mahiwaga

Today I had the day off. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to leave the intern pager at the hospital, so I had to wake up early in the morning to get it to the intern taking over my service. Which is just as well, because I had 13 dictations to do.

After three hours, I had breakfast at the Mission, picked up a package at the post office, then went back to sleep.

I was supposed to run some errands the day before. Yesterday, I had laid my head down at approximately 3:30 pm and failed to wake up until midnight. I still haven't learned to set my alarm post-call before nodding off to sleep.

But this time I woke up around 1pm and decided that it was a good time to go to the beach. This time I headed straight west on the 8, out to Ocean Beach.

Now I realize the following analogies are lame, and they really don't do justice to any of the places I talk about, but I'll write them anyway:

Whenever I try to explain Venice Beach in L.A. to any of my Northern Cali friends, I tell them it's like Telegraph Ave in Berkeley, or the Haight, except it's right next to the ocean. Well, in truth, it really isn't, it's just that the smell of incense and marijuana often fill the air in these places. I imagine that these places are the few scattered remnants of what used to be the whole country in the '60's, but what do I know? I was born in 1976.

Anyway, to mutilate an already ugly analogy, Ocean Beach in San Diego is like Venice Beach on steroids. It is actually a lot more like Telegraph Ave/Haight-Ashbury than Venice is. Venice is more like a tent city in comparison. (But of course, none of these places has that guy who wears a turban and roller-skates while playing the guitar.)

So, yeah, there are the hippies and the Rastafarians and the potheads and the goths. The counterculture still lives in scattered corners. Even in uber-conservative San Diego. I ended up going to the used bookstore, where I bought a grip of books. One of them was about feng shui for apartment dwellers. We'll see if it will actually help me with my inability to stay organized and clutter-free. I'm really desperate. I'm ready to try anything. Shit, if this doesn't work, I'm probably going to have to hire a maid to keep my shit together. My place may as well be radioactive, that's how nasty it is. Anyway.

And, as usual, though probably because of my erratic sleep pattern today, I can't get to sleep, despite the fact that I have to once again wake up at the ass-crack of dawn. Damn it.