Sunday and Endings

The picture above was taken last summer in downtown Los Angeles to document random graffiti for my sister's art history thesis. She is writing an undergraduate thesis at the University of Chicago on the artistic value of illegal street art; and that baby is due tomorrow! Good luck, Samantha!

I woke up at noon today (surprise), worked a little bit on odds and ends before grabbing lunch at the Canvas Gallery with my favorite girl, Kim, around 1:30 p.m.

It was a meal that strangely focused on the theme of endings (at least for me it did)...the Canvas Gallery closing, a long weekend slowly ending, a year gone by in the blink of an eye. Kim (my favorite partner in the metaphysical journey known as life) mentioned how a year is both a long and a short amount of time, and how so many things can happen within the space of 12 months and yet how it's paradoxically not a very long time at all. We talked about daylight savings time and how Kim was upset about losing an hour to talk to her friend in Germany due to daylight savings. It makes me realize that time = love, even more than time = money.

This seemed especially poignant today, because it was the first anniversary of a friend's death, a gifted friend from high school who was preparing to take over my job at Stanford last year before passing away unexpectedly while whitewater rafting in Peru over spring break. Time is a strange beast, and it feels like the most precious thing in the world. We squander it.

After lunch, I went home to squander a bit more time before heading over to Paul's for a quiet dinner around 7 p.m. Did I mention how my life is a long sequence of eating delicious food? If you haven't noticed already, my life amounts to 40% eating, 30% class, 10% blogging, and 20% studying. I rarely talk about medicine because (a) I'm not studying and (b) it's boring to talk about studying.

We had a delicious dinner right after watching the sunset over the buildings of San Francisco. Albert, a sunset watching enthusiast (especially from the nerdy vantage point of the library), likes to say, "They don't call our neighborhood 'Inner Sunset' for nothing." Watching the sun go down reminded me that another day has gone by, and then I remembered how beautiful the sunset was yesterday over the Pacific Ocean...and how there is a certain special quality to seeing the sun go down over a salt water horizon without any man-made buildings in the way. An unadulterated sunset. Those kind of moments stick with you for a long time.