the underwear drawer

jet-lagged

I feel like Bill Murray in "Lost in Translation," all dazed and off-cycle. "Mistah Hallis, please lip my stocking! Lip dem!" Two more nights, and then I'll be done with the night shift, and with the ER in general. It occurs to me that since I'm switching to Anesthesia in the Spring, this may be the last time I ever work in the Emergency Room. I mean, barring my getting pulled to cover someone else's shift on sick call or something similar. The notion makes me positively misty. However, I would feel much more nostalgic about saying goodbye to the ER if I wasn't at the end of working 11 shifts in a row.

Tomorrow morning, I have to pick up Joe's tux for the wedding on my way home from work, and then I have an appointment with a housecleaner that I found on Craig's List. We are living in squalor, and it must stop. There is a sense of failure about resorting to hiring a person to clean our house--you know, that we couldn't keep up with the rate of entropy and sweep up our own hairballs--but based on the testimonies of other residents who have also decided to hire household help, guilt gives way to relief rather quickly when you can come home to a clean bathroom and spend time with your spouse without applying subtle pressure to one another to take out the damn trash already. The real deal-breaker with this housekeeper is whether or not she's scared of dogs. She says she likes dogs, but there's a huge difference between a little teacup Maltese and Cooper. I'd say about 70 pounds.

Currently reading: Too tired to read at the present. I've been taking to napping on the subway, and somehow have been honing this sixth sense about when the train is approaching my stop. And it is a sixth sense, because half of the conductors don't announce the stops overhead, and the other half that do don't seem to have PA systems that work very well. "(Static) street, next stop is (static) pleasestanclearuddaclosindoors (feedback whine)"