in today's trivial minutiae: I am typing this on my brother's Toshiba Satellite, horrifically missing MacOS X. It's really just the little things. Like how I don't have to reboot the stupid computer every time I wake it from sleep because I can't get back onto the Internet. Like how I don't have any built-in Firewire ports and therefore can't charge my iPod (because, like the scatterbrain that I am, I left my stand-alone charger in San Diego.) I've had to sort of shoehorn a UNIX like system onto Windows XP (by installing Cygwin) feh. the spacebar is screwed up for some reason, and I have to really pound on it to make it type a space.

anyway. I wandered the streets around the Mag Mile today, and I couldn't help but reminisce about all the times I've done this, usually in misery or loneliness or both. for example, I started thinking about that time when S left me in the Friend Zone, her rejection burning in my chest like Drano, all the while listening to M trying to rationalize a way to forgive her ex despite the fact that he had likely fathered a child with someone else (all the while stabbing my heart with little pinpoint daggers. ah the joys of the Friend Zone™) and here I was wandering these empty streets under a grey, dreary sky (I can't even remember what month it was because there were so many grey, dreary days over the past five years) chain smoking cigarettes and imagining how my life was going to turn out, how I was probably going to alone for the rest of my life, and how every day was the same, this low-level of mediocre misery. not the incapacitating grief of full-blown major depressive disorder, to be certain, but certainly as annoying and as draining as a case of infectious mononucleosis.

and it's interesting how when you go back to places that you haven't been for a while, all of the sudden all those emotions you left dormant come up to bite you in the ass, or at least make you trip as you're trying to step onto the curb.

what is interesting (and not a little bit pathetic) is that nothing has really changed. I just have a lot less time to wallow in self-pity these days. I mean, yeah, as soon as I'm done with residency, the rest of my life pretty much looks like that black pit of despair that imagined that one gloomy day as I strode down Michigan Ave, burning cigarette in hand. it's not a little pathetic that the one bright spot of the exhausting work I'm doing is that at least there are attractive, intelligent women there who talk to me and give me smiles of recognition, this despite knowing that (1) it scarcely means anything, and my desperation is merely a symptom of being single for far too long and (2) relationships among colleagues have this tendency to become far too complicated and volatile.

so here I am on day 2 of my vacation, whiling the time away in my hotel room, typing about how sad and pathetic my life is. as usual. I don't know, like I said, I'd rather not think about it, because the future, frankly, looks horrifically bleak on a more global level, and currently, I am from at least a purely monetary point-of-view, worth more dead than alive (because if I die or am killed, the insurance on my loans will cover my debt.) while, certainly, I could theoretically start making money once I am done with this particular stage in my life, the thought of working for the next ten years merely to bail out this sinking ship known as my credit rating kind of leaves a nasty taste in my mouth, and it's times like these that I feel like picking up and moving to Argentina, or preferrably somewhere where I won't get extradited for defaulting on my debt, or maybe joining a remote monastery somewhere, but oh well, whatever. As they say, we'll burn that bridge when we get to it.