Hippocrates In San Diego

Ugh.

I’m still sick. I felt better for a few days and now I am again at the brink of dying. Humans weren’t meant to live like this; I understand now why our ancestors died of infectious diseases so easily, at an early age. It was just too miserable to survive. In other news I’m in the middle of my 2 week shift on service at our downtown hospital. It’s been a joy to work during my last days on earth. Really.

OK, I’m just being a smart-ass. I feel miserable and therefore have taken some poetic license with the truth. I’m not dying of this illness, although I assure you that is exactly how I feel. And all things considered, I’m healthy, happy, and quite lucky in life. But that doesn’t mean I can’t whine a bit about feeling ill.

Nicole and I have been enjoying ourselves on the social scene lately, going to dinner a few times with friends in recent days. It’s been so blasted cold here for the last couple weeks (far colder than I remember last winter in San Diego, anyway) that we haven’t felt much like being outside. So we’ve been going to friends’ houses or various restaurants for dinner and getting to know the city a bit better (from the relative warmth of the inside of a multitude of structures).

I bought a film camera about a week ago, a Canon Rebel K2 35mm SLR. It’s beat up, dirty, with annoyingly sticky controls and buttons, and probably not worth anything close to what I bought it for (on craigslist.com). I’ve shot nearly 3 rolls so far and I can’t wait to get them developed. I’ll probably take them to Nelson Photo Supply or a similar specialty shop to have them developed, since I’m certainly not going to trust Wal-mart to develop my film with any accuracy. I’m really loving the sound it makes with each exposure… it’s a sound we just don’t hear anymore. I have distant memories of film cameras being around when I was a kid, but since my family isn’t particularly photo-happy (we don’t have too many records of get-togethers from more recent times) and my sister and I adopted digital cameras fairly early, I don’t think I’ve even seen a film camera for years. It’s going to be a lot of fun to learn the differences from digital. I suspect that my techno-bias may look upon the film results as inferior — I hope I’m able to look at them for what they are — a technology from the last century that has its own culture, history, and style.