mahiwaga

Now that I understand the Laws of Probability a little better, I recognize that most coincidences are meaningless, or even more likely, most coincidences become significant in my mind only because my attention shifts for one reason or another.

Nonetheless, I find it amusing to list the following episodes that have driven my mind back to thinking about moving to yet another city once I’m done with my residency.

1. B (my roommate from college) keeps asking me repeatedly as to when I’m going to visit the Bay. I haven’t been up there since February 2005, and I keep making promises that I end up not keeping.
2. I met one of J’s friends who is currently living in the South Bay, and as we hung out at the PB Bar and Grill, she suggested that we should hang out should I ever make it back up to the Bay.
3. The girl that J may or may not be dating is from the South Bay.
4. There was once a random idea proposed by E back in the day that once I finish my residency, I could move in with him and his wife at least temporarilly since they have a little extra room (although now they have 2 kids so I’m not sure if that would still work.) Since I will be finishing in about 18 months, thoughts about what I’m going to do after residency keep popping back into my mind.
5. What I’m going to do with my life after residency is basically the current topic of conversation with my mentors. During my performance eval, my program director naturally asked this question. This question was also always on the mind of one of my attendings whom I really enjoyed working with, and he is a big fan of Cal (although he is a bigger fan of USC.)
6. A woman I have a crush on precipitously moved up to the Bay. (Unfortunately, she is apparently unavailable—as in not single, but, such is my life.)
7. An ex-girlfriend e-mailed me randomly a few months ago because she had gone to a conference in the Bay Area and she thought of me.
8. Both the attending I mentioned above and χ played up the Cal vs. UCLA game last weekend. χ actually went up there with her boyfriend to watch the game at Memorial Stadium. That was an awesome game.
9. The waitress at Raw whom me, J, Jason and Jason’s cousin met happened to be San Jose. She was concerned that we were going to crash on our way home after getting fucked up with sake and Asahis.
10. S who is one of my few friends from med school that I keep in touch with, is constantly back and forth between SoCal and the Bay.
11. I met an endocrine fellow who happened to have finished her residency at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, which also happens to be where several people whom I knew from undergrad also finished their residencies at (and S finished her transitional year there.)

Now, objectively, none of these things are all that significant or remarkable, it’s just that the human brain is wired for pattern recognition and trying to make meaning out of chaos.

I recently had a conversation with my preceptor’s husband, and I came to the realization that San Diego just isn’t my city. (He’s from NYC, so he constantly finds things to be disgusted about this place.) I find myself more comfortable when I think of this place as a distant suburb of L.A.

At the same time, I’m not sure I want to go back to L.A. While there is the comfort of being near my parents and my brother, my mind comes back to a conversation I once had with B. He’s actually still out in NYC, and he’s been somewhere on the East Coast since 1994. I couldn’t help but wonder whether I would actually like L.A. if I didn’t grow up there. There are a lot of things about it that I find odious, and while B professes that he likes it out there, he clearly doesn’t like it enough to actually move back to the West Coast.

I think that I do need to stay in California though. The thought of going to a place where it snows regularly strikes terror into my heart despite the fact that I really enjoyed living in Chicago, and that I really like NYC. That and the fact that doctors seem to be more uptight the farther east you move.

Nonetheless, I still feel like it’ll be a while until I actually have to make this decision. And yet, I can’t seem to extinguish it from my mind.

It’s 4 a.m. and I’m heading up to L.A.

Sleep is for the weak. And probably for the sane.

I caught the tail end of “Just Like Heaven” which is set in San Francisco, features Reese Witherspoon as an ER resident who works 24 hour shifts and ends up kind of undead, and is titled after a Cure song (and which Katie Melua does a pretty good cover version of.)

This morning I woke up at 4 a.m. I had fallen asleep on top of my covers. I jumped into my car and drove up to L.A. The fog limited visibility to about 20 feet, and every single light glowed eerily. By the time I made it up to L.A., the sun was starting to peek over the horizon, turning the sky orange.