It's different out here. I always seem to forget that. I walked out of the hotel to bright sunshine and the lightest cool breeze, and I remembered that the weather forecast doesn't really matter.

I drove to the nearest In-N-Out Burger for lunch, then strolled over to the beach. There wasn't much of a crowd: a handful of beach volleyball players, a few joggers, and the occasional beachcomber. I laid out, read a bit of my paperback book, and counted the rare wispy cloud like it was floating over a fence, as the grains of sand lazily meandered down the hourglass.

Dr. Strangelove or:

During my rotations at County earlier this year I heard some of the Rush residents refer to the third-year on-call pager as "The Bomb," presumably because it was always going off. We don't have anything that cute in my program, as our pages (and our pain) generally tend to be more evenly spread out. Even so, during my intern year, I had many, many times when I wanted to toss my pager and its infernal beeping into the abyss.

This year, I've learned to take a deep breath and to take, well, it. Of course, it helps that I don't usually get bombarded by all the ridiculous intern-level pages. Still, I hope that my patience is slowly building in my professional life, even as it seems to get ever shorter in all other aspects.

I think part of it is due to living alone, and doing whatever I want whenever I want. Combine that with getting older and not having to answer to a significant other, and you have the recipe for selfish-er-shest.

Myung just had his two new roommates move in, and it's been a bit of a shock to his system. Myung, by nature and nurture, likes things tidy and clean. Apparently at least one of his roommates doesn't mind leaving things a bit unkempt.

Myung: There are boxes everywhere.

Me: Boxes of what?

He: I don't know. And there are half-empty water bottles on the table. I don't know if I should throw them out since I don't know if he's done with them.

Me: This is going to bother you.

He: Boxes...

Meanwhile, I've been setting up my last vacation week of the year. Parker and a buddy of his wants to see two large black men beat the living crap out of each other, so I figured I'd tag along for my first visit to Sin City. And while I'm out west, I thought I'd spend a few days on the beaches of southern California. But now I'm looking at the weather forecast for the last week of May and it doesn't seem like it's going to be warm enough for the beach. Oh, LA, you never fail to lift me up/bring me down.

Trauma ended with a buzz. My last day on Trauma started with an ICU patient going into asystole, followed by multiple failed attempts at intubation by every method you can imagine, and then my first cricothyroidotomy (alas, unlike on TV, I did not use a straw or the tubing of a pen). Most of the rest of the day was spent running around different ORs. Then the last memorable Trauma page of my second year: male circular saw to neck. It looked pretty much like what you would expect. Not only did he survive, Mr. Pez dispenser (as one nurse called him in typical medical gallows humor) looked better in the morning than I did as I finished another Trauma go-around.

Now I'm left with a couple of months of general surgery to finish off the year. The hours should be pretty long, but at least I'll get a day off here and there. I'll miss the wear and tear of the nightly South Side gun-and-knife show like, well, another hole in my head.