my days off. To that end, I actually went out last night (witness my barely coherent musings and the pathetic story fragment that it inspired.) And today, I decided to visit the Sea (which, as I have mentioned, I am completely obsessed with.)

Today I found myself in La Jolla. While there are better, less snobby beaches to go to, for some reason I was drawn there. Maybe it's simply because of the cliffs, reminding me of my mad trip up Highway 1. Maybe it's the traces of memories from those demented days when I would fly out to California from Chicago and spend time visiting my sister here. I don't know.

The thing I noticed is that the music on the radio really gets me down. I don't know why. Because I don't live that far away from work right now, I haven't been bringing my iPod with me, which may have been detrimental to my mental health. Now that I am listening to my own music again, I feel much better. I want to rationalize that it's because the hip-hop they play on the radio is dreary and appeals to base commercialism and materialism, while the hip-hop that I have on my iPod is typically life-affirming, cognizant of the Struggle, and/or cerebral. Conclusion: hip-hop on the radio sucks shit. Nothing we already didn't know.

So I wandered around the streets of La Jolla with my iPod on, and it really made a difference to my mood. I stayed out there until the sun was too low to provide any warmth, reading The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind on a bench overlooking the cove. The book really reinforces my suspicion that I suffered some subtle brain damage when they anesthetized me as a kid, given my general indecisiveness and the overwhelming inertia I feel when trying to start a project. It's probably no surprise to anyone who knows me well that I probably have some kind of brain damage. True, I may be highly functioning, but I've always maintained that I'm probably the stupidest smart guy you'll ever meet.

After that, I decided to go to Coronado, another site of decadence, where the affluent dwell. One of the places I work is actually in Coronado, so I ate at a familiar diner and browsed quickly through a familiar book store. By then the sun had set, so I headed home, a little weary, somewhat pathetically content that I at least didn't simply rot at home.

The question is, how long can I keep this up? Can I keep going for the next three months without having an entire weekend off?

Still, I suppose I don't really have any choice. Sink or swim, baby, sink or swim.