Day One (The Best Convention On EARTH, The 34-Minute Mile, and other odds and ends)

The world is a vampire, set to drain

Intermittent sleep. My body just refused the quick switchover and mass reduction of time; I woke up three times during the night which hasn't happened since the nightmares were more rooted in reality and not things with fangs and drooling with neon eyes. Alarm was set for 4:10 but I beat it by 20 minutes and just toughed it out. Two glasses of orange juice and a bagel, out at 4:30.

Not only is there a 4:30 in the morning now but to quote Raymond Chandler it's darker than a carload full of assholes. It's very odd and spooky and plays into every paranoid fantasy fueled since childhood by Freddy Kruger and his ilk. All lights, maybe 5 people, maybe 10 cars. Good things about taking the first bus of the day, even if it is S(tanding)R(oom)O(nly): it's on time, you're not alone. And the stops aren't too many. Mass exodus at the trolley stop between me and all the Tijuanians (?) coming over to do their various service jobs.

35 minutes later I was at work.

Chaos shortly ensued. Some sort of heat-functioning device went awry and the alarms were going off for about an hour. Nutty. About two hours in, after five minutes of quasi-training I ended up being a doorman for an hour to spell a guy. You've seen doormen by this point in your lives, you know what they do. It was for the employees during the main portion of work rush hour but surprisingly I didn't get a lot of employees. I spent a lot of time with a small smile and looking vigilant, however, which is most of the work when people aren't around.

Then for a while I got lured into church sleep. Church sleep is when you try to cram in every amount of sleep you've missed in two second shots before a) someone sees you and 2) your head snaps all the way back, waking you back up. 3 hours of sleep'll do that to you. Fortunately something happened that kept me awake. And it wasn't being acclimated to all my new jobs. (3.5)

One of the two main conventions going on right now is for bars. Just bars. As I was being given a tour of the facility, I walked into the bar convention in order to get to something else. Or as a reward. Can't remember, too tired. Anyways. The bar convention is like a Maxim party. Nothing but hot babes, enough booze to make Ted Kennedy squeal like a little girl, and a few pool tables because pool and booze and babes are so awesome. Made a slow, decisive sweep of the floor twice because power corrupts but absolute power's f'n sweet.

Lunch, I got lost and wandered the building.

After lunch the orientation for the day finished but I still needed to ride out my shift. So in order to acclimate me to the radio/kill time I got to wander the building AGAIN.

Boring yet PAINFUL fun fact: With the new renovations, the SDCC is half a mile long. OW. And it was painful too, like from room 1 to room 30 to room 7 to room 25 or something like that. Ye gods, if I'd known that was coming I would've spent lunch trying to break back into the bar convention. As it was, I pulled off the aforementioned 34-Minute Mile. Then for the remaining hour I helped shadow public safety via being a traffic cop on the outside. Nice day. LONG. $70 down.

Of course I missed all 3 of the connections I needed to get home, but that's the sort of brick in the wall I've gotten used to that makes me want to say "Brothers and sisters! I don't know what this world is coming to!" but well, what the hell don't? And now to see if I can keep awake the next 5 hours so I can save the sleep for when I need it.

I don't wanna try to anymore...