The Onward Spiral

"Submissive To Only One Wolf"

2010-05-03T19:14:00.000-07:00

Just finished reading the whole of the Best of Jack London. Thoroughly inspired by animal nature.

Secret Garden

2010-03-31T21:42:00.001-07:00

I've been watching these flowers struggle to emerge lately. Some deep chills swept through, but it didn't get so cold that the ground froze. Today was a beautiful, warm day - warm enough to coax a wash of blooms. The grass is starting to peak out too.

The first flowers of spring

2010-03-07T16:11:00.000-08:00

Kelly and I raked through the topsoil of the garden in the back and cleared out the winter's dead leaves. We scattered wildflower seeds that were like powder in our hands into the dirt and loosely raked more dirt on top of those. Kelly planted some in the containers that lined the fence. I untangled the hose and got my upstairs neighbor to turn on the water to the outside so we could soak it all. I found a bag of grass seed and rolled some of that around in the dirt. It's not a huge space, but our backyard garden has several great trees, including one Catalpa and a couple of types of birches. There is one spiral growing tree that I'm not sure about - I'll get back to you on this when I get my dad over to id it for me. With the grass and the wildflowers, it will one day be a perfect spot to read and nap in the sun amongst the butterflies, or to drink coffee and listen to music in the mornings.

Someone who lived here before us had the same instinct, and while we worked we enjoyed the first heralds of spring. These were the first flowers that grew this year, and I have a feeling that they portent much greater blooms that lie in store for the future.

I found this birdfeeder under a pile of old twigs and leaves on the back fence. My backyard has been described as a "Sanford and Son" mess of junk, but to me it's space full of funny surprises everywhere I turn.

Cold Snap

2010-01-08T13:27:00.000-08:00

My week from hell began last Friday with a few phone calls from an unknown (866) number. "I'm not answering this shit," I thought to myself and rolled myself tighter into the blanket, crawling my way out of a whiskey hangover in the dark. It was an unfortunate hangover in that it was coupled with insomnia, so I was aware of every gradient of suffering along the way into the pit of despair that I had dropped into by noon New Years day.

By Saturday evening I was in better spirits as I went through paperwork, getting ready for the year. I navigated through my student account online for a moment before a red alarm flashed in the center of the screen. "HOLD" it said.

WTF?

I clicked in the hold and in short order I discovered that this account was suspended, and the reason for this is that I needed to update my immunization records in order to proceed any further.

I scanned through and realized that while I had a mostly current record of shots, I was sort of due for the tetanus one as it had been over 10 years. #Areyouserious?

So then I was gathering information on health clinics to call first thing on Monday to get these shots, and on the phone with Walgreens, when I found out about the false charges on my bank card. My stomach tightened. My wallet was missing. I mentally indexed the things I'd need to replace. I called the bank and they said they'd just freeze my whole checking account until things got sorted.

Another sleepless night followed, this time with a menacing tickle in the back of my throat that coughed me awake after I would doze off for a short minute.

On Monday I waited for 3 hours in the health clinic. It was a day that registered 7 degrees Fahrenheit. a -20 degree windchill. The weather reports screamed of warnings and severe weather, and warned of an extended 14 day period of Arctic conditions. "No End In Sight!" read the headlines in articles about the weather. Meteorologists across the board were unanimous in their forecast of sub-zero weather for at least the next couple of weeks, during which it would snow during a few sever weather storms.

One good break was that being a filipino in a hospital or a health care center works in your favor when a lot of the staff is filipino or asian too. A very nice nurse who was acting like an auntie to me helped me as much as she could. She didn't ask me for an id, which had worried me since I realized that I didn't even have a wallet!

I raced over to school with two very sore arms - I need to mention how much I loathe shots from the deepest core of my being - and presented my doctor's note to the office. I was just finished telling the girl at the desk about how I couldn't feel anything below my elbows. "Yikes," she said, "well, unfortunately I am actually going to need one more record before I can take off this hold."

"But you already have that record!!!" I protested, holding down the volume of my voice as much as I could muster, sweating underneath my winter coat and scarf.

"Yeah, no, I am sorry, we just need to update all of the records especially after our offices moved, Ill. state law requires us to have this..."

I raced to my parent's house and dug through their filing cabinet while filing a police report and getting into an argument with a police woman about whether I was giving her attitude, or telling her how to do her job. I typed up a letter disputing the false charges on my bank card to fax to the bank.

The next morning I raced to school, got the hold lifted and straightened things out at the bank. I was looking over my schedule of classes to find that during the academic hold, while I had been running around town taking care of paperwork, one of my classes had been filled. I fired off an email to the professor, who is also my academic advisor asking about a waitlist. She got got back to me fast to tell me, nope, this class is full. At least it is going to be offered next quarter. At this point every other word out of my mouth is a new and creative cuss word.

I shuffled my schedule around again and worked everything out. I went to class, and then I went in the id office to get my cta pass. "Since you didn't finish registering until this week, you can't pick it up until next week." Ok, onto the library.

"To give you your library card back, I'm going to need to see at least one more piece of identification and a letter with your current address," said the librarian.

"You have got to be fucking kidding me." I didn't hold back that time.

I was walking the half mile home in the snowstorm, feet freezing in the drifts on the sidewalk with tears welling in my eyes beneath my black fur lined hood feeling sorry for myself, when I reached to adjust my hat. As my thumb brushed up my hair, I noticed that the diamond stud on my right ear was missing, although my other earring was still in my left ear. #FML

The story goes on. Things get resolved with the library, and I found my earring underneath my pillowcase. But not until after venting my despair at my brother, who quickly gathered his things and skedaddled when I told him I was about to kill someone and I liked him too much for it to be him. I went over to Kelly Hyatt's house, and over coffee we talked shit until we could laugh about what a shitty week I'd been having.

Later on she took me to her friend's house in Pilsen. He had flown back from NYC that morning after having an equally shitty time driving there. I realized that this mayhem and craziness is happening to everyone and am finally starting to chill the eff out. Things can only get better!

"The day's events had prepared him for the unknown to manifest itself in the most stupendous and unthinkable ways." - Jack London

2010-01-01T22:39:00.000-08:00

Brought in the new year by reading White Fang. Glad to start things off with the study of lone wolf nature and the laws of the wild.

Cawfee tawk

2009-12-31T15:06:00.000-08:00

BL: ... so I figured we should all get back into fighting form, it being a new decade and all.

RA: I think I should start doing some martial arts training.

BL: Maybe you should

RA: Ok, I shouldn't do too much grappling though, my stomach muscles are pretty tender these days...

Me: Maybe don't mention that to your classmates in fighting on the first day, how about waiting until the 4th or 5th class so they don't just start whaling on you from day one?

Ramon is dangling his arms onto the floor, despairing with his forehead to a stool.

RC: I don't feel like doing anything. I don't care anymore. This is how I prefer existence sometimes, like yeah my heads down.

BL: Uh, could you guys run out and get us some more sage? We burnt the rest of that bundle up after you started playing with a ouija board and tarot cards in the house. Also when we burned that necronomicon we found in the laundry room. So we're going to need some to smudge the rest of this year outta here. Especially if you keep talking like this.

RC: I can't move. Andrea wants her private time, she wants the space to herself tonight.

Brenda Lee wistfully imagines the concept of private time, and having her own space. She resolves to at least start the new year and decade with fresh beats and phenomenal music.

Brothers continue to mope around and sigh.

Jeanne enters.

JNM: I woke up next door to the Playboy mansion! Ohmagawd! And I lost my phone!!

Friendship and Zucchini Bread

2009-12-31T01:35:00.000-08:00

At the end of a long stretch of holiday engagements, social obligations and drinking binges, my friend Jen and I caught up with each other for a couple of days during her visit to Chicago this Christmas. The last thing we wanted to do was hit up our neighborhood hipster bars and go out drinking - she was still recovering from an epic Christmas hangover, and I was in no better shape from a whiskey fueled high school reunion over the weekend. Time for us to detox a little and take it easy.

Chicago has been locked in an arctic freeze and covered with snow since last week, so it was pretty clear that we weren't going to skateboard downtown or go on a long bike ride. We've always bonded over food, so I figured the best way to spend our short amount of time together would be to come in from the cold and hang out in my kitchen in our socks around a warm oven. Between the busyness of our past couple of weeks, we planned our intense baking session.

Jen's vegan, and has been influencing my eating habits for the better in the many years that I've known her. We'd feed ourselves between extreme adventures on wheels, and I learned how to transit out of a thoughtless processed food lifestyle with fresher and more natural alternatives. Introducing good healthy food into your diet reaps exponential benefits for your life all around. We work hard and play hard physically - the ability to cycle dozens of miles every day, and skate a bowl for hours upon hours demands that you eat your vitamins.

In some sub-zero windy moments rushing around during the holidays, I daydreamed about this zucchini bread we would be baking. It would be savory enough to keep it from becoming just another annoyingly cloying pastry. The delicate flavor of the squash would bake so nicely and keep the bread moist, while the cinnamon and nutmeg would make my house glow with the smell of spices. I'd cut it into slices and toast them, and offset the warm chewiness of the zucchini bread with a drizzle of almond butter. Yum!

Jen came over and set up her music player to trade music with me while we prepped and got the ingredients in place for our project. We caught up on each other's states of minds, as we've done many times during our hangout sessions throughout the years - from cabin rooftops in Colorado where we splayed out in a valley inhabited by a she-bear, to alleyway gardens in Lincoln Park in the summertime - we've shared so many exquisite brief pauses in the chaotic tornadoes of our everyday existences and treated ourselves to a few fine things that have made those moments even more delightful. This very thing is truly what these holidays are supposed to be about, and I felt so fortunate to have caught up with Jen before she headed back to Denver.

There is not a more wholesome and honest way to spend time with a friend. I believe that baking is a wildly creative endeavor, an alchemy of passion. We zoned out on the work it took to grate the zucchini and put love into mixing the sugar and the spices. Here is the recipe that we followed. It's made with applesauce and flaxseeds, and simple enough that we could put absolute care into every ingredient.

We triumphed in our efforts and swooned over the outcome, as we knew we would. The almond butter on toasted zucchini bread slices was as amazing as I imagined it would be, especially with some vanilla soymilk. Like many divine things that manifest into my life I finally understood that I had dreamt it to ensure it would become real, because it was going to be so fantastic.

Is this thing on???

2009-12-02T20:30:00.000-08:00

Demetrio, an old family friend, invited me onto his radio show at WHPK in Hyde Park after we traded a few stories earlier this year. His show, Chicago is the World, broadcasts on Tuesday and Thursday evenings at 5PM CST and can be listened to on the internet at WHPK's stream.

As filipinos born in Chicago, we share similar perspectives on the experience of traveling back to our families in our parent's islands. They make for some humorous, poignant, and sometimes tragic moments, some of which I had the pleasure to share on the air yesterday.

I was so excited to visit this legendary radio station, and to be beckoned by the University of Chicago's gothic archways for the second time in a month. The history of hip hop and house music in Chicago evolved in that studio. Generations of underage backpackers found new beats and styles the old school way, ears glued to boomboxes with raised antennas like a true music head.

A long time before music blogs and internet streams, access to the best recordings hiding in the niches of culture could only come from programming from stations. I always learned something new from listening to WHPK. So many rappers, djs, and musicians passed through there, and so much great music has been brought into the public ear through those broadcasts.

In a world in which the rest of the dial plays such trite, predictable and generic music that my ears weep, I find these microbroadcasts and small pockets of innovative and thoughtful programming to be a heroic effort. It is a sanctuary of brilliant cuts, a treasure chest full of jewels of songs, rare and excellent.

Through these decades of music, the station has accumulated a vast library of records. The station is a music lover's dream.

We discussed an issue close to my heart, the plight of migrant workers from the Philippines who leave the country to enter a world in which they often have no basic human rights. Demetrio played an amazing set of music, from Balkan beats to Colombian electro music. I can honestly say I had a phenomenal time during my visit to WHPK and was honored to have been invited, as I exited to an amazing dub set.

In Transit On Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T14:27:00.000-08:00

Union Station.

I've walked these halls so many times that I know the corners, secret alcoves and tiny spaces to duck into for a quiet moment out of the very public arena of the train station.

I'm in the Great Hall, filled with pillars and caryatids, once again... as well as crazy people surrounded by ticking irritation, hostility and shopping bags sprawled around filled with crazy stuff. It's Thanksgiving. The train station has a different vibe when the rest of downtown has shut down for the holidays and its filled with the chaos of travelers and a bare bones staff, and this is my favorite place to observe people.

Years ago when I worked in this building as a young girl manning the espresso machine alongside gangbangers and hoodrats, we spent a lot of time drinking coffee and standing around talking shit. I'd wander around the station during my breaks, smoking alongside the river and in hiding spaces throughout the underground walkways encountering all types of characters, some predatory and some friendly. Here is where I met my first martial arts teacher, a guide in my philosophic search for truth. I haven't spotted Douglas today, but he's here in spirit - I am remembering his silent and watchful way, an elderly former Black Panther with a kung fu pigtail and glasses, broom at his side. He observed me for some time, stepping my way around through the seas of people cluelessly but agile, before he began stopping by the coffee shop to share some much needed knowledge about life.

What is a more intense place for ninja training than a train station? He taught me wushu moves, punching techniques, throwing people, tai chi. In the end, it was just a bunch of fucking around on the job but in the process I learned some things that changed me for the better, and some fundamental wisdom that I have practiced ever since. This environment, the constant movement of strangers and the need to watch your back at all times made for a great microcosm to sharpen one's skills.

Walking through the station, I saw another student of the guy who asked me to call him sensei, the only familiar face amongst the workers of the station today. He used to laugh at us clowning around kung fu style, but I see by his demeanor that he's taken on the sort of reflectiveness that I learned here from Douglas. What else is there to do here than that? His name is Otis, I believe, and as I walked by I noticed his face - a little leaner from the years- spouting some truths to a coworker. It has been too long to have broken into their conversation and ask if he remembered me. It felt like too many lifetimes have passed between now and then. I did want to ask about Douglas, but I was also fine with just passing through invisibly.

There are ghosts here. Old time Chicago ghosts and the spirits of so many lives and dramas that have passed through the Great Hall on a stop at the busiest transportation hub in the country. Someone once told me that around 100,000 people travel through here on an average day, both locally and across states.

I trekked through here this morning with Kelly Maree, slugging our duffle bags and wellington boots through the cold puddles of the gray Chicago November day. We rushed to get her to the gate bound for Milwaukee to hang with Mikey and the rest of the Del Rosarios up there. I noticed the electronic schedule blinking that my next train would be in an hour, so I took a walk through the crowds of people draped across benches and chairs, and up to the river for some fresh air before coming down to the Great Hall for a good vantage point for watching people. Now I'm breathing in the feeling of solitude in this monumental ultimate waiting room. The overcast sky makes this moment feel like a dream, with light streaming through the skylight. The atmosphere is charged with the wet emotional rawness that I find typical of the holidays, people waiting to face their families, facing the realness.

I'm sitting here now reminiscing, lost in my memories, watching a bizarre looking gray bearded man watching me from across the enormous room. He's a little over 6 feet, long gray trench and khakis, holding his head intensely. he's unnerved by the fact that I am staring at him and scribbling in my notebook, but he does not look away. He has now moved behind a pillar, but he still sees me watching him.

I'm glad for these moments to be suspended in time and to linger in transition. So much has happened and I have traveled far from those days, and now the distances lie vast in the tracks that stretch before me here in this hub. Time seems to stretch in every direction here at Union Station, odd enough for a place that I've burst into many times, out of time, sweaty faced and missing my train. This hasn't happened in a long time - I think my timing has improved. But for this hour, I can think of no better thing than to have this waiting bench to reflect on these things and sit still to breathe. I know the clocks will tick on, and then I'll have to jump up again, ready to rush and catch my train so it can charge me ahead to the next place I'm going.

In front of these piles of commuters waiting, the gates to the trains twitched with artificial robot voices announcing the departures endlessly droning. Are they trying to hypnotize us? It felt like it. I was stoked when this guy pulled out his guitar and fought the electronic voices with music.

I got onto the train and we barreled through the distance.

Happy Thanksgiving! I'm grateful for time, these stolen moments amongst others. It's a good day to appreciate the many unbelievable and transcendent moments that I don't always have time to reflect upon before life charges me into a new scenario.

Nuclear Physics

2009-11-14T17:53:00.000-08:00

"Want to go see some mad scientists?," my friend asked on a recent warm autumn afternoon as we walked around Hyde Park.

"Why not? Hanging out with geniuses sounds like a great plan."

We asked what they are building, and the short answer is a detector, which will be used at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. It will be used to study double beta decay.

Paths of Knowledge

2009-11-14T17:24:00.000-08:00

I apologize because it's about to get really nerdy around here.

The Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago is one of the largest libraries in the world. Among its treasures are original manuscripts by William Blake and Alan Ginsburg in the phenomenal special collections.

This library's stacks open up like a labyrinth.

Lions

2009-11-14T17:19:00.000-08:00

The theme of my week was lions. I kept running into pairs of them all around Chicago. Strangely synchronistic.

The Tsavo Lions at the Field Museum, killers of 140 men.

These were on a stoop in Hyde Park.

This one is one of two in front of the Art Institute.

Undefeated Lady Horse

2009-11-08T13:37:00.000-08:00

Cosmic Debris

2009-11-07T09:01:00.001-08:00

The leaves on the trees around the city of Chicago are ripening from their red and orange hue that you saw in the pictures from the previous post, and are amassing in piles around the ground and sidewalks. For the first time in my life, I am entering this season with less of my usual resentment at the weather turning colder and with more of a true appreciation for the cycle of life that we experience through nature.

I was talking with my brother's friend about walking around our streets during this time of the year, surrounded by the decaying leaves. "Death surrounds us," she said, "I step on the leaves and feel the dead energy." What she said caught my ear and sparked some thoughts. I told her about the pagan beliefs of the ancient Celts, who celebrated the feast of Samhain to mark the end of the harvest season. This is said to be a time in which the boundaries between the living and dead are blurred and made indistinct, when the fresh green life that abounded during the summer slows down and becomes dormant. For the past week, I've been musing upon this subject as I face the march of time and change in to winter. We turned our clocks back, giving me the great gift of an extra hour but also taking away a few more precious moments of sunlight at the end of the day. I feel myself gearing up to buckle down for the winter and get absorbed with work, books and films.

All the cooking I have been doing during the past few months as I have experimented in the kitchen have left me feeling the need to clear out my own body of a bunch of dead things. A majority of my girlfriends are vegetarians and have swept me up into their lifestyle of eating fresh fruits and vegetables. I have finally joined their bandwagon of trying to put mostly good things into my body after a prolonged season of very decadent living. I have learned that times of indulgence must be balanced by periods of austerity - and with this thought I began a mostly raw food fast last week and have been avoiding putting animal products into my body.

Kelly Hyatt called me up over the weekend to invite me to do yoga with her at a new yoga studio in our neighborhood. I had been hoping for the chance to get back into practicing yoga after skating and bicycling pretty hard in the past few months, so I jumped at the opportunity. In the past week, I've practiced yoga every day and have felt my body become more efficient and tuned as a result. Coupled with the vegan fast, I feel my organs, blood vessels, skin and body system adjusting to a healthier metabolism. I had been feeling the effects of getting older by noticing that I no longer bounce back from my skatepark wounds and bruises as quickly as I had in the past, with just a good night of sleep to heal me up. It has been taking me longer to physically recover from skateboarding and I had been feeling as though my energy was slowing down and becoming sluggish. There was once a time when I felt like a superhero, able to withstand an extreme athletic lifestyle, on fire about everything. I want to set my body up to get back into that kind of shape.

I've been told that the best times for fasting are during the shifts in the weather, to prepare one's body to enter or exit the dormancy of winter. I have found that this has been my own instinct, and now have a better understanding of why I have this impulse as it connects to larger patterns in life and in nature.

***

I also wanted to remind us/myself of the upcoming Leonids meteor shower on November 17 and 18. We enjoyed the Perseid meteor shower on a few outstanding nights this past summer. A meteor storm is defined as 1000 meteors or more passing through the path of the earth. I had a great conversation during the meteor event in August about the shape of the moon changing perhaps by the pummeling that it takes from these clouds of cosmic debris.

L'automne

2009-10-25T18:55:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I came home to this loveliness. I don't remember the leaves ever being colors as vivid as these!

Photos courtesy of my dad's flickr account.

Nice flyer, chicas!

2009-10-18T13:56:00.000-07:00

...that drawing looks like my life.

If you happen to be in Denver at the end of the month, make some noise for the lady racers!! Look for my friend Jen aka the Hurricane, of the Bicycle Film Festival.

Beirut - Nantes

2009-10-07T21:23:00.001-07:00

Biking on Lake Michigan

2009-10-01T23:19:00.000-07:00

Jeanne fixed up that red Schwinn from her childhood and joined me on a manic run down the lakefront on a perfect day. She couldn't resist the camera of course.

photo by Tim Chiou

Kid Koala, Moon River

2009-09-24T22:03:00.000-07:00

Sunday Reggae

2009-09-13T12:04:00.000-07:00

From the day I knew myself, I've been a drifter...

The Full Moon of September

2009-09-07T21:02:00.000-07:00

The ninth month, the month of the Muses. My brothers took me to a full moon party drum circle on the beach, and those lunatics found ways to make me laugh all the way home.

What's he doing back there?!?!

Song to the Siren

2009-09-02T22:35:00.000-07:00

Sung by John Frusciante, written by Tim Buckley

A Monarch

2009-08-28T16:20:00.000-07:00

Under a Ceiling Fan

2009-06-10T00:49:00.000-07:00

After watching the third and last installment of Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai Trilogy, I sat in silence musing upon the fact that during the entire film, the swordsman never drew his sword except during an ambush battle. The ceiling fans were whirring and I shut the windows and turned off all but one light. A strange, low buzzing bleared through my ear.

I knew that sound.

The lamp lit the corner of the ceiling and I noticed a zipping, flitting movement. I tried not to react as I observed it, kept my breathing steady and relaxed my muscles. Motherfucking mosquitoes are here. We have a duel scheduled right this moment.

I fought my emotions as my mind flashed back to the terrible time a year ago, when I was laid up with a fever in the back of a diesel truck traveling two hours north on an island in the Philippines. I thought I was going to die in a strange room, within concrete walls and unfamiliar sheets under a ceiling fan keeping an anxious beat, in front of a faded picture of a weeping Jesus. My sweat was running into my eyes and through my hair. I heard whispers of "You think its the dengue?!? I heard you can only get that from the green mosquitoes in the morning..." being spoken in Visayan in the room just outside my door, and wondered if I was just dreaming as my kidneys screamed and writhed in pain. Just two mornings before that, I had been at the top of my health. I emerged from swimming laps in a pool in the mountains of Cebu City and was drying off when I was bitten.

I got over my fever, but not after vowing to destroy any mosquito who crosses my path in the future. My mind flashed back to another time, many years ago. It was a particularly rainy summer, and my window screen had a crack in it. At night, they would sense exactly where I was and would just zoom straight through and feast upon my blood with wild abandon, as I would thrash and scratch in utter torment. I had already been suffering from insomnia from being bit by mosquitoes all summer, one early morning when I heard that familiar buzzing careen past my head. I had to get up early the next day, so every moment that I stood staring at the dim lit walls left me sweating with increasing anger. "Die, Mosquito! Die!!"

It was a lost cause. I was defeated by the fact that my room was so messy that there were way too many places for a clever mosquito to hide. She taunted me when I tried to ignore her. There may have been more than one - I wasn't sure. As the long hours of the morning wore on during that battle, I was certain I began hallucinating. I didn't actually get any sleep that night, and counted 13 new mosquito bites the next horrible morning.

"You are not winning this one", I told the mosquito hopping predatorially around the corner of my room. "You have no idea what's in store for you, trying to come in here looking to bite me. You are a dead mosquito."

Across the air I lept over the cushions. I noticed a spider web and took a break to dust the ceiling. The mosquito hovered just beyond my reach in the lamplight.

I had a paper towel in my hand from dusting down those hard to reach shelves and I noticed it moving when my the light got blocked by my arm. It was getting chased by my shadow! They hate the dark!! I guided it closer to where I could leap. I didn't want my roommate to wake up so I decided to keep it absolutely soundless. I snatched the mosquito out of the air, opened the paper towel in my hand and saw it's smashed remains.

I flushed it down the toilet and came back to find another smaller mosquito bobbing around. This one I smashed with my foot against the wall, as slowly as I could get away with.

Scratching

2009-05-13T10:25:00.000-07:00

Kelly just showed me this clip of Mike Realm video scratching along with the sounds; he has some pretty sick skills:

True story!

2009-04-10T16:30:00.000-07:00

I had to change the homepages of my browsers to something less controversial. All winter long, I'd began each day with electric jolts of agony as the news sites that I had them set to bleated the bleakest news about the state of the world I lived in.

Millions of jobs lost across all sectors of the economy!!!

Trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars lost - evaporated! - or stolen - or devalued

freefalling!

with no end in sight

at least for several years!

I don't want to get into the specifics but the term hemmorhaging money paints the picture and psychically I felt like I was dying. Especially when I had these news items burned onto my retinas first thing in the morning before I even had time to eat a banana. A case of writers block developed as I focused all my writing energy into pitching myself to jobs that I never heard back from. I became a creative letter writer, and for the most part nothing worked from every angle.

Almost 40 days ago now things began to change with the season. Today is Good Friday, and I just realized the whole timing factor. It was at the end of Ash Wednesday that I quit smoking tobacco and boarded a plane bound for San Juan with my roommate after staying up all night. One of my best friends was getting married, and Ranee and I were meeting up with about six of our girlfriends down in the Caribbean to help properly usher in this fantastic new development in her life.

I packed a blunt as we packed our bags, intending to get the two of us healthily mind froze as we took a 3AM train to the airport but she rightly thought it would be a terribly dumb idea before checking into the airport, so I had to smoke the whole thing myself. I put my hood and sunglasses on and tried to be inconspicuous and when we made it through to our gate I passed out with my headphones on. The guy checking tickets called me out from my bleary looking eyes and told me to check out the dinosaurs in the airport. Leaving Chicago I was just completely numb, pale and zombied.

What can I say- it had been a long terrible winter.

After my time in Puerto Rico, standing up for one of my closest friends as a tribute to beautiful people to undying love, my outlook on life changed. I spent my first day there getting thrashed by the ocean. That island has some sick waves! Just standing up was hard - the water was so powerful and I was so small against it. Every time I stood up I got knocked on my ass. Two minutes after wading knee deep into the water I found myself face smashed against the sand, my sunglasses gone forever. Every time I get into the ocean she always takes something from me. Once it was my shorts, another time it was my shoes, two t-shirts a different time, my bracelets... I'm not counting though, because the ocean always gives me so much more back.

As I found myself getting thrashed by the sea in Condado, San Juan I was moved to tears with joy. What a strange situation for my life to have gotten into - there in the water I felt a familiar feeling of having been compelled to the shores of a beach, getting bathed in the salt water of the ocean sea. Water I could effortlessly float in with the sun melting onto my skin.

As a transplanted tropical person, being 100% islander biologically and born and raised in the most inland city you could get in N. American, it rouses the deepest primal instincts to be on the beach and in the water. My hair suddenly gets curly from being bone straight, my skin gets soft and loses the dry unbalanced texture it gets in the winter and springs to life like a fish changing colors in the humid air. I feel like my most natural self, and that the ocean likes for me to be playing in her and occasionally summons be through strange trips. It was not the first time I found myself deliriously frolicking in the water for hours, wondering how I even got there.

I had read a Kurt Vonnegut quote a few weeks before I got there: "Strange travel suggestions are like dancing lessons from God." I giggled over this as I floated on my back and felt the anxiety that had stopped my mental gears from turning float away like rust getting rinsed by a powerful solvent as the waves sent me tumbling and I had to keep getting back up.

We were staying at a resort that was also being visited by some famous NFL football players who were all set up in a huge posse at the side of the beach. They gawked at me diving headfirst into waves and letting them carry me super fast up the shore, as they tentatively toed the sand ankle deep, I observed from far away. They never got further in than that because the force of the water was banging.

The night before I left the island, I found myself strolling a street called the Paseo De La Princesas with my beautiful new friend Lana, as she explained the law of attraction to me. We laughed about how I had visioned some bogus things that wound up coming true prior to the trip, and I was convinced I should start thinking about the kinds of ways I use my mental energy. I was even more convinced when several people that were unconnected to each other also mentioned the same arcane principles in the course of the next few days - including a cop from Jersey who sat next to me on the airplane home. Spooky!

We walked along a wall that was built to protect the city of San Juan from the pirates and freebooters from marauding the town, because they were a major problem for the city. They must have raided it pretty hard, because that wall was solid and fitted with some serious looking cannons. You can tell how strong the offense must have been by the size of the defense. As a local pervert frustratedly escorted Lana and I through the city gates as an increasingly sullen tour guide as it became clear that we weren't going to take up his offer of letting us stay at his house, I breezed through the streets and felt the weight of the remnants of those times and wondered why I have always been drawn to the territory of these pirates - like the time I found myself swimming in the precariously jagged caves of the Baths in Virgin Gorda, where their single masted sloops hid as they scouted for booty. One day will it all make sense? I pictured Old San Juan lit by torchlights, shot at by cannons on square rigger ships, the gates finally bashed in by those relentless motherfuckers.

Isla de Encanta, indeed.

Winter has arrived

2008-12-26T12:19:00.000-08:00

The snow was coming down heavy and steadily a few days ago when I split up from my friends at Union Station and rode the train out of town. There was a weather alert across the country for the winter storm that was passing, which explained the hundreds of people covering almost every inch across the great marble expanse of the Great Hall, splayed out and camped with their luggage trying to get home for the holidays.

I stepped my way through all the travelers after my roommate and I jumped out of the taxi and dashed onto my train with minutes to spare. I put my hood up and my headphones on and left the city. The drive to my family's house was through the rapidly falling snow, which had followed a couple of days of subzero temperatures. The snow was so thick on the ground when I arrived, that I wished I had brought my snowpants and gloves so that I could go and roll around in it.

My dad pointed out a bird to me in the corner by the edge of the woods, a larger bird about the size of my hand and forearm. I caught it landing and we watched it with its head down, poking at the ground with its beak.

"That's a Kestrel. I'm thinking about making a nest for it."

"What do you make a Kestrel's nest out of anyways?" I wondered out loud.

"A box. Where it can lay eggs."

I envisioned that, and watched the bird lift off after a minute and spread its tail like a fan as it shot upward. It had distinct white markings spread across the tail when it fully flared.

And today I've been watching a fawn. On the drive from the train station, we saw a small herd of deer hanging out in the front lawn of someone's house. This is where they go when they are chilling. This one has been standing at the edge of the woods, in the same place where I saw the falcon. There is a runoff of water from where it drains from uphill there, and it seems to be the spot where animals like to gather. I had my camera close by and got a quick snapshot. An hour later I went back to the window and she was still there, joined by another.

The weather warmed up and the massive piles of snow that have accumulated all over the house have been collapsing like bombs as they slide off one part of the roof to another. Anything above freezing here outside of Chicago feels almost balmy. The sound of the water droplets from melting ice and the sight of icycles liquifying has set a rhythm to the day.

Croak!!!!

2008-11-27T13:34:00.000-08:00

My voice is croaky, because after a strangely silent and numb couple of months, the narrative stream of consciousness has returned between my ears. I am not sure how other writers find their words, but for me they come from a speaking voice that has always existed in my thoughts and I just write the words as they come along. When I was younger this voice was often at odds with my actual speech voice - I was shy and introverted and often couldn't get my thoughts to converge with the words coming out of my mouth, and so many years people assumed I was borderline autistic unless they happened to be a penpal. I was the master of the passed note in my school days; that's how I made friends.

Anyhow, the past few months have been like the end of V for Vendetta when the fireworks explode the parliament buildings all over town to Beethoven's 5th symphony. It was like a spectacular destruction of my life as I knew it and was comfortable with on many levels - professionally, romantically and domestically. I took solace in knowing that as things came up with me to figure out and work through in my life, the rest of the country and world was going through similar crises and transitions.

A global financial meltdown and new president later, we are piecing together a new plan for the future. I am glad that my soul is coming down from being stunned into shock so many times and my writing voice is returning - the other day I was walking with a dear old friend and found myself fumbling for the pen I had kept handy for that moment, when my thoughts returned.

What makes a human have ability to formulate intellectual ideas above those in a more primal survival mode is being able to clear your mind enough to let those thoughts rise, I suppose. I knew that I was in a transition phase during the past few months, and gripped my mental cap nervously as I assured myself that the silence in my head would pass when I could finally stop freaking out.

So on this Thanksgiving I would like to check in and apologize to this neglected project for my inability to croak out anything positive or good to hear the past few months. I would like to express my thanks to my brain for snapping out of the shock, and my gratitude at being a little older now and having the perspective to know how my creative cycles work - as opposed to dramatically perching on a bridge assuming my soul was dead forever. I have been musing upon cycles in general - as this may be a time of downswing in my life and in my world, there will be a future for which we should focus on positioning ourselves for. Can't wait to see what happens.

Grant Park Victory Rally

2008-11-05T12:17:00.000-08:00

Election Night 2008

2008-11-05T11:17:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of moving forward, the United States elected Barack Obama as the President of the Untied States of America. This ended a very long process - years of the primary race within the Democratic and Republican parties and a very condensed past few months of heavy campaigning by both parties. I believe the whole country must be relieved that we have finally come to a conclusion.

I watched John McCain's concession speech from the counter of our local pizza spot, as the camera flashed to glimpses of the Obama rally taking place downtown at Grant Park. As he gracefully stepped aside in the race for the presidency, it became more and more apparently to the jubilant crowd in Chicago that it's hope for change was not quite as audacious as it had been in previous election years.

An image gently weeping Jesse Jackson marked the remarkable and historic shift in social and political possibilities. As I crossed the intersection of Congress and Michigan Ave. after jumping on the train to head to the rally, this thought occurred to me again when I realized that I had crossed the site of the riots of 1968 during the Democratic National Convention, 40 years ago. how the world seems to have changed. I heard the crowd roaring when I stepped out of the subway a few blocks away at jackson and Wabash, and knew the victory speech had begun.

The crowd in Grant Park was elated, full of smiles at random strangers, exchanges of hugs and high fives. No one was more enthused and proud than the city's African American population who represented themselves, bearing signs proclaiming "Yes, we did!"

2008-10-23T11:13:00.000-07:00

This was not a dream.

2008-09-21T19:51:00.000-07:00

Tonight I stepped outside for some phone reception, when I heard the lilting sounds of horns trailing off into the distance. I finished up my call and was about to step back inside when the chords rose, lifting into a progession and the sounds wrapped themselves around my heart. I paused for a minute, then wandered in the general direction of the music.

I couldn't figure out where it was coming from, so I wandered the blocks and ran into people walking their dogs and chatting on the phone, all with their heads up, wondering where the music was coming from. Then a quick light beat kicked in and gave the horns a platform, completing the song. I wondered what I would do when and if I ever got close to where the music was coming from - knock on the door and ask what track it was?

Hypnotized and mesmerized by the sounds, I thought how silly it was that I was wandering around in slippers with my front door slightly open, abandoned, searching for that perfect sound. It was like a perfume lover catching a stray note on a stranger's fragrance, a mark of beauty that was so compelling that I was powerless against it.

I finally decided that it must be coming from a rooftop on Milwaukee Ave. and stopped on the curb to let the melody imprint onto my brain.

This week has been as volatile in my life as the financial markets have been in the news, but with staggering heights to match the bottoming lows. I feel a change coming in the air as nature prepares to shift into a new season, and I feel geared up and ready, weary of a long hot season that began for me 7 months ago when I got on the plane to the Philippines and shed my winter coat. I never thought that I would be stoked out for the cold weather, but right now I am looking forward for the shift into news things all around and can feel those changes at work already.

Post-birthday Spiral

2008-09-12T12:32:00.000-07:00

I hate to admit it, but ever since my birthday life has been charging forward like a barreling train, in which I have been lounging louchely in the party car. This past week I have gone to sleep (or passed out, exhausted) with dancebeats more times than not, my muscles pummeled by soundwaves from speakers. It sets the soundstage for my dreams, which are larger and livelier than ever.

I don't live like this all the time, and this kind of energy is actually typical for me around this time of the year so I know to enjoy these fun times for what they are. My birthday occurs during a season of change, which always makes me reflective. Recent events have brought a unique tinge to this particular year, which have led me to spend this time reflecting on previously unconsidered meanings of the idea of freedom.

***

This weekend my friend Jenny is getting married. I have known her since we were little girls playing on the swings in the park, from so far back that I remember when she lost her baby teeth.

It will be an honor to read this at the ceremony tomorrow, as it has been such a beautiful thing to read all week for me:

Strive eagerly for the greatest spiritual gifts.

But I shall show you a still more excellent way.

If I speak in human and angelic tongues
but do not have love,
I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal.
And if I have the gift of prophecy
and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge;
if I have all faith so as to move mountains,
but do not have love, I am nothing.
If I give away everything I own,
and if I hand my body over so that I may boast
but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind.
It is not jealous, is not pompous,
it is not inflated, it is not rude,
it does not seek its own interests,
it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over
injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing
but rejoices with the truth.
It bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things

Love never fails.

Obama DNC Acceptance Speech

2008-08-28T19:54:00.000-07:00

Moving rhetoric at the DNC.

I consider this the first presidential election to accurately represent my generation, having grown up in a community outside of Chicago, where my classmates and I were of the first of many different ethnicities to represent our cultures in largely white communities. It was an undeniably historic moment to watch him break through the historically untouched demographic of the power structure of our country and step into the role as a presidential candidate. "I know I don't fit the profile..." - I know how he feels.

I'm not for Obama because of his race, just as I was not for Hillary Clinton because she is a woman. I am for him because he is a critical thinker with principles derived from an unusual upbringing, and a tough but peaceful nature. My opinion doesn't matter really - I'm from Illinois and he's got us in the bag.

He evoked Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. towards the rousing end of his speech, which was what I was watching for. It is a pleasure to listen to an excellent orator.

And some of his last remarks were fitting for the theme of spiralling onward, and moving forward:

"We could have heard words of anger and discord,
told to succumb to the fear and frustrations,
but to people of every creed and color
Our destiny is inextricably linked
we cannot walk alone, we shall always march ahead
we cannot turn back
not with so much work to be done

We must pledge... to march into the future."

BMXes around town

2008-08-21T19:46:00.000-07:00

I went over to Mikey's house to listen to music and watch tv, and wound up being around when he got his new bike! He found an aluminum bmx that was rode once before getting stored for a couple of years. We put in new tires and tubes, replaced the seat and put a chain tensioner on the dropout of the back wheel. Stoked!

True to form, Mikey will be customizing this ride to his exact specs. It's getting a new blinged out chain, some pegs and some sweet handlebars. This is the sort of guy who matches his shoes to his moped!

Hanging with Mikey is fun because we invariably feel like little kids who've been let loose in the city. The fridge is always empty except for grape juice, red bull and ice cream. Every time I've hung out at his house over the years, he's always used his small kitchen floor as a mechanic bench and once had all eight of his mopeds squeezed in there. This night, he was switching hard drives on his computers and had like 3 macbooks in different pieces as well, so there were a bunch of different specialized toolboxes strewn about. We sat on the floor and worked on bikes.

Sorry for the lame picture - my camera is still broken from the time I sat on it in a club.

There is something to be said for riding in an upright, laid back position. It's quite a nice change from the crouched over racing form that I am usually in when I am on a bike. Riding BMX style means that you can observe the street from a less vulnerable position and get around looking effortless, like its no sweat. All of the 12 year old boys on our block are envying Mikey's bike; I could tell when they gave us a stare down when I rode the pegs down the sidewalk.

Mikey's friend Britton got a BMX the next week. He replaced the brake and has plans for a new drive train, tires, handlebars. He doesn't care because he got the bike for like $40.

He's got the same rims as my friend Jeremy, who loaned me his bike when I visited Denver. It was the best way to get around, and I am so glad to have had the chance to be so stylish when I was there. I couldn't be around all this bike customizing without referring to this sweet ride:

Now that our old roommate finally picked up her cruiser from our back porch, I'm considering a new bike; its probably going to be something laid back and solid.

Ashes to Ashes

2008-08-21T17:21:00.000-07:00

This morning I woke up in the woods, listening to the wildlife clicks and buzzing of the early morning face down on my pillow in a pool of drool. I pretended to sleep for an extra ten minutes so I could listen to the nature sounds and think my day through before pulling myself away off of the blanket.

We made coffee by boiling water in the kettle after using the last of the wood chips to make a fire. Everything was damp in the morning coolness. My soundtrack for this camping trip was the soundtrack to Imagine, the biography of John Lennon. I thought of the 9 bundles of firewood that we had burned through, remembering how heavy they were to carry and how as individual units they were almost as expensive as a gallon of gas. In that case our little excursion cost about half a tank. The oldest fuel, as much as commodity now as it has been from the beginning of time.

I stared at the hexagonal ash pit, into which disappeared all those logs, feeding a raging fire that warmed and nourished us. It was the focal point and center of our world for a short while, acting as our hearth, keeping away the raccoons and warming my feet through a dark night. When we arrived, the pit was still hot from the last time it had been used in a fire hours before, and there were old logs of white pulverized powder that crumbled apart when I hit them with a stick.

The ashes were a white shadow of their former form, light enough to disintegrate upon touch. The raging and spirited flames that swallowed all those logs extracted the energy to feed its strength, transforming all that wood into dust.

Jen and Brian tended the fire in a cooperative effort. They made a great team and were excellent at keeping the fire alive, stoked and raging. They'll be married 3 years this September and it was such a lovely thing to see the easy combination of their efforts in mesmerized concentration, sustaining the heat, feeding the flames, fanning them. Giving us insight on the concept of unified energy control.

As I stirred the ashes and watched the dormant buried heat bubble through like a volcano, I wondered what the next part of the process is. That heat was so live! What is ash and how do things like phoenixes and whatnot rise from it?

I looked it up. Ash is comprised of varying levels of metal oxides and minerals depending on what kind of wood you were using to melt your smores and cook your bacon. Burning the wood decreases the wood to 6 - 10% of it's original mass. I was guessing way less than than. The tree that produces the wood extracted the minerals and elemental necessities from its environment (the earth, and the air) in order to grow. The most abundant mineral in trees and ash is calcium, followed by potassium, phosphorus, magnesium and even aluminum. Because of this, ash has been traditionally reused as an alkaline subsitute for lime. This dusty mess was once valued as a fertilizer, recycling the nutrients that were taken from the earth by the tree to plant new ones.

How appropriate that the wood releases its energy like the force of the sun - in a very simplified way when Jen and Brian created the intense beating flames, it was relinquishing that solar energy that the tree had absorbed in a controlled way, leaving behind only what is necessary for the new generation of trees.

A 200 pounder

2008-08-20T19:02:00.000-07:00

I was whisked away to Wisconsin before I had a chance to put my things down. My friends showed up on my doorstep and dragged me away - I wasn't even sure I even wanted to go camping and was secretly thinking up excuses to bow out. They weren't taking no for an answer though, and on the way up there I hugged my pillow and passed out with headphones on until we were in the next state.

When I woke up we were rolling into a campground lobby and I saw this guy:

200 lb. black bear

Georgian reporter gets shot, gets up, keeps on

2008-08-15T13:02:00.000-07:00

War reporter gets shot while filming, continues unfazed.

The Full Moon of August

2008-08-14T19:54:00.000-07:00

I watched Michael Phelps, champion swim racer, pull his way to a seventh gold medal in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing while competing in the individual swim medley. I could barely count or see his strokes, he was moving so fast, and when he pushed off of the pools walls he gained momentum that bounded him ahead setting another world record.

* * *
"There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music." George Eliot

My friend Dave called me and invited me over for a beer, so I dropped into Heaven Gallery (1550 N. Milwaukee). Inside the second gallery space were rows of chairs occupied by patient music lovers facing a cello , a violin, some kind of big xylophone, some microphones and a piano, all in front of the window that faces Milwaukee Ave.

As the musicians tuned their strings in a low cacophony and the audience murmured, I found a place to sit out of the way. The windows were closed and the room became quiet. and the first strings of the performance began with a violin and cello duo called Wild & Wulliman. Their first piece was called Amore Scaduto. Although I had straggled into the performance with an exhausted frame of mind, they commanded my attention from the opening notes. Picture your heart being played like the pulls of a bow to a string, the tension and release of the sound reflecting notes that move your emotions in ways that you can't even being to understand. I soon got lost in the music and began to realize different layers of complexity to all that had been on my mind.

I closed my eyes, and the musicians introduced themselves. The next song was titled Pastor Hick's Farewell, and was sung by the soprano voice of a woman named Mary Bonhag, accompanied by Evan Premo on the double bass. It's lyrics spoke of the ebbing of love like an ocean tide, and it took all of my will to contain my tears. The low strings are the ones that got me, rustling loose grave emotions that seemed to have settled inside me, lightening them up.

I was so happy to have dropped in. Music is the best thing for loosening tension and unwinding abstract notes... when words can't express all of the complexities that color our experiences, these chords and harmonies can.

Golden Mean

2008-08-10T10:30:00.000-07:00

Interesting article on sacred geometry

Samurai Sunday!

2008-08-10T10:08:00.000-07:00

Duel at Ganryu Island

With my dad across the world, engaging in the sort of ronin battle of sorts that he's been preparing for his whole life (long story), my brothers and I are left to entertain ourselves with our own discourse on samurai fighting techniques this morning as we keep our mom company. This is a clip from a series we watched Sunday mornings when we were little, from the epic life story of the samurai Miyamoto Musashi.

Bahai Bike Pilgrimage

2008-08-07T08:10:00.000-07:00

I woke up feeling like a tighly coiled rope, my muscles stiff and uncomfortable beneath my skin. It had been a night of restless energy and angst filled sleep. I dreamed of gravity and pressure, of forces pressing in on me like the weight of being under a hundred meters of ocean water. I walked over to my neighborhood coffee shop to start my day as I usually do but with a long stone cold stricken expression, the kind of look that makes people avert their eyes when they see you. My phone rang. It was my bicycle friend.

"How do you feel about riding up to the Bahai Temple? I'm thinking about going up there today. Need some spiritual healing."

"I'm down," I answered immediately, didn't have to think twice. "I think that's just what I need on a day like today. We'll be bike pilgrims." I had been there before, rode the 16 miles during a late night trip with a group of midnight riders about 2 years ago this month. When I walked through its winding gardens under a glowing full moon, I knew I had to one day return to see the grounds on a sunny day. How strange to be compelled back during this moment, and how absolutely necessary too.

After taking care of some business I set myself to cleaning off the drive train on my bike, tuning it and filling it's tires with air. I packed my backpack with my lock, water jug, a dress and a towel, then stepped into my flip flops once again and rolled over to meet my friend.

The ride up to Wilmette began during the hottest part of the day, but once we started heading north on Halsted the cool breeze of the lake kept the sun from being too exhausting. Riding in the busy streets of a highly trafficked city requires absolute, intense concentration so it seemed like most of the time was passed focusing on just surviving in the bike lane. As the miles slipped by in quick succession, I began to feel the exhilaration of my bicycle's movement. It was like I was shedding the hard exoskeleton of despondency. Compressed into the low crouch of the pursuit position, I focused on the rhythm of my breathing. Before long we reached stretches of smooth road, and a song burst forth from my lungs. It was Sam Cooke's "It's Been a Long Time Coming".

At the end of Lake Shore Drive we got kind of lost in a winding path. Our route was influenced by avoiding certain high traffic intersections, detours past streets under construction. When I found myself cycling on a narrow sidewalk lined on both sides with construction fencing, with several large patches strewn together with plywood I started to worry that we were on the wrong path. I felt myself becoming more agitated, especially when I found myself pedaling on top of random piles of sand and puddles on what was becoming increasingly bombed out streets.

"Don't worry, look up!" said my friend, and just when I was about to start looking for a way off of that path, I saw the top of the dome of the temple.

My skin was covered in sweat and felt something like the outside of an airplane after a transcontinental journey. I soaked my towel in water and wiped the salt off of my face and cooled off until my heart stopped racing, before putting on a dress so I wouldn't be striding into this holy building looking like I had just stepped out of the gym.

This is the threshold of this temple. It holds to many of the forms of ancient temple building, including making the journey towards the inside of the sacred space through several spatial stages with its winding gardens.

Here is the view from the top of the stairs:

* * *

Inside, I breathed in the beauty of the architecture and watched the light filter through the windows. I read some of the mystic writings of the founder of the Bahai faith, who was said to have been a divine messenger. This religion is founded upon the principle of the oneness of humankind, espouses equality between men and women, harmony between science and religion, the abolition of the extremes of wealth and poverty, and a focus on universal acceptance.

Here is the most famous of the Bahai faith's sacred texts:
The Seven Valley and the Four Valleys

* * *

One of the things I prayed about was the guidance to find the right path, which makes the entire return trip kind of ironic in retrospect. After a long contemplative walk around the gardens, I was ready to leave. I was not thrilled about going down the same dangerous path that took me to the temple, and felt compelled to stay close to the lakefront. First we crossed this river, and Jimmy Cliff's "Many Rivers To Cross" went through my head.

My traveling companion did not exactly share this decision, and wanted to bike through the city in the interest of getting home quickly. We parted ways unintentionally within the first few miles when we got separated, so the rest of the way home I rode alone. It was just as well, as I was becoming fatigued and the rest of the trip was a focused sprint that took the rest of the energy I had. By now my lungs felt wrung ragged, and about to burst which replaced the dreadful hollow feeling that had been in my chest all week plaguing me. As my muscles burned mile after mile, my chest felt strangely enough as though there was an owl getting ready to explode out of it and take flight. I day dreamed about how nice it would feel to shower and put on some comfortable pants as I kept moving forward. Here is the view of the city from the beginning of the bike path and the last place I saw my bike friend:

It was beautiful, but the view just spoke of how far I had to go. I put my head down and pedalled.

My mind went on auto pilot and I quickly regretted not having any energy bars on hand. I did this whole 35 mile trip fueled with one banana and a quarter of a mango. I have been fasting since the weekend, and this made the journey that much more surreal. The only sounds I registered were the industrial vibrations of machines and the sounds of birds. Voices, traffic and all other sounds were drowned out as I kept my pace. I was becoming more and more lightheaded and focused all of my mental energy on keeping an eye on my path and staying safe.

I rolled in and felt completely wiped out. As though I had rode all those miles on top all of the muscles in the front and back of my torso. I earned my sleep tonight and look forward to having better dreams.

Fury in the Skies

2008-08-05T18:54:00.000-07:00

Photo courtesy of Accuweather photo archives

Yesterday the weather in Chicago was raging. What began as a pretty calm and clear evening quickly turned into a violent, howling summer storm with gale force winds. (Winds of 94 miles per hour were recorded 3 miles off the shore of Lake Michigan) The weather report stated that there was something around 200 bolts of lightning in one hour from the storm. It hit fast and was ferocious, trapping me at the climbing gym with my younger brother and his friends for hours when the streets around the building got quickly flooded. I practiced tying knots and worked out my forearms and fingers on the rock wall - it was kind of a pleasant way to take refuge actually. The gymnastics team huddled downstairs with us until the sirens stopped. I peeked out the front window and watched the lightning rip with mad flashes all across the sky, making it look like the synapses of Frankenstein's brain. The sky was full of that unrelenting, merciless energy all night. We got home during a brief lull in the rain, but it got its momentum going once again and the windows were rattling scarily by the time I went to sleep. Mother Nature: more furious than anything anyone has seen.

I stared at the lightning and was mesmerized by the force with which it cracked the atmosphere. It was a thrill to see so much electricity in the air, there was an almost palpable charge. It made me think of the significant moments when I've stopped to watch lightning storms at critical times in my life- high above the ocean in a rainless electrical storm, across the Colorado sky high in the mountains. One lightning bolt contains 3 billion kilowatts of power, said to be enough energy to run a major industrialized city for months.

Looking at the way the ground absorbed the crackling bolts thrown at it through the ionosphere, with enough thunderous force to send vibrations through my body miles away - all those billions of kilowatts disappeared on contact- my thoughts turned to Nicolai Tesla, a discoverer of some of the most significant observations in the field of electrical engineering such as the fact that the earth is a conductor of electricity. He was also known as the "sorceror of lightning".

Said to have been born during an electrical storm, he went on to school the world (alongside Thomas Edison) on the principles of electricity. He devised a transformer which generates artificial lightning by increasing the voltage of a current which gets transferred between oscillating circuits. With this discovery we are able to harness the energy of lightning; now we can even make lightning ourselves. (!)

Tesla is ranked amongst my favorite mad scientists: I have a fondness for eccentric geniuses who advance humanity profoundly and exponentially with the work of their lifetime, yet die unrecognized and in poverty. It is heroic to my romantic nature; he was driven by a curiousity more true, sincere and primal than that which motivates the normal person. A curiousity which in itself drove the industrial revolution and allowed us all to better understand certain awe-inspiring forces of nature, at least the tangible mysteries of the physical world we live in.

Shouts!

Wearing a Sundress Was a Bad Idea

2008-07-30T16:06:00.000-07:00

The blister on the inside of my right calf was the size of a small chicken egg when it first puffed up. All the skin around it was red and angry looking, and when I poked the sac-like pillowy protuberence it squished firmly, full of clear blister fluid. "That's not good," I thought, the proceeded to deal with it the way I deal with most of the cutaneous injuries that I regularly incur as a skateboarder and cyclist - I rolled down my jeans and went on my merry way. Being a child of a doctor and nurse makes you laugh at pain and non-life threatening injuries. Besides, I've found that most of my sports injuries like strained muscles, sprained joints, cuts and scrapes - the ones that aren't deep anyways - benefit most from just a few basic things: epsom salt baths, lots of sleep and being left alone. I also take care to eat better when I am healing up.

A couple of days later I noticed a screaming pain when I woke up, and a wet spot on the sheets. Are you grossed yet? This wet spot wasn't of the ordinary variety of bodily fluids you might encounter on a bed sheet, but even worse because it was from the blister on my leg which had by then swollen even more. Fearing an impending scarrage that would render future skirt wearing or shorts wearing unsightly - and make those activities an actual disservice to the world around me - I decided to finally treat my wound like the third degree burn that it was.

I had always wanted to try the moist burn pads that are in the pharmacy next to the band aids anyways. I ran to get some bacitracin and said burn pads, as well as a bunch of adhesive gauze that would let the wound breathe and not stick to it.

A few years ago I used to get injured like this all the time, mostly on my elbows and knees, the sides of my ankles and even my hips. I took a lot of thrashing in the skatebowls before I could ride them, and before I learned how to fall. Now I use my whole body to slide down the side of the wall and go limp. Or if I am not on a transition and on flat ground, I run out of the fall.

Once, an 11 year old kid collided with me going pretty fast at the skatepark and I saved us from certain doom by grabbing him under the ribs, picking him up, and running some paces until our momentum was spent. He was devastated, but I didn't feel bad that he looked like a baby in front of his friends because I had to do what I had to do.

So I carefully cleaned the blister with soapy warm water and betadine. I could kind of see under the top skin of the blister where it was slightly torn and could tell that it was a pretty bad wound. Yowza! That motorcycle exhaust pipe is probably hundreds of degrees hot. Wearing a sundress had been a bad idea. "Just think," I thought, "just beyond that are all the nerve endings and fatty tissue of my calf!" I wonder where the muscle starts?

By now my whole calf was throbbing and so I put a second skin blister pad on top of the whole mess and called it a day. For the past 10 days I've been monitoring its progess. The blister pad worked pretty well at keeping it hydrated during the crucial first few days when the white blood cells are trying to patch up the open.

Time.

2008-07-22T12:13:00.000-07:00

I rode my bike four miles today, the whole time thinking about time and how I often seem to be racing it. I do so many little things to save time, but there always seems to be a conflict in partitioning and distributing it... then there are hours that go by when it seems that I am not using time well, which balances out those days that I am so busy and experiencing so many things that every moment seems alive with endless significance.

I assume it to be a relative thing. In other cultures that I have experienced, time is viewed much differently than my life here. When I was in the Philippines with my family, the people we met up with seemed a bit confused and almost inconvenienced by the fact that we would meet at the exact time that we said we would. "They really are American!" they would say when we would call to make sure that they were clear on our version of time, and hustle a bit faster to get there. For a good laugh, ask your nearest filipino friend on their outlook regarding time. Family parties that say 4PM on the invite really mean "Start thinking about getting ready to go a 4PM" and everyone knows that the party really starts around 6-ish.

When Christophe and Didier were in Chicago, I found that the frenchies were just as laid back in their interpretation of time. Planning to leave the house at 8AM kind of meant being really ready to go by 10:30. That is just how they rolled, and no amount of throat clearing and glazed over looks could move the process along. In the mean time, they would be drinking coffee, making grilled cheese and ham sandwiches, listening to music, talking and smoking.

Somehow we managed to get everything that they needed to get done, done. We missed a couple of beginnings to soccer games, but otherwise they would make up for their late starts with late night - most evenings we would wind up sitting down for dinner close to midnight. They insisted on having a cocktail hour and sitting in the yard for no other reason than to relax. In a filipino household, things are communal like this as well. We might be singing a song on the karaoke machine, playing piano, poking fun at our moms and grandmas or just enjoying a quiet moment of peace or conversation.

There is an opposite extreme to this end - 120 hour work weeks, meetings, deadlines. I'd like time to go a little more slowly sometimes, but in this kind of life it always needs to go faster. This is where time becomes like money, a quickly slipping away commodity that there is no subsitute for. I worked in one job that bridged an island culture with a western business model that took over the laid back effects of equatorial life. Our office made sure that shipments got delivered, emails got answered, bills got paid in time and generally made sure that the business ran smoothly. That's how things get done in this world, but I always wondered if I might be on the wrong side of that equation.

The Garden

2008-07-16T16:00:00.000-07:00

A work in progress for almost 30 years, every tree and every plant was thought out carefully. The slopes of the hills are run with an underground irrigation system, and he probably never had more fun than when he was building the stone walls. In some shots you can see our dog Quasimodo's old doghouse, which he never used. He didn't have to, with this magical wonderland in which he spent his life prancing about chasing squirrels and skunks. But he's a story for another time.

Photos from my dad's secret garden.

2008-07-16T15:35:00.000-07:00

It's been a year of epic rainfall.

2008-07-16T15:30:00.001-07:00

Sige na

2008-07-15T12:05:00.000-07:00

Saw my dad off to the airport. It was the post-modern equivalent of riding the horse to the city gates in farewell, only our horse was an funky taxi with an ornery Bangladeshi driver. I jumped in at the last minute when the cab pulled into the driveway, decided to catch a train home at the airport. I had a question to ask, and I kept him company up to the security gate. My dad and the driver had a tense standoff in the car when the driver answered one of his questions with a snappy attitude, which resulted in a confusing exchange of money when he tried to return my dad's tip but got the total wrong anyways.

Another lonely trek home from O'Hare.

2008-07-15T09:03:00.000-07:00

I Hear the Gentle Voices Calling

2008-07-14T09:58:00.000-07:00

This morning I hung out with my dad in his office while he prepared for another trip back to Cebu. Tomorrow will be the fourth time in 2 years that I'll be saying goodbye to him - my dad has become a solo wanderer now. He probably had always been one. The work that he is doing is the work of a lifetime, tying together the disparate ends of his life and reconciling things that were done by people who are already dead. He became the head of a divisive and contentious family upon the death of my aunt last year, and is returning there to resolve issues that were left in the wake of her passing away.

My dad had escaped the stifles of his family by studying hard and keeping his head down until he departed immediately upon finishing medical school. He lived on the other side of the world in Chicago for 30 years, until these obligations found him boarding the plane at O'Hare and reentering a world he chose to leave a long time ago. It appears to me that there seems to be some things that you just cannot escape, the biggest battles in life will find you and confront you until you've resolved them no matter how far you've gone to avoid them.

Between buzzing around mailing taxes, writing letters and organizing his paperwork, my dad dj'ed for us by playing his favorite music off of youtube. He was mostly just playing whatever he felt and would even change the song sometimes in the middle of the track. As I tried unsuccessfully to choke back the tears through each song, I realized that there is indeed a romantic and morbid streak that runs deep and wide through my family, a melancholic inclination that can only be soothed with hours long bouts of listening to haunting lilting melodies.

Some of these songs had been played for him on the piano by my grandmother. She was one of a few people in her town who owned a record player (in the Philippines, just after WWII) with which she bestowed this passion for music from all over the world and from every era onto my dad. Did she know she'd be unleashing a million dreams throughout many decades through the power of music? How could she not?

My Dad's Youtube Playlist:

Beautiful Dreamer - Roy Orbison
The Great Pretender - The Platters
Old Man River - Paul Robeson
Ave Maria- Hayley Westnora
Micaela's Aria - Gordana Jevtovic-Minov
Those Were The Days - Mary Hopkin
One More Walk Around the Garden - Sarah Brightman
Vincent - Josh Groban (my dad dedicated this to my brother Ramon)
Old Black Joe - Trapp Family
I Dream of Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair - Don Ameche
Beautiful Dreamer - Marilyn Horne
Once Upon A Time - Frank Sinatra
Malaguena - Lecuona
Damisela Encantadora - Lecuona

Here's where we'll part ways

2008-07-12T10:15:00.000-07:00

2008-07-10T13:01:00.000-07:00

2008-07-10T12:47:00.000-07:00

Traveling Shoes Are Worn Through

2008-07-10T12:34:00.000-07:00

2008-07-10T12:03:00.000-07:00

2008-07-10T11:52:00.000-07:00

Dinant Ensemble

2008-07-10T10:21:00.000-07:00

Au Revoir

2008-07-09T12:11:00.000-07:00

Today is the last night that the French guys will be sprawling out on my living room floor, passed out with a myriad of sights dancing in dreams inside their exhausted brains. I know how it is to be a stranger in a new place, to get around in a country in which you do not speak the language, when you listen very hard to catch just a fraction of what is said.

I feel that I was born to facilitated understanding between cultures. English was the second language of both of my parent's, and my life's work has been making connections between their country and mine. Travelers are my kindred spirits, because all journeys bring about the same sort of self-awareness and knowledge. It comes from leaving your home and all traces of what had been familiar to discover what you are capable of in entirely different situations and environments, how you fare and roll with the punches as things come up.

Tonight I plan to send them off with a Chicago style house music dance party. It will be a celebration of everything that they picked up in the last month in the city of big shoulders. I will make sure that the soul and vibe of my hometown is not lost on them.

Moving Forward

2008-07-08T09:20:00.000-07:00

The deep parts of my life pour onward

as if the river shores were opening out

It seems that things are more like me now,

That I can see farther into paintings.

I feel closer to what language can't reach.

With my senses, as with birds, I climb

Into the windy heaven, out of the oak

In the ponds broken off from the sky

my falling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

Rainer Maria Rilke

2008-07-05T21:52:00.000-07:00

Frenchies En Force!

2008-07-05T20:57:00.000-07:00

Corinne, Cristophe and Didier have been covering some ground during the four weeks that the french guys are in Chicago. I've spent the past week hanging out with them, rising in the morning with croque monsieurs and cycling around town. They live at a good pace, taking time to converse and unwind at the end of each day. Sharing meals is a great pleasure with this crew. I met up with them when I came back from Wisconsin - turns out, they had been there on a road trip also to Prairie du Chien where they saw the Mississippi river. They had also visited Milwaukee Indiananapolis, Detroit, Toronto (where their aunt lives), and Niagara Falls. They'd been to three of the Great Lakes, five states and thousands of road miles.

They are super excited to celebrate the national holiday while they are here. It is a lot of fun for me to share their perspective and see my home city through their eyes. The past few days have been a rolling party, from the skatepark to barbecues, parties and fireworks on beautiful summer days. When they return to Paris, they will be arriving home in time to celebrate the French national holiday with a renewed sense of appreciation for their country.

2008-06-29T08:53:00.000-07:00

Stormy day going up to Spring Green, Wisconsin

Jen "The Hurricane" Nordhem

2008-06-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

2008-06-24T08:30:00.000-07:00

2008-06-24T08:28:00.000-07:00

Climbing Off the Roof of the World

2008-06-24T08:21:00.000-07:00

We headed south from Denver to the mountains near the border of New Mexico, where Justin's parent's let us borrow their cabin for the weekend. It is situated in a valley that faces southward towards two big mountains - San Isabel and Ferdinand, which is a peak that rises 14,ooo miles above sea level. Above the valley the stars stretched in an infinite canopy at night.

It is bear country down there - evidence of black and brown bear activity was all over the cabin in the form of scratches, and Justin recalled seeing one during one of his first trips up there. It was scavenging food out of their cooler and reared up taller than 10 feet on his hind legs before galloping away on all fours when they started making noise. A she bear is said to inhabit the valley on a regular basis.

Over the course of the weekend we were making so much noise and smoke so that all the wild creatures of the mountains knew to stay away. With all the dinner bell gonging, Lil Wayne blasting out the speakers and the firewood in the stove for heating the hot tub we created a commotion all weekend. The mountain view was so immense and there was no one else in sight.

Things got buckwild as soon as we woke up in the morning. Somehow Jeremy got ahold of a machete and used it to cut up the watermelon, soaked in vodka overnight. I put on a headband and stuck long red feathers from the wildflower garden into it. Justin rocked a fake fur vest, and Jen decided that it would be an all bikini weekend as soon as the heat of the day started beating the valley.

On the summer solstice, storms were brewing in that mountain range. We ascended another 3,000 feet to a lake by truck, a wild ride that seemed to follow the route of the storm cloud. All around us it was sunny and clear blue, but right above us the thunderstorm raged. Half blinded by all the rain washing down the windshield with the broken wiper, we saw a lightning bolt spear the earth, a hot pink straight shock 100 yards ahead of the car and the sky boomed almost immediately.

When we finally got to the lake it was surrounded by clear streams of melting snow and mountain pines. I had never smelled anything as soft and sweet as those trees - the altitude, that fragrance, and the mimosas Ann brought made me dizzy with all the natural beauty. We dared each other to jump in and splashed around in the icy water hollering and creating a ruckus until it was time to roll out.

On the way back,, we met up with Suzanne and Curt, who promptly announce their engagement over a few pitchers of beer. It was officially a celebration, and that night we splashed in the hot tub under a clear night with endless stars that just got clearer and clearer, watching the lightning storm electrify the over the big mountains in the distance. The sun bowed out as late as it ever could, with the psychedelic shadows of sunset stretching long with magical light. The sound of gut busting laughter and music stretched throughout the valley and their vibrations seemed to echo back to us with howling reverberations.

The next day, I stayed with Jen and Justin as the rest of the camping crew took off back to Denver. Ann had said that if she couldn't find a ride back, she wouldn't mind hitching one. No one was particularly adverse to jumping on a freight train if necessary. Those guys were crazy badasses. We soaked in the sun and basked in the beauty of the amazing vista until the next day, a quiet stillness both humbled an awesome. Jen had taken me to one of the few places in the world where I have ever seen the sky as dynamic as this mountain one was. I would have been pining in loneliness had the crew that she had assembled not been so individually inspiring and fun. I could not have shared that time with a better group of people.

2008-06-20T20:11:00.000-07:00

I've got to Raammbble!!

2008-06-20T08:52:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I ambled past the Frenchmen snoring underfoot in my living room with nothing but a knapsack on my back and headed towards Midway by train after stopping at my friend's house for some quick bong hits. I got on the plane and thought of the drifters who have headed west before, people who have gone to the same place but by jumping trains. Decided that this trip would be a tribute to my literary heroes and the adventurers whose books I read as a kid that stoked the latent fires of wanderlust in my imagination.

When I think of Denver I think of Jack Kerouac... that was his first stop after Chicago in On the Road. He was in turn profoundly influenced by Jack London. Wanderers and hobo travelers heading west while getting more introspective with each mile gained, rambling on and on and on both in print and on foot.

"I've got to Raammmble!!" Led Zeppelin was playing in the bar Jen took me to after she scooped me from the pointed tented airport. We played air guitar solos and ordered shots of whiskey. They were kind enough to hook me up with a bmx bike to cruise around Denver in while I am here. We stopped at Jen's boyfriend Justin's bike shop on our way home and he hooked me up with a skateboard as well... traveling light and in style. Then we raged in typical Hurricane Jen style - she is as rambunctious as I have always known her to be, alternately endearing and terrifying all those around her.

We are heading to the skatepark this morning, but first I am going to the camera store so that these words can be illustrated. This evening we are heading south to stay at a cabin in the mountains.

2008-06-20T08:30:00.000-07:00

This is how we got around in Denver.

Tack!!

2008-06-19T08:59:00.001-07:00

At the end of the night last night I counted the number of miles I had traveled during the week: I had ridden about 50 miles by bicycle, 4 by car and 5 by sailboat. Today I will travel by plane a thousand miles to Denver.

For me, the most enjoyable mode of transportation is a toss up between the sailboat and my bicycle. There is no more beautiful path than the wake of the boat catching the waning light in green glints off of the waves. But a racing sailboat with a competitive and experienced crew is not the best place to leisurely bask in the awesome sights of nature, as I came to find last night.

I had only been out sailing with these guys once before, a couple of weeks ago. None of the sails got put up that day - we traveled in a thick fog that reduced visibility to a 20 meter radius around the boat to the starting point, where the race was cancelled. I stood on the bow talking shop and watching lookout with the guy who normally handles bow duties as we drifted through the ghostly spectral waters. I loved it.

This time the weather was cool, the winds were sweeping and the skies were clear to the stratosphere. I felt like a wide eyed ingenue or provincial cousin as the weight of my inexperience and technical incompetence was hard to shrug away when I stepped onto the boat. The best thing to do was to keep busy and out of the way when necessary. I found myself at a woeful disadvantage: upon biking six miles to get to the harbor, I discovered that I had only one shoe in my backpack. I distinctly recalled seeing the other shoe in next to my closet at home and realized that I had forgot to grab it on my way out. When I looked at the slippery flip flops on my feet, I knew I had to resign myself to a long night of feeling like an idiot.

Before all the roll tacking and jibing would take place, I still took time to marvel at the systems on the boat and the simple mechanics behind them. I helped pull down the mouselines and uncover the mainsail, and felt the gears turn in my head in high drive listening to the organization of the ropes that would control the main sail, jib and spinnaker. As we reading the boat to leave the port, a small Beagle with soft enormous ears was carried onto the deck clad safely in a life vest. He was carried by the handle that attached to the back of the life vest and would occasionally pop his head out throughout the rest of the evening.

"Hopefully next time you'll have some real shoes on," said the bowman from last time.

"Young lady, not only is it crazy to have those on your feet, it's dangerous!" scolded DS.

We had too many inexperienced sailors on the boat to have had a good showing in the race, but the boat was full of smiles as we parked it in the dock. We had towed a Rhodes 19 rocked precariously by three dorky, overly enthusiastic and breezy young preppy looking guys in khaki shorts, and as we turned into the boat's space one of the young men fell in the lake when they rocked him over. I rode the six miles home in two stages and stopped to eat, and when I got to bed I fell into a dead sleep.

I can't stoooopppppp!!!!!!

2008-06-18T12:23:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday our house turned into a vortex of travelers on the move... fifteen minutes into our evening house party/ bbq/ soiree, I sat for a quick shot of rum with a few gentlemen in my backyard. Ben had his backpack packed and his boarding pass in his pocket - in a few moments, I would walk him to the train to the airport, where he would not breathe fresh air until he would disembark 14 hours later in Berlin. Coco's brother, Christophe, and his friend Didier had just put down their bags in my living room, fresh off the plane from Paris the night before. And my friend Mike wandered in, just in from hanging out in a boat off of Cape Cod photographing whales.

I raised my glass to life being a great adventure.

Later on that night many more people would wander in and out of our backyard in various states of inebriation. This time of the year brings many visitors to Chicago. Aside from our new houseguests, my roommate's friends and colleagues drifted in to help celebrate her birthday. Friends of friends of friends of friends, who I had never met before. I saw old loves meeting again for a brief moment in my living room, having been parted by the distance the length of the Mississippi, in the same town for just one night. The city opens up as the weather gets warmer, and the heat of the sun matches the strength of the wind - and the lake is a gleaming showcase of water and light. It would be crazy to come here when the weather is cold and people stay burrowed in, bound tighter that a nut, when the skies are high pressured and gray. I am not used to inviting people into my house, meeting strangers in my own personal space. I am used to being the one doing the visiting and then coming home just for a breather, doing laundry and sleeping for hours and hours in my small dark room.

There were several elements that appeared at the party that reminded me of how close to home here I have come - my brothers arrived to sit and philosophize under the tree, and were thrust with my old skatergirl friend's newborn baby and toddler to hold for a brief moment, my old schoolmate appeared and commiserated with my old neighbor. We were on a street I have lived on for years, in a city that I have come home to every time I have traveled anywhere and I still felt the push of life in motion.

Yesterday I went downtown to an Irish Pub with the Paris crew to watch the soccer match between France and Italy. The four of us rode there on three bikes - Christophe was heroically transported on the rack they had just attached to the back of Corinne's vintage Schwinn road bike. A towel was wrapped around it for comfort and he held on for dear life as she struggled up hills and across bridges to get downtown. Her tireless efforts were shaded somewhat by the easy birdlike gliding flow of my racing bike and the girl's cruiser Didier was stylishly swooping around on.

She yelled at me for blocking the way.

"I can't stop!!!" she screeched in a nerve wracked warble, as they hobbled across the intersection. I moved forward just quickly enough to not get crashed into. After we passed the intersection, balance and composure were regained and we arrived just in time to see the start of the game and for me to finally let out my chuckle.

Mi Ultimo Adios by Dr. Jose Rizal

2008-05-01T14:00:00.000-07:00

Farewell, my adored Land, region of the sun caressed,
Pearl of the Orient Sea, our Eden lost,
With gladness I give you my Life, sad and repressed;
And were it more brilliant, more fresh and at its best,
I would still give it to you for your welfare at most.

On the fields of battle, in the fury of fight,
Others give you their lives without pain or hesitancy,
The place does not matter: cypress laurel, lily white,
Scaffold, open field, conflict or martyrdom's site,
It is the same if asked by home and Country.

I die as I see tints on the sky b'gin to show
And at last announce the day, after a gloomy night;
If you need a hue to dye your matutinal glow,
Pour my blood and at the right moment spread it so,
And gild it with a reflection of your nascent light!

My dreams, when scarcely a lad adolescent,
My dreams when already a youth, full of vigor to attain,
Were to see you, gem of the sea of the Orient,
Your dark eyes dry, smooth brow held to a high plane
Without frown, without wrinkles and of shame without stain.

My life's fancy, my ardent, passionate desire,
Hail! Cries out the soul to you, that will soon part from thee;
Hail! How sweet 'tis to fall that fullness you may acquire;
To die to give you life, 'neath your skies to expire,
And in your mystic land to sleep through eternity !

If over my tomb some day, you would see blow,
A simple humble flow'r amidst thick grasses,
Bring it up to your lips and kiss my soul so,
And under the cold tomb, I may feel on my brow,
Warmth of your breath, a whiff of your tenderness.

Let the moon with soft, gentle light me descry,
Let the dawn send forth its fleeting, brilliant light,
In murmurs grave allow the wind to sigh,
And should a bird descend on my cross and alight,
Let the bird intone a song of peace o'er my site.

Let the burning sun the raindrops vaporize
And with my clamor behind return pure to the sky;
Let a friend shed tears over my early demise;
And on quiet afternoons when one prays for me on high,
Pray too, oh, my Motherland, that in God may rest I.

Pray thee for all the hapless who have died,
For all those who unequalled torments have undergone;
For our poor mothers who in bitterness have cried;
For orphans, widows and captives to tortures were shied,
And pray too that you may see you own redemption.

And when the dark night wraps the cemet'ry
And only the dead to vigil there are left alone,
Don't disturb their repose, don't disturb the mystery:
If you hear the sounds of cithern or psaltery,
It is I, dear Country, who, a song t'you intone.

And when my grave by all is no more remembered,
With neither cross nor stone to mark its place,
Let it be plowed by man, with spade let it be scattered
And my ashes ere to nothingness are restored,
Let them turn to dust to cover your earthly space.

Then it doesn't matter that you should forget me:
Your atmosphere, your skies, your vales I'll sweep;
Vibrant and clear note to your ears I shall be:
Aroma, light, hues, murmur, song, moanings deep,
Constantly repeating the essence of the faith I keep.

My idolized Country, for whom I most gravely pine,
Dear Philippines, to my last goodbye, oh, harken
There I leave all: my parents, loves of mine,
I'll go where there are no slaves, tyrants or hangmen
Where faith does not kill and where God alone does reign.

Farewell, parents, brothers, beloved by me,
Friends of my childhood, in the home distressed;
Give thanks that now I rest from the wearisome day;
Farewell, sweet stranger, my friend, who brightened my way;
Farewell, to all I love. To die is to rest.

Coconute Tree Adventure

2008-05-01T13:00:00.000-07:00

Balamban, Cebu

2008-05-01T12:05:00.000-07:00

How to Be a Great Lady Part II

2008-03-19T13:33:00.000-07:00

Everything happened on a damp afternoon of a Spring day. The phone call, the text messages, the heartdropping news. It was a day like this and the smells on this day sparked a memory chain that unraveled me back to the past

I burned incense to fill my little space, my writing nook, with the smell of spices and to clean the air. The curls of the smoke danced in the air, charming the wind and dancing in whirls and spins. They spun through the windowsill as the rain misted, it was the kind of rain that if I turned my face up to the sky, would cover me from ear to ear with an instant light dew. The dead leaves of winter were soaked and the chill in the air was a happy one because for once, at least, it was just no longer cold.

When the smoke started sifting its way through the window, I had been listening to music with the sound of bells and women singing and in the light of the afternoon sky I suddenly became stricken and broke down in tears. The sounds of ringing and full throaty declarative harmonies of their voices bore my memory back, and when the scent of the incense reached my nose I was instantly transported. I wept with my face turned back, and felt the tears stream endlessly down the sides of my face, dripping past my ears, falling into my hair.

I remembered climbing with curiousity into my aunt’s room, on bandy nine year old legs with wild hyper hair and excitement in my eyes. It was connected to a terrace that overlooked the sea, where she would stretch in the mornings those days she didn’t rush out for business, listening to opera arias in her wide sleeved robes. There would be incense burning, the smell masking the smell of her cigarettes and tea as she thoroughly enjoyed herself in the morning light. I would climb the steps hewn from native canes, with bamboo to glide my hands on. With my young impatient steps I would barrel into her open doorway into a room lit by low lamps and lanterns of diffused light.

It was the treasure trove of an explorer; in every corner were jewelry boxes laden with gold chains and precious gems that spilled out, inviting me to try them on and give myself a glimpse of my young self in the costumery of a princess from a faraway land. There were dusty antiques, warriors carved out of tropical wood that stood in attack mode under faded paint and a collection of fearsome crucifixes sacrilegiously adorned with leis and NY Knicks caps. All the mirrors had been dulled of their silver. I could pull hats off of mannequins posed exquisitely, limbless. I was surrounded by all of the accoutrements and accessories of various grand places in time.

Across the world in her midtown Manhattan apartment, I slept fitfully in the week after she died. I couldn’t even think about the exact place where she might have dropped dead, or the sinister shadows in the demonic faces of the cherubs in the dawn light. It was no longer charming to be surrounded by so much haunted history, because now I was living that haunted history. I coasted forward during those days, not stopping to sink, breathing steady.

She left me, my sister and her granddaughter some of her shoes and clothes, and we bedecked ourselves in her things like costumes that somehow became molded to us perfectly by the time we left New York. My sister’s leopard print boots and my niece’s fur coat suited them because she had imparted in us some of the personality that it takes to pull off that kind of fashion showmanship. I came home with a floor length giraffe print jacket, and a pair of water shoes that I secretly always wanted.

This afternoon as I felt the low pressure of the weather system lull me, and the scent of the incense haunt me I remembered those shoes and felt compelled to pull them out. My friend sat patiently in my living room as I dug through my closet flinging shoes across the room, looking for the pair. I could find one, but not the other. I panicked, knowing that I hadn’t seen or wore those in a while.

"Freaking shizz! I lose everything!!! I can’t freaking lose those."

A breath and a step later I looked aside and under a pile of my clothes peeped the toe of her shoe mysteriously, as though her spirit had nudged it into my sight. It’s moments like those that I felt that she might still be close to me. I stepped into her shoes and trod through my backyard across the wet leaves to call my dog in. I was stricken though with the thought that almost a year after she had gone the shoes were relatively still kind of new and with the style of my time, since she was always slightly ahead of the curve with her fashion instincts. One day they wouldn’t be and in the years ahead her things would wear away. It has already taken me a whole year to begin adjusting to all the things she left in the vacuum of her presence, and I am left with a great legacy to one day start writing. What I want to hold on to are the things about her that are timeless, the things that will travel with me decades down the line. All she could really leave us were those instincts and that sensibility. The rest will fade, or harden into relics, but my life is too dynamic to carry around dusty baggage.

How to Be a Great Lady Part I

2007-04-11T13:39:00.000-07:00

My aunt taught me alot of things I have needed to know, both in her life and in her death. Her presence blazed a way in my family to be the youngest and most rebellious girls of our generations, and is responsible for pointing out the wanderlust and adventure in my blood. She was known to have a tomboy streak, kind of like me, but she had the style of a dame. People have been telling me about how they remember her blazing through town on her bike and on her scooter like a fiend when she was young.

History comes full circle in strange and unforeseeable ways. She once told me that her oldest recurring nightmare was being plunged beneath the sea and wandering the wreck of an old airplane and encountering human remains. Oddly enough, doing this very thing has become one of my favorite hobbies since became a scuba diver. In this case, am happy to step up and live through the previous generations nightmares.

She stopped fearing death at a tender age. I think since her early 20's she had one foot in the grave practically, but this allowed her to live a very liberated life and live out fantastic adventures. Once she told me about traveling the Khyber Pass between Afghanistan and Pakistan as a young lady on camels and on foot. This information was relevant to the conversation that we were having as to where the handsomest men in the world can be found. She advised me that throughout all of her travels, in her opinion she found Afghani men to be the cutest. Of course this was so hilarious to me, especially when she said that the men of Italy were overrated. She definitely was not your typical filipina.

As one of the few western women traveling through the Hindu Kush mountains, tracing the steps of Alexander the Great, it didn't really occur to her to try and blend in and cover her head. Why should she? Everywhere she went she was an anomaly. All around the world people stared at her out of curiousity anyways. She was used to it; as a young woman she couldn't help but offend the societal norms of where she grew up, and to the rest of the world she was a foreigner, a beautiful and bizarre curiousity.

"All knowledge of things merely from pure understanding or pure reason is nothing but sheer illusion, and only in experience is there truth."We are perfectly justified in maintaining that only what is within ourselves can be immediately and directly perceived, and that only my own existence can be the object of a mere perception. Thus the existence of a real object outside me can never be given immediately and directly in perception, but can only be added in thought to the perception, which is a modification of the internal sense, and thus inferred as its external cause … . In the true sense of the word, therefore, I can never perceive external things, but I can only infer their existence from my own internal perception, regarding the perception as an effect of something external that must be the proximate cause … . It must not be supposed, therefore, that an idealist is someone who denies the existence of external objects of the senses; all he does is to deny that they are known by immediate and direct perception … – Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant

Riding Dirty

2007-01-26T13:41:00.000-08:00

I woke up early this past Sunday morning in an ashy mess of a living room strewn with beer cans, blunt innards, miscellaneous flakes floating around and a snoring roommate surrounded by bottles of painkillers... the TV was still on and my brain felt dried, wrung and stupid, burned with digital images and droning sounds. My sinuses were sore with languishing stale smoke, my blood felt dirty, my muscles creaky stiff and cold. I stumbled into bed unhappily and reflected on the shitty physical state I had let myself get into with my face buried miserably in the pillow, coming to the conclusion that this is just not how my life is going to be. I'd have to take immediate action to shake myself out of this wintertime stagnant potato chip movie watching lifestyle, or why not just pour the quicklime straight into my skull and die now?

I got up officially when my bike mechanic friend came over to help me work on my Bianchi road bike. I've been waiting to work on it since the summer but I've have been pretty much just been busy keeping my other bikes ridable. In the meantime, I thought out the process, talked to my bike mechanic, came up with the gear ratio that I want and put aside the $$. It had been sitting in the corner all dusty with a bent wheel just being unusable and annoying.

I'd been riding my mountain bike to work since it got cold out and my road bike would get all salty and messed. Its a stable bike to ride in the raw elements and its fun to jump curbs and roll through bridges, but it is also fucking slow and heavy. I got passed on the street by all kinds of dorks one too many times, contributing to the depression of last weekend. I don't really have the sort of constitution to be fine with being the slowest person on the road.

By 10 AM I had taken my bike apart completely. I got new wheels and fit the back one to a single cog, took off the gear shifters and derailleurs, cut my chain and oh shit, its converted. Those may have been the most educational few hours that I have had in a long time, my mind was spinning in high gear. I found myself happily playing with my old hub on the carpet in total fascination. I worked with like 20 different tools that I had never seen before. It looked awesome, especially with all the extra gear stuff taken off. My mood changed and I was a completely different person from the cranky croakiness of the early morning.

But the next day when I was riding it, something felt kind of off and I wasn't too surprised when the chain fell off and I heard the faint clink of broken washers on the road, a fucked up sound to hear when you're on your way to work and late. So I walked it to the bike shop later in the day where we took off the old stupid biopace chain ring and my old pedals and just set up a new crank system. It turned out that the shape of my old shit was ovular and made my chain fall off without the derailleurs. I had never taken apart my bike and put it back together by myself before- my bike mechanic encourages a sort of dependency when it comes to fixing stuff.

"What's this?" I'll ask.

"Ah, basically, its really complicated and that's why you have me here to help you."

"But what if something happens to you? Then I'd have to go figure it all out off wikipedia?!? What?!?!?!?!? I need to learn."

Taking my bike apart reminded me of how I used to love taking apart my skateboard to clean out the bearings, set up new wheels and fuck around with the bushings on the trucks. Every part of my skateboard is customized to my exacting specifications, except for the grip tape which I usually like to outsource because I'm clumsy with that shit. Once you've had your hands on every bit of hardware and have rotated the screws on every thread to exactly the place where it will bear your weight perfectly to your style it is your skateboard - more of a part of you than your shoes or clothes.

The bike ride home was delightful. I never us that word, but thats what it was. I was delighted. "My bike is the shiiiiiiiitt!," I sang at the top of my lungs, "my bike is the bomb-dot-com! Its the smoothest bike in town! There's no cooler bike around!" I called Jen 10 times in a row until she answered because she may be the only person I know who could understand the excitement. Converting it to single speed turned my bike into an elegant machine with simple mechanics, a light coasting smooth ride that rockets me around.

I am 100% purist. I like to keep the components simple and minimal and focus my energy on the essentials. The skateboard is the most ascetic vehicle around - its just wood, trucks and wheels. There is no sophisticated technology that can help you be a better thrasher. Its also the most egalitarian ride - the skater makes the skate tricks, not the board. You could line up five people and give them the exact same setups and they will all skate differently. Out of this most basic formula I've seen superhuman feats accomplished and the physical laws of gravity challenged in the sickest ways. It doesn't take that much to rip, as long as you keep your bolts tight.

Once I got home from the bike ride I was spinning on a natural high from being so stoked and I put the bike in the kitchen so I could just stare at it. I sat down to watch Heroes but my blood had not quite settled yet and I couldn't shake the restlessness and felt like jumping around or dancing. After a short while I found myself standing on my skateboard watching TV. I hadn't seriously sessioned in months and my board looked bored just sitting there. Then oops I jumped and snapped an ollie. Then, oh shit, I start practicing my kickflip on the carpet. I landed one and did the I'm the coolest song in my head again. The roommate starts looking annoyed at all the noise, and I couldn't take it anymore. I ran out of my house like a werewolf and ollied every sewer cap on my block.

It's been a year since I broke my leg, about the exact amount of time that my doctor said I would be fully healed up. So I skated with the confidence that my leg is whole, a luxury I haven't felt in a long time.

Then I knocked on my friend's door a few blocks away with urgency. She answered the door in her pajamas. "Let's go skate!!! We have to! It's the only thing that will sustain us!!!"

"Uh... actually, I'm sleeping?"

"All you have to do is put on your skate shoes and coat. That's what I did."

It was 16 degrees in the late evening. "You're crazy", she said before closing the door. "But I want to skate too."

I cruised around fast like a maniac until I broke a serious sweat. What is better for a pent up and irritated cranky person than the private personal drama in the pushing and jumping kicking toe flicking falling getting up again then landing and cruising of skateboarding? Nothing. I'm absolutely certain.
I got home and called all the skaters in my phone to set up time to go to the skatepark. The next day I got a new deck and skate shoes and took some personal afternoon time off of work to schralp it up with my homies. I finally skated Krush again, after breaking my leg there last winter and I no longer hate that skatepark or fear the bowl. It's funny. I spend so much time and energy trying to act like I'm supposed to be a for real adult but I wind up having the best time taking turns skating with a bunch of helmeted and smelly 7th grade boys at the miniramp. Funfuckingfunfuckingfunfunfun.

Ok, I am getting to the point. Getting back on my skateboard and fixing my bike this week has made me realize how much I am missing in life when I am just drinking beer and watching football sitting around trying not to freeze. Without it I am lost. While I was skateboarding my creative thought process and abstract reasoning skills came back after mysteriously disappearing during recent crucial times. Its a very real and tangible phenomenon how skateboarding expands your mental awareness and understanding of everything. That's why I do it. Later I asked other skaters at the skater bar if that is real to them or am I just crazy, but everyone I talked to knew what I meant.

So it's important to make the time and effort to skate when you are a Chicagoan because this weather will weigh you down in every way. Even when its fucking freezing and you think you're too old for goofing around. Just wear gloves and a hat and you'll get warm pretty fast. And call me, because I've decided that a dedicated person should skate every day that they can even if its just the curb in front of my house, as long as I am not injured or its wet outside. There are so many things I am not even close to doing on my skateboard that I have been dreaming about for a long time. Cold air has higher pressure than warm air, which is what I believe makes us all feel so yuck in months like this.

Hotter Than the Inferno

2006-07-31T13:47:00.000-07:00

"You're never going to know about the world until you get out there and go it alone and see for yourself. What are you, chicken? Bawk bawk bawk bawk bawk."

My Uncle Howie amused himself with this sentiment several times over some spliffs and San Miguels as I planned my trip across Cebu to a marine sanctuary, shooting down my hopes of borrowing an air conditioned vehicle and driver for the next several weeks and traveling in style. I'd be borrowing his beach house though, and just for the snarky attitude I considered hitting him up for house sitting fees and asking him to pay me to go stay there. I didn't want to look the gift horse too closely in the smoking belching mouth, though so I just mentioned that when my mother sent me off to the Philippines, the last thing that she had in mind was letting her youngest daughter wander solo through the country poorly equipped with some laughable language skills, a skateboard and a backpack full of contraband. Back in the day she wouldn't even let me go down the street for a coca cola in a plastic bag without having a nanny and a guard.

When he dropped me off at the bus terminal with my 60 pesos ($1.50) for the six hour bus ride, his look was a little more stricken and way less smart alecky.

"Shit, I feel like a parent now. You'll be ok, right?" her said nervously chainsmoking.

"It's a wild world, and I have an American passport. That's hot property. If you find my finger in the mail could you put it in the freezer until they can reattach it? And try not to be too stingy if they ask for ransom money, sell my paperbacks on ebay if you have to."

"You're an adult, you can handle it."

"Peace out homes!," and I gave him snaps.

I stepped on the bus and enjoyed the rare look of concern on my uncle's face as he put his money where his mouth was. I looked around for somewhere to sit.

The bus was a clanking metal box with torn up vinyl seats. The windows were just open rectangles with wooden boards that could fit into the space to close out the sun. The only problem with this was that if all of the "windows" were closed the bus turned into a rolling oven. But with the windows open the beating strength of the relentless sunlight turned it into an oven anyways. I was wearing pants and a long sleeved tshirt for traveling purposes because all the girls in the Philippines cover themselves up even when its blazing, so I resigned myself to sweating through my clothes.

The crowd on the bus consisted of middle aged men with beer bellies and dirty shirts all chewing on something, and lurkers that had the up to no good vibe all around them. Those were the guys that had intense native look in their eyes, curious and predatory at the same time which makes me know what an animal feels like when its been spotted in a hunt and about to be pounced on. I knew that look, all the men in the red light district a few weeks earlier in Amsterdam wandered the streets with it. And I'd seen it a few times in Chicago. All the window seats were taken, and the only women on the bus besides me sat by themselves up front.

One guy tried to grab my eskrima sticks from off my backback.

"Don't!!" I said sharply and grabbed them back. He let go.

Shit. Where the hell was I supposed to sit?

Thats when I spotted some girls in the back sticking their heads out the window waving goodbye to their friends. Typical cebuana dalagas (young ladies). I could tell by their long glossy hair, lipstick and hoop earrings. They were dressed kind of slutty for Cebu in their tank tops and shorts, but what the hell, thats way better than the creepy seats up front. I headed back there, traded smiles with the girl next to me and dropped my stuff on the floor in front of my feet.

I glanced at the floor next to me and was jolted out of the momentary comfort zone I had just established when I saw her feet. Oh shit! Not only were they quite large, but her toenails were an inch long! Each!And they were bumpy and gnarly and painted in red!

I looked at her face again and noticed the stubble on her chin and around her bright red lipsticked mouth. Definitely much hairier than the typical Cebuana. And all around her eyebrows where it was starting to regrow. Even her sideburns were shaved. Damn girl! At this point she was brushing her hair.

"Whats your name?" she asked and held out her hand, with fingernails of various lengths of long also painted in red. "I'm Nico."

"My name is Brenda Lee."

"Ah, like the singer!"

Tous le monde. Everybody says that when I tell them my name all around the world. I never knew so many people like Nashville country music.

We chatted for a minute, I told her my story and asked where she was going. I wished I had brought some jewelry to give her.

She fanned herself prettily as the sun beat down on us, and her friend in the seat behind us shielded herself with an umbrella inside the bus.

"It's hotter than Dante's Inferno in here!" she exclaimed.

I giggled. What an unlikely reference.

"Yes, we have entered the eighth ring of hell!" I chimed in, then she looked at me quizzically. Oh well, I was very accustomed to not being understood at that point.

She showed off the bikini she was bringing and kept playing with her jewelry. Occasionally she'd go an conference in slang Cebuano with her girls and they'd eye me as they talked. After a moment she looked troubled and wanted to tell me something.

"You know... I'm not really a girl," she stated very delicately.

I started laughing. "Don't worry. I'm not as dumb as I look! You're very pretty though."

Ode to True Love: Skateboarding the Summer Solstice

2006-06-22T13:49:00.001-07:00

Ode to True Love: Skateboarding the Summer Solstice

I almost rolled past the skate park as I biked north on the lakefront path on because there were so many things to look at as we approached Wilson and I had a lot on my mind. The air felt like it was melting onto my skin and sweat dripped into my eyes as crews of skateboarders came from every direction. I kept my balance with my board strapped to my backpack and just focused on not crashing. In the middle of this beats started bumping from stacks of speakers very close by and I wondered where the party was at, when I glanced to the right and almost fell off my bike when I saw the thousands of people swarming the park packed into every corner mob deep.

"Are you fucking serious?"

I switched gears and rolled through the grass up to the fence, where we paused to gape before me and Corinne locked our bikes to it and jumped straight into the frenzy.

"Are you for real going to skate this craziness?" I asked Corinne as we dropped our bags to the ground.

"This doesn't bother me. In Paris sometimes the skatepark gets so packed that we have to wait a half hour to skate. I'm used to this. Besides, its a holiday, we gotta skate!"

Yeah, she had a point. Holidays exist for the purpose of celebrating with the people you love. And here, conveniently, was all the elements of a party. In the midst of the massive crowd there was a tent set up with turntables, where our homies just happened to be djing surrounded by speakers taller than me standing on my skateboard. Skaters swarmed all over every inch of concrete and as I looked around the crowd as a whole appeared to be like a faceless hollering streaming blob of pulsing life.

"Have I ever even seen you out in the sunlight before?," I wondered as I hugged and kissed my old friends who just happened to be hanging around the dj tent like it was just another open mike night, and was genuinely happy to see every one of them. I love Chicago. I found the awesome locals skaters I see everyday and bumped knucks and felt just a bit more at ease seeing those familiar faces like this is just what we do for fun and stepped up to the lip of the pool. Normally it might have been hard to skate in front of hundreds of people, but everywhere around me I found people that are close to my heart. I don't think I realized that until I found myself in this situation.

I shouldn't have hustled so hard down the bike path on such a sunny day. I was still out of breath and my face felt like I was emanating waves of fire, my heart was racing with white heat while my blood pounded from the bike ride. My legs felt like jello and my mouth was so dry I couldn't even swallow as I gasped for breath, and the moment I stepped on my board my knees were shaking like battery acid was running through my muscles. I wondered if it had been such a good idea to get so blazed before I jumped on my bike - could this moment have blown my mind any less? Oh well. Do or die, whatcha gonna do. While I was regaining my bearings, I sat in a puddle of iced tea. The park was so packed you couldn't even tic tac around or get any sort of flow and it smelled vaguely like a rotten wet towel.

Between the chaos of the crowd, Alo and I-Ron dropping beats on the decks, Junior squatting up in a tree over his hammock with a cooler of budweisers, and the colors changing shifting in the sky by the moment, it felt like the convergence of my night life meeting my day life in a surreal mashup. It was the summer solstice, when the daylight runs the deepest into the night on the longest day of the year so it was bound to be the strange sort of evening when the line blurs between time. I did not go gently into that good night - I took Dylan Thomas's advice, and burned and raved at the dying of the day, and raged against the dying of the light.

The crowd in the street course roared, there was no way to even get in there. I just couldn't look over to that side, there were so many bodies that I had to block that whole side of the park entirely out of my consciousness. Over by the bowls it was an aggression session, I just started going whenever I could. Skaters were snaking each other left and right and dropping in on each other like frenzied bats as the beats pounded through the air. At one point Corinne and I were skating doubles in the bowl and three other skaters dropped in it with us and we were skating a line of five or six. Radness! No one crashed!

The chaos of the scene was overwhelming and it would have had me weeping on one of my more sensitive days, but the facts remained that:

1. Everywhere I turned I saw a familiar face

2. I didn't think I'd even get to skate at all today but the rain let up

3. We were still fucking ripping the bowls in spite of it all

4. Music!

I saw Christina saunter up to the fence with Bijou and Ozzie's leashes in her hands, so I took a break from the havoc to hang out with them for the only moment of calm and peace that I had the entire day.

There was an exponential amount of the usual people to watch the stupid things that I do when I skate, and as I looked down at my legs and hands for the first time I wondered what I looked like when I am skateboarding. I just decided that this was not the time or place to start contemplating that or be neurotic.

I had the rare bonus of having a various assortment of old-school Chicago thrashers give me tips on my kickflip as I practiced in the only two foot square circle of empty cement uninhabited by human bodies. It was a miracle that no one got hurt.

When the music turned off as the sun relented its hold on the day and finally dipped slowly below the horizon, my body felt wrecked like a class of kindergartners had gleefully bounced around on my back and my spine like a trampoline all afternoon, and I still hadn't found any water. I was covered in a thin coating of sweat mixed with dust, my hands were tore up and sticky and I kept walking into clouds of gnats. Gnarly. I hydrated with a popsicle before contemplating just passing out under a tree in a panic. There was still the bike ride home ahead of me though, so I curled up into a ball at Corinne's feet gasping and clutching my skateboard and rolling around and told her that I thought I was dying.

Later when we were sat down for dinner and had settled down, Corinne named her skateboard and proclaimed her undying love as she gazed at her Tony Trujillo high heeled legs Anti Hero deck and ate her french fries.

"His name is Clement, after my first love."

I flipped the deck under my feet to look at Mark Gonzales sweatpants smiling happily nestled in a bed of red flowers, and I saw her point. I marveled at how fond a person could be of an inanimate object. Our skateboards have always loved us back, unconditionally with no Oedipal issues or any skeletons in the closet. Even when I broke my ankle; I would blame the dunk highs that were a half sized too big for me before I would ever blame the Marc Johnson flying V guitar board I was riding (even though I retired it that day). It's more loyal than anything - no one else ever rides my board, and it would never cheat on me with my friend while I went out of town on a business trip. I spent time with it alone, and in front of hundreds of people. Last year we circumnavigated the globe together and hit the streets in five countries I'd never been in before and I believed that its presence kept me safe, as I wandered with it strapped to my back. It responds to everything, and gives back more than everything that I put into it. Devotion.

I realized that I too was in love.

*************************************************************************************

Then today our pictures are in the newspaper, on the cover of the showcase section of the Sun-Times. Oooh, the Sun times. There's an awesome photo of Corinne, and the one of me makes me cringe. Is that what I look like when I skate?

Here's the article:

http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-ftr-skateboard22.html

Last week we were skating and a reporter approached us for a story on girl skaters. He kept asking about getting vibed in the park by boys.

"Only douchebags do that, we just skate," I kept telling him, but he had a strong concept of what he wanted the article to be about.

But at least I finally got some skate pictures after bumming about the fact that I never had any a few weeks ago.

Tomorrow and the next day and the next day there will be new news and photos of different times in other people's lives but for this moment its my strange reality.

Ode to True Love: Skateboarding the Summer Solstice

2006-06-22T13:49:00.000-07:00

The Whole Thing About Living the Double Life...

2006-06-05T13:50:00.000-07:00

... is that it requires a hell of alot of inconvenient shoe changes and wardrobe adjustments.

It's Never the Same Place Twice

2006-06-01T13:51:00.000-07:00

Life is good right now, but it still boggles my mind how quickly things can change. Just like the sea, deceptively peaceful and harmonious one moment then violent and deadly the next never the same place twice. Its not about avoiding storms but steering through them. People keep telling me that darkness purifies the soul, and I am beginning to not trust any person who has never really suffered through anything in their lives. Until then, how could you take life seriously? How could you otherwise rid yourself of the stupid impulses and compulsions that waste your time and life until you start being serious about living well? It makes me appreciate the things in my life that are the most solid and enduring - like my family with all of their flaws and all our strange traditions and our culture and the house I've lived in for the past eight years more or less (minus short stints living elsewhere having crazy adventures). With all other facts of life transient and fleeting those are the things that will keep you on an even keel, what you come home to.

My legs feel strong, I've been racing them. Skating hard, riding bikes, dancing. My ankles are the same size again and my brain has been springing with endorphins.

Whenever it rains pain shoots up and down my leg. Those aches are so abstract to me now, because as long as I can move my leg I will. There have only been a couple of times in the past couple of months that I've felt crippled by the pain, like when I tried boardslides four days in a row and didn't land most of them. The next day I was reminded of that horror when one block suddenly feels like four because you have to limp down it at less than one mile per hour. Thats when I got back into healing mode and slept a lot and ate food for a few days and just chilled. But otherwise I keep my joint loose by soaking it constantly compulsively stretching it, alternately working it.

Dedicated Skateboarder For Life

2006-04-26T13:52:00.000-07:00

Stepped onto my skateboard for the first time in 4 months and 25 days!!! The longest stretch of time off the board in years. Dropped back into the pool after making the sign of the cross and right away I remembered why. I can't help that I was born and raised in Chicago and the only things we have to surf here are concrete waves.

I still got it, and I was more than ready.

A big fuck all ya'll to anyone who ever thought that the broken bone would break me, and stop me from skateboarding again. And a punch in the face to anyone who assumed I would never find the will to get back on the board. I know its not the most ladylike thing to say, but its insulting and unsupportive to be doubted. The only people who said things like that were people who either don't skate at all or have never really skated with me, i.e. people who don't know what they are talking about. Ya'll don't know me and you don't know my style.

And if I fall again and have to get pulled out of another ramp or pool with a broken body, I'll be on the stretcher giving the finger to them and it would still be worth it. I skate for love, for no other reason and I am dedicated when it comes to the things I love.

Plus, I'm insured now bitches!!!!!

Hello from the BVI's

2006-04-20T13:54:00.000-07:00

From the Leeward Island chain, Virgin Gorda, the British Virgin Islands:

There goes life being stranger than fiction again.

For the 2nd time in as many years, I've been summoned to a faraway tropical island ostensibly for the purpose of business. Hilarious considering that I've made it my business to avoid all matters of serious business, and have been quite successful in this throughout my life. I wasn't even really looking for a serious job this time, but it found me. What has actually happened is that I have spent a small percentage of my time discussing matters of importance, and the rest exploring the coral reefs and ocean life. It has always seemed to happen at just the right time, and I feel that the ocean calls me.

I'm diving wrecks - and getting sponsored to do so. Around this particular island, there are 200 documented shipwrecks. Its not a very big island either. The pirates of the 1500's used this group of islands to exit the Caribbean and sail out to the Atlantic. Many fierce battles ensued, and the pirate ships were sunk. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island about this area.

Its a very odd twist of fate considering that at this time last month I was freaking out about my leg still being in a cast and wondering when I would ever walk on my feet again. Now I feel whisked away to be in the element where I feel most happy, beneath the ocean water flying through the deep pressure of inner space exploring the colors that wash through the diffusion of the light. Divers call it getting off the rock. My body springs back to life in the water. I traded the fiberglass for fins, much more suited to my well being, and the swimming is way better physical therapy than anything anyone can devise. I've slept on the water and been lulled and comforted by the waves of the sea. Everything has been falling into place as if by some grand orchestration, I've been meeting all kinds of people who have become instrumental in healing me. Life is not just crazy, its ridiculous and mine continues shift surreally between the extremes of absolute beauty and absolute misfortune. As usual.

Got the Cast Off!!

2006-04-04T13:55:00.000-07:00

I had my eleven week visit to my orthopedic doctor today, and as I entered the hospital I closed my eyes and made the sign of the cross.

"I am sorry God, but if they tell me that they're wrapping my leg up and that I am going to have to be on crutches one more time, I am afraid that I am not going to be able to stop myself from just breaking out of here."

I was inspired by the story that a girl told me at Stephen's house about her friend whose arm got wrapped up, and got so frustrated by the debilitating aspect of being in a cast that he just cut it off himself and just let his broken bone dangle. Fuck it. At least he was free. At this point I was willing to deal with the consequences. This situation was starting to feel unnatural.

The P.A. sliced into the fiberglass shell with a small 1 1/2" circular saw, I could feel the heat of it close to my skin as it barely grazed the gauzy underwrapping of the cast. They pried it apart, and I lifted my leg out and started laughing.

"It looks like it belongs to a mummified leper with anorexia!"

You don't want to know what I mean by that, lets just say that I am due for a long session with the foot scrub and pumice stone. I hobbled over to the x-ray department. The x-ray technicians know me by now, they find me and my story very peculiar, but we're cool - one of them even gave me a ride home last time. I high fived them and posed for my shots.

He came back with bad news.

"It's still broken. It's probably going to be a year before its fully healed up. You broke it bad, girl. This ain't no greenstick fracture, this was a real break. They're probably going to cast you up again, you're fixing to be off your feet for a while still. But you didn't hear it from me. I'm not the doctor."

That was the last thing I wanted to hear, and I grabbed the x-rays and moped back to the orthopedic office, fighting back the tears. I drew the images of my bones in my sketchbook as I waited for the doctor, and eyed the door as I hatched my escape plan.

Finally my doctor came around, and picked up my x-rays. He looked at them for just an instant, looked at my chart, and felt up my ankle.

"You've been off your feet for eleven weeks now, I think we can start you walking now."

"Shut up!"

"No, seriously."

"But my bone is still broken in the x-ray."

He launched into an explanation of why that was, bones heal slowly, it takes time, blah blah blah; while I adjusted to the idea that he was really giving me the go ahead to walk without a cast. The P.A. strapped an aircast around my ankle.

"Go ahead, stand up!"

I felt like the Little Mermaid and held onto the doctors hand as I placed my foot with wobbly assurance onto the ground, and on the way out of the hospital I made the sign of the cross again; this time I prayed with much more humility.

* * *

During the darkest moments of being off my feet, I consoled myself by remembering better times. Nine months ago I was on the other side of the world on a tropical island spending weeks exploring and studying the mysterious vibrant coral reef, swimming in the color and life of the ocean, alone except for the cute guys from all over the world. I fell into that experience just as I fell into this one - headlong fully unexpectedly and by chance.

Through my sadness, I told myself the same thing that I remember telling myself the day I scuba dived with the whale sharks: this moment is going to pass, and you'd better experience it fully now because it isn't going to last, and it will never come back. Nothing lasts, everything will definitely change. It is the only physical fact.

I wish that I could say that I handled this experience with grace and dignity, but that would be a total lie.

Last month I found myself bubbling over with frustration over the restrictions my injury imposed on me. Skateboarding is the only thing that I can do in the middle of a shitty day that will neutralize my anxiety; if I am pissed off and I go and skate, chances are that when I return I will be totally stoked out, or at least I'll have been able to brush off what it was that bothered me. If I can't go out and skate, then I'll go out and dance.

As I hobbled around feeling like a robot, with the prosthetic freakishness of my crutches and hard cast, my reality spiraled into a bleak and desolate dream.

I remember a string of days of waking up to the hard repressiveness of that fiberglass prison and closing my eyes wishing I could go back to sleep for a thousand years. I slipped down the stairs and busted my lip when I stubbornly tried to do my laundry by myself, resulting in the corner store guys gently urging me to "take it easy" when I hobbled in for some vitamin d milk.

My boyfriend broke up with me the week before Valentines day, just a few days after I had quit smoking cigarettes for the first time in ten years. I think you have to be a girl to see the horror in that. I couldn't drink coffee or ingest any refined sugar, and drinking alcohol was out too - all that stuff is bone robbers. Everything that I loved and was all about was suddenly on the other side of life. All I could do was lie back and contemplate it all, it felt so unbearable. Then later that week I went to the doctor and found out that my fracture was complicated because of the way that it broke, and that I wasn't going to be healing up as fast as I had hoped and be off my feet indefinitely. It was absolutely sadistic fortune, and it was then that I learned the meaning of the word despair. I also gained insight into such lovely terms as 'nihilism' and 'existential angst' - they were no longer just academic concepts, that shit made sense in a terrible way that it never had before. One interesting thing that I learned about myself was that while I could bear the physical pain of my broken bone with no problem and no painkillers, the emotional effects felt overwhelming and those were the times that I wanted an anesthetic for my heart.

When a few beats had passed, all of the bogus things that went down started to seem ridiculous. Like there was no way that life could get any more absurd or preposterous if you tried to engineer it that way. It dawned on me that shit was so bad, it was funny. There is a fine line between tragedy and comedy in the human experience, which is why the masks of drama are laughing and crying. And it is very characteristic of my life to have things shift in such an extreme, for events to unfold in a fantastically exaggerated way. I couldn't really laugh about it until today, because until now its just been too personal, but I could see the humor in the whole situation.
On the brighter side of things, I finally quit smoking after being a dedicated tobacco enthusiast for half my life. I never even wanted to quit smoking before, but now that I feel the difference I am so glad that I did. I weaned myself of my vices, switched to green tea, ate fruit instead of candy, took vitamins and hydrated like a motherfucker. Almost every vice: chocolate and herbs have healing properties so I figured I owed it to myself to continue to enjoy those, but after Ash Wednesday it was in moderation.

Things changed when I realized that the only thing that I had any control over in this situation was my attitude. It took being around a few good people who set a shining example for me of the difference between being a nurturing force for health and life as opposed to one of negativity and destruction. The one conclusion that I've come to at the end of the experience, on this day that they cut off that freaking cast - its going to sound really dopey to you if you have never been hurt, but fuck it one day you'll understand - but its this: what it all comes down to is that its really just all about love.

Love heals everything. Even if you have to generate it yourself and you feel like you don't have any reserves. I am not a hippie, and I am more sober minded than I have been in years and I'll still say it. I don't care how trite that is. Love is the only thing that can heal you and until I die I hope to always be a force of love.

Crrraaacck Went My Bone

2006-01-23T13:57:00.000-08:00

Last August I turned 26, and with a straight face determined that this would truly be the year that I would pack away all the youthful frivolousness and whimsy that I have celebrated in my life since I was way too young, tone it down and take off on a new threshold of maturity. I went out and bought a new suit and high heels to acknowlege how serious I was about growing up, and then proceeded to charge like a hothead through a series of very adult situations.

So its kind of odd that five months later, I find myself adapting to a new routine of drinking milk, napping with my foot propped on a teddy bear, crawling on my knees up the stairs and crushing on a comicbook superhero. I mean, there were times that I thought I was regressing into childishness before, but it now appears that I've devolved all the way back to the crib, living the lifestyle of a little baby.

The bad omens

The day after the New Year, I went out to the skatepark with the grlz to skate off our weekend hangovers and start the year right. We braided our hair and danced in our seats all the way down there. It was a progressively rowdy car ride. At one moment I found myself simmering down and laying back staring up at the sky, watching the rhythm of the passing electrical poles. I noted the assembly of small black sparrows perched on the electric lines, there was like four miles of uninterrupted bird sitting alongside the road perched wing to wing. As we sped further forward, the birds started to flock in bigger groups, clustering in from smaller groups coming from different directions.

We turned the music off and marvelled. After a couple of miles they were flying in massive clouds of black and looked like liquid shapes that shifted directions, funneled twisted and spun. The bird formation was at times hundreds of meters wide, groups would break off and come back, flying faster and faster. They surrounded our car, got close, flew straight to the windshield and spun away, came back and swirled around us. We were getting closer to the skatepark and the black birdcloud was still escorting us.

We were just a few blocks away from the skatepark and I was still staring transfixed out the window. My rapture was broken with a jolt when my eyes landed on the sign for the ambulance company that screamed *emergency!* and was situated unfortunately just a few blocks away from the skatepark. I sat up and shook myself back to reality and hoped I might never have to be in one of those.

We entered the skatepark, our usual spectacle of disorderly femininity and immediately aroused the ire of the girl at the front desk, wearing head to toe skate gear and the mug of a gargoyle. "She must not skate at all," we collectively thought at the same time as she glared at us with beady eyes, and possessively placed her hand on Bob, the guy at the desk. She smooched him, while staring at us with a peripheral sideways glance. We shifted uncomfortably. "Nice shoes!" I said. She ignored me. A girl skater would have been excited to see us, at least as excited as her boyfriend was. My cousin rolled her eyes and stuck her tongue in her cheek lewdly. We signed in and bought our way into the new girls skate free! Tuesday club that Bob agreed to start there on the spot.

Yippeekiyay

We warmed up in the pool and loosened our muscles. It was slippery with waxy masonite and required a lighter gentler touch than concrete. It took a while to grow accustomed to the feeling of the pool, but I was getting stoked out more by the minute. It had been such a long time! I had a few tentative runs and realized that this bowl was small enough for me to get up to the lip consistently and had enough compact curves to speed me around endless lines. I worked my way up from just hitting the back truck for a 5-0 and then I finally found a place where I can stick a long 50-50. I've been wanting to do that. I started experimenting and seeing if I could get my front wheels over the lip and try a feeble grind. Yeehaw! Almost! I took a break and called my boyfriend to brag that I was skating and he wasn't. That bowl was fun.

Hours past and we were skating hard, we moved to the street course and did some wall rides. I made some miserable attempts on the manual pad and got super frustrated with my stabs at landing my flip, which I have sometimes then lose. So I snuck back to the pool and did some runs, my heart was beating hard now and I was having so much fun, I was almost delerious.

Here's when it happened

A girl came up to the platform and started talking to me, Corinne and Cheryl. We high fived her and just started chatting while we took turns skating. She asked me how to drop back into the pool from a 50-50 and I couldn't explain it. "Uh, you just twist and drop? Do you know what I'm talking about? Here, let me show you."

I waited for the last skater to leave the pool and balanced my trucks onto the lip. Something felt wrong from the moment I stepped on the board, but I just did what Mariah does and I shook it off. Something felt wrong as I pivoted on the back truck, but I pushed down with the front anyway because I was explaing something to someone. Something felt wrong as I was sliding down, but I figured it might be salvageable...

As my back wheel hung up on the lip, I dropped forward five feet to the ground, where at some point along the way the edge of my shoe by my pinky toe caught the ground as my leg and my body twisted the exact opposite direction, crushed on top of it. I heard a snap, inhaled, said "FUCK!", and knew that whatever happened it was serious. My foot had bent beckwards, the wrong way. It hurt so bad I couldn't hide it, or get up; the two things I normally do immediately when I fall. My leg spasmed and shook and inwardly I screamed, and as I got onto my elbows to look up, I saw three helmeted rollerbladers and two bikers gaping at me. I thought for a moment they heard my silent scream, before I realized that they were just shocked because they saw it all. I summoned my best glare and shot them with it, then looked for my friends. They mobilized into action, Cheryl took off my shoe as I tried not to cry and I hopped out of the pool with my arms on their shoulders. I realized that for the first time in my life I had to be carried out of the bowl.

I'd never sprained my ankle before or broken any bones. I've donated blood to the concrete, and lost a lot of skin, but my skeletal frame has always been intact. The only other time I had ever been injured somewhat seriously was the time that I got a concussion from skating in the rain like an idiot at Wilson, and me and Whitey crashed into each other head on - our skulls hit the ground and I was seeing stars. That was painful more for how stupid it was than actual nervous system trauma.

"I never thought I get broke off in a pool this small!" I said as they got me onto the bench and ran for ice.

"That's happened to me before. You're talking to a professional ankle roller. We just have to get ice right away," Corinne said.

I'd never sprained my ankle before so I didn't know how that was supposed to feel, and looked dubiously at my foot, which now dangled at freakish angle. "Do you think its sprained?" I asked.

"Yeah. The same thing happened to me before. You should get an aircast. In two weeks you'll be fine."

"Two weeks? I can't waste two weeks of my life hobbling around! I have all kinds of shit to do!"

"Well maybe you could get back on it in a week and a half."

"That sounds better."

Bob the guy at the front desk came over. "Its probably a sprain", he decided and I was relieved that that was what they though it was. A different girl was with him, rubbing his ass.

"You think its a sprain? Does that girl want to kick our asses now too?" I asked my cousin. "I hope its a sprain."

"Hey," she said, "do not ask me. I am not a doctor."

"Yeah. It has to be a sprain."

But there was no way that I was going to take a single step on the foot, and when Cheryl asked if I could walk to the car I refused. I knew I couldn't.

I looked around in a panic as the cold blood from the ice seemed to trickle through my body. Everyone here was like thirteen years old! I needed help! Then I spotted Brian C. walking up the stairs, he just got there and was tying his shoes. He was a family guy and the father of several small children and I trusted him as a responsible adult and recalled the time that he broke his wrist at Wilson. I was so glad to see him.

"Brian Carly! Could you please please please carry me out to the car? I weigh around a hundred pounds! I don't want to try to make it down the stairs!!!"

He saw the ice pack and winced. He picked me up and carried me as I tried to remain calm and make small talk. "So, how's your wrist?" I asked. "Oh my wrist, that was so long ago. Its fine. Don't worry, it's probably just a sprain. This happens to me all the time," he said. We talked about pain and sprains and I hugged him before we sped off.

Bloody aftermath

A few days later, my foot had swollen to about the size of a small loaf of bread. I wrapped it and had been taking ibuprofen, which didn't help at all. I had tried very hard to remain calm, but the pain was so intense and there seemed to be no end to the swelling. I started to worry that it might explode, because it felt that thats what it wanted to do. My brother the medic examined at my foot and felt a weak pulse in it, which was a good indication that it wasn't badly broken. He diagnosed a type III sprain, or a fracture. Fuck. I was still going with the sprain.

Dave D. had come over to visit and brought over some crutches. "I'm out of here!" I proclaimed as I bounced out of bed to stand on my leg. I felt something shift just under my knee from my ankle movement and got the chills. I continued to bury that thought, then proceeded to crutch around town.

I was lying propped up with ice tucked all around my ankle, which was throbbing and still swelling. I looked at it in horror and felt my blood grow colder. My emotions were bottoming out and I don't actually remember much of that evening at all, but was told later on that I was cranky beyond belief, picked several fights and insulted my boyfriend's art. I am still ashamed of it. It was the pain! All I can truly recall was the feverish sweating and the deepest agony in my bones, drifting in and out of dreams that started with the sound of that *SNAP* that I heard when my ankle twisted and evolved into a gallery of terror and dread. In one of my dreams, I was a galloping black horse and I heard a sharp crack, then collapsed in a pool of cold icy blood as I was shot in the leg. In another, I was a person in midstride hearing battle cries, then cut down fallen to my knees when an axe swung fast at my ankle and it crunched, in a red and orange swirl of heat. I woke up sobbing, at which point J. picked me up and carried me into a cab headed for the emergency room.

A couple of vicodins later things were still unreal, but at least my nerves were calm. My temperature was a few degrees colder than normal. I looked at the x-rays of my foot with the radiologist, who pointed out the place on my fibula where the bone had broken cleanly. The prognosis was 6-8 weeks with perhaps a surgery to repair the broken tendons by the small bones in my foot. "So it was broken!" I said with wonder. Denial is strangely comfortable, but coming to the bottom of things is way more satisfying. No wonder why I couldn't walk on it, duh. The emergency room doctor came around with strips of plaster to splint my leg and told me to roll over on my stomach.

"You want some more painkillers? I can get you some."

"No thanks. I think I'm going to puke from the ones I already took."

"You know, this splint is going to be pretty big when I finish setting it. Do you want a, uh, hospital gown? Because otherwise you might have to cut your pants off with some scissors when you get home."

"There is no way I am going to traipse around here in a hospital gown," I said, eyeballing the gangbanger moaning in the bed across the hall with his chest wrapped up around his stab wounds, and the old man lurched up next to him gaping across the way. "I would rather die, and I will sacrifice my pants not to have to do that. Could you just fix my foot and make sure to set it straight, please?"

The events proceeded with an awkward silence until I could finally get up and hobble away. I felt like Sophocle's punchline to the Oracle of the Sphinx's riddle to Oedipus, the "What walks on four feet than two feet than three feet?" I've healed fast from every injury I've ever had, and look at this as a good opportunity to make my ankles more solid, and stronger. I come from the sort of people who maniacally think that abusing the fine lines between life and death is loads of great fun and the only way to live, and that painful situations are useful as ninja training. I'm using all the hopping around that I'm doing on the good leg to build up strength so I can nollie on it and the balance to help do better nose manuals.

2005-11-17T13:23:00.000-08:00

Life continues to move forward at breakneck speeds. It's very convenient being a skateboarder and feeling accustomed to moving fast and reacting quickly physically to quick changeups and force yourself to skate through the pressure. The good news is that I haven't bailed on any hills I've bombed lately.

The tone was set a few weekends ago when Inbum dropped the needle on a record of ghoulish laughter from beyond the grave. It was some echoing voodoo caca hoohoo haha's. He was playing it over Vincent Price's monologue from Thriller, a normally pretty scary thing to listen to, but the absolute height of freaky creepiness to me that night. "Why can't I stop dancing to this?" I asked myself, as I clutched my skull fearing that I might seriously be tripping out.

It was a good thing I was dressed as a superhero that night, as was my cousin, because we needed some sort of supernatural force field to deflect all the deep pressure of the dark Halloween night. The Chicago White Sox had just swept the World Series and beat Houston TX in baseball. Every night during the weeks building up had been lively. I had been spending a good portion of the night hours prowling the streets like a werewolf with restless energy. The night before, my cousin and I visted a haunted house, where we practiced our ninja skills by jumping into every horror filled, strobe lit room and spooking the monsters and scary clowns before they could scare us.

Mars orbited very close to the earth that very night. I pointed it out to my cousin Cheryl as we drove west. At 11PM, it was 65 degrees above the horizon and glowed strongly, a very bright red.

"That's your planet!" I told my cousin, an Aries. "The god of war. I can't believe we can see it this clearly! And its Halloween"

We mused upon the sight as we felt the effects of the chocolates sink in. She put on her mask and gloves, I strapped my guns to my thighs and checked to make sure I had a lighter. Both of us reapplied our lipstick and searched in vain for eyedrops. We got out of the car and strode confidently towards the door of the party. We stopped abruptly.

"Oh shit, I forgot my phone!"

"I forgot my wallet!"

Fifteen minutes later we were still in the car a few blocks away from the party and no closer to being ready. We drove up closer so that we were right in front of the party, and finally we made it through the door.

"What the hell kind of superheroes are we?!?"

As the night proceeded, we made our way through clowns of masked strangers and found refuge in the company of some dancing bunnies with manic energy. Everything in that party quickly developed a coating of booze, including somehow my hands and cigarettes. We boogied down on a white glowing dancefloor with built in transitions, a floor to wall quarterpipe where the corners should have been. I had been sulking enviously watching the girl dressed as a roller chick because she had roller skates on and could skate the dancefloor. The guns were an absolute necessity as we fielded several leers or evil eyes and pushes and shoves, all of which were quickly stunned by a quick shot by the water gun. I put perfume in it before I left the house and found myself being obnoxiously trigger happy.

"Where the hell is my skateboard?" I wondered out loud, and I looked around. I spotted an old flat nosed torpedo of an old school deck flipped onto its side at the edge of the dancefloor. "Whose skateboard do you think that is?" I shouted in Chewie's face. He was wearing a bloody pink tutu and Mickey mouse ears

"That's Jeremy's".

"Who's that? I wonder if he'd let me ride it."

He pointed to the pillar, where I had noticed a figure standing motionless watching for the past half hour.

"Excuse me, dude? Can I ride your board? I've been wishing for a skateboard all night! This shit is bananas, there's no corners on the dancefloor! Seriously, when does that ever happen?"

I handed over to him my spray painted black squirt guns to make it an even trade, and skated the dancefloor.

It was nice to be able to skate around the crazy party in my costume for a moment and regain my sense of balance. That skateboard, a wide sturdy Santa Cruz reprint of a 1988 Jeff Kendall board, was a solace to me. The pressure of the night was building, and already felt intense. Outside the night was filled by the sound of sirens and most of the people at the party looked like strangers from some foreign city underneath their masks. And the boomers were kicking. We ate the second half of the chocolate.

"What we are witnessing here is the force of gravity between two large planets. How could things not feel very intense when large heavenly bodies swing close to each other? It is a natural phenomenon that we are seeing made manifest by everybody acting all bizarre," I reasoned pedantically like a geek as my cousin and I moved to the next party in the car. "Actually this is all very normal."

We pulled over to park on a dark empty street, and I stepped out to the curb to smoke a cigarette and regard the night sky. Cheryl was looking for her phone or something in the car, and Jeremy sat in the backseat keeping her company. I had dragged him along, when I stood in the doorway of the party and demanded to know if he wanted to hang out with a couple of superheroes for the night or what. So I was trying to relax a little bit and was in mid-thought when I saw a figure walking fast in the dark towards me. I sat very still and watched as a man emerged in the light, trying the handles of the doors and looking into the windows of all the cars parked on the street that I faced.

"What the hell are you doing?" I couldn't stop myself from talking shit in the silence of the streetlamps.

He looked up and saw me staring at him. He shot me this hard look from across the street, then kept walking.

"Don't be a jerkbag."

He glared at me intensely and I glared back. He walked away, swiftly, not looking back. I stubbed out my cigarette and jumped back in the car and locked my door. "This shit is bananas."

We walked down Milwaukee Avenue, past car accidents and police cars all over the place. I was trying to remember where I put my id, when I heard a voice stop me.

"Hey! Come over here!"

I looked over and a policeman in a vehicle called me over. I felt that I had no choice but to go over there. He looked me over.

"You know we're giving out tickets for jaywalking tonight."

"Oh shit. I am so sorry officer. I didn't realize I was jaywalking."

"You're not supposed to cross the street until the light says walk. If you don't, then that's jaywalking."

"Ok."

"Next time I will give you a ticket."

"Well thanks."

I walked away with the pressure of a thousand emotions. When another cop asked me across the block what the matter was, I stopped again.

"That guy almost gave me a ticket for jaywalking! Are you serious? I try to follow most of the laws every day and this is just too much for me to bear tonight! I just stopped a guy from breaking into cars; where were you guys? It's Halloween and I am just seriously overwhelmed, so I am sorry that I jaywalked, but I have had so much on my mind, I've been through so much this week and everything is just crazy! I am sorry for jaywalking, what else can I say!!"

"So where's your boyfriend? That guy was just trying to talk to you, forget about him."

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, but this was an emotional crescendo and I just went with what felt more natural, which wound up being the latter. I started bawling.

"It should be illegal for you to ask me that!" He let me go with no further questions.

As the night wore on, more images of ghosts and spirits swirled in my head. I had to at least get off the street and away from the cops. Far away from the noise and the light of the city, I huddled in a the sanctuary of a dark room listening to the voice of a boy whispering about the souls that haunt him, that continue to ride through life with him. I told him a ghost story of my own. It certainly felt like the eve of the beginning of the dark season of the year.

Ifelt the presence of certain ghosts, from Jim Morrison's voice singing
to me all day through the radio, in Walgreens and even on tv, and books
of his poetry falling off my shelves and into my hands, to Oscar
Wilde's plays making their way into my path. I had visited both of
their graves earlier this year.

The ancient Celts count the first day of winter -the dark season, the end of the light season- as November 1st and bring it in with a festival called Samhain. This was a time in which the realms of the living and the dead were blurred and chaotic forces would invade the world of order. What a coincidence. During this time, spirits of the dead and spirits yet to be born were said to walk amidst the material world. Magic is most potent during this time of the autumn solstice. In Norse mythology, it was a night said to be overrun by mischievous elves. They were all most likely laughing at me.

the pace of this place

2005-10-24T13:19:00.000-07:00

Racing through hours and minutes that pass

I've seen twelve things in the time it takes

to catch one breath.

moments slip past in a flash

faster and faster

my eyes and my mind

slice like razors through time

cutting my path through its fabric.

(when I can hold them steady)

Let's Make Some Noise!

2005-09-26T13:17:00.000-07:00

"If you see a police, do you have to stop stop? Or can you just do the roll stop? Or do the slow down stop? You don't really have to stop? In France nobody stops."

- Corinne on stop sign etiquette

Our plan was to leave on Monday morning, because Cheryl was the only one in the car who was obliged to an employment schedule and she only had a couple of days to spare. It was preceded by 5 straight nights of dancing to house music until dawn and afternoon skate sessions sweating out the hangovers, I had been living on a steady diet of beer, crepes, nutella, bread and cheese and ganja. The harvest moon had brought a fevered pitch of hedonism - everyone we knew was in rare form, hooting and howling at the moon, cute boys were everywhere bringing us drinks and spinning us around on the dancefloor. I had moved on to drinking whiskey and my head was so full of beats that I found myself boogying everywhere I went even during the day, dancing down the aisles singing at the grocery store, getting props from bums on the street.

The harvest moon is way more fabulous than I had ever known. My friend in Japan emailed me about how people there have always stayed up all night to watch its glow, it being the most luminescent light the moon makes all year. Then someone else told me that it is called the harvest moon because it was so bright that people could use its light to work in the fields and harvest the fields that grew under the sun all summer. Wow. So it's an ancient time of bringing in the fruit of your labors. Then I remembered another thing about the month of September. My favorite story from Hesiod's Theogony is about the birth of the muses, and their birthdays are nine days in September.

Zeus and Menosmene (the goddess of memory) had a torrid love affair which lasted for nine days. During this time, she had a break from carrying the weight of all the world's memories on her shoulders. Nine months later she bore nine daughters, each of whom were bestowed with a creative force. They are: Euterpe (music), Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Erato (love poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Polyhymnia (sacred poetry), Tersichore (dancing), Thalia(comedy), and Urania (astronomy). As daughters of the king of all the gods and the goddess of memory, they evoke the most divine inspiration out of human artists to preserve for the rest of history. When I found myself partying for nine days straight with people whose energy I found overwhelmingly inspiring, I was like, "what a coincidence!"

By Monday morning when we left for Ohio, my blood already felt stewed like the weird elixir for healing up muscle aches and pains and channeling energy my old roommate Gautam used to distill with herbs and alchohol. Only these herbs came from British Columbia not China and they only stewed with the alchohol after I drank it in shots at the bar. But it seemed to be a pretty good recipe for longevity anyways. The rental car guys could sense the fragility of our mindstate and handled us very gently.

Corinne and I threw together our essentials. Having lived mobile lives lately, we basically just zipped up the bags we've been living out of and grabbed our skateboards and some pillows. Travelling light helps you to appreciate the small things in life. All weekend before we left I marveled with morbid fascination at how little planning went into this journey. As the sort of person who tries to arrange all movements and calculate the costs in advance, I found it shocking that Corinne and Cheryl were prefectly comfortable with the idea of just going to Ohio and crashing wherever. We didn't even have car reservations. I was mystified. We had agreed over dinner at the Thai restaurant that the three of us had a reasonable amount of wits amongst us to figure out how to get around one we got there.

So we just prepared by boogying down and getting in shape, getting ready to skate and toning up our legs and stretching out. We had smoked through the tightly packed past week with long pulling drags. I had gotten an average of like three hours of sleep every night, just disco napping, and I'd given up the illusion that I might ever find personal time to catch up on my sleep. Life has been too much fun for snoozing. So it is nice to finally get a chance to just sit still in the car listening to music. Corinne is so stoked about being at the wheel of her own vehicle after all the directions she's been taking from everyone since she's gotten here. She handed me a couple of sheets of notes and a huge North American atlas, then wondered what R N D meant on the gearshift. In France its 1 2 3 4 and R. Then she tried out the horn.

"In France you can't do this. They put the horn over here," and she gestured to the side of the steering column, "Lets make some noise!" as she beeped out of the alley.

I said that its probably in everyone best interest to put the horn a bit out of reach in the hands of Parisian drivers. I pictured the sound of all that reckless horn blowing. In Chicago I noticed that most people normally have a disciplined hesitancy when it comes to honking their horns, avoiding it until it is absolutely necessary.

Cheryl has the whole backseat to herself, decked out with pillows and airplane blankets. Its a break for her from driving the party train around and time massage some tiger balm and heal up from the shoulder collision she suffered at the skatepark.

As we cruised, I recalled the events that lead us to be currently hurtling down I-90. Corinne knows exactly where she is going now, and I don't need to give her anymore directions or interpretations.

The Love Refugee

14 months ago she showed up solo at the greyhound station in Chicago and called up some friends she had met the summer before at the skatepark when she visited with her boyfriend. They brought her over to my house and I very cornily brought out some bread and cheese and put on a French movie to watch as I tried to understand what she was talking about.

She got her story across and I managed to piece together the story somewhat. She was from Paris, seriously dated a guy from Cleveland (?!) for a few years. After arriving in Ohio ready to spend the summer with him, she found that he had changed his mind. A terrible falling out happened, and she found herslf having to bat the hell out of town just a couple of days into her months long stay in the U.S. Chicago was just the next closest town and she knew Jen from the skatepark, so that's where she headed next. It was a very somber story and the only thing that she would ever talk about. I was like "Get over it! Moving on is the best thing you can do!" and tried to change the subject to something more fun.

She was collapsed fatigued and jetlagged still on the couch and five minutes into L'Auberge Espagnole she was snoring with chipped hot pink nails and black mascara streaked with tears smudged over her eyes. The heavily accented skater girl passed out on the couch was just as much of a marvel to me as the many oddities that cross my path, so I took it in stride and pulled a blanket over her.

For the next few months I checked in on her every once in a while. When I hadn't heard from her in a while I'd ring her.

"I'm in Pennsylvania. I'm with some friends and we're sleeping in somebody's mansion. We did motor skis on the lake and did inner tubes," I remember her whispering into the phone one late night.

"Ummm... yeah, sure. Well ok then. I was just calling to make sure that everything is ok. It's cool. But how could you forget to invite me!?"

She would tell me about baseball games, fashion show, skate spots, beauty salons, people's parent's houses. I'd been working a lot during those days and had a crazy busy schedule so all this talk about fun vacation time got on my nerves.

We kept in touch after she went home to France and a few months later when I found myself in Paris for a few weeks I called her. She was the first person in France who understood what I was talking about. We walked all over the city taking photos and skating, and two guys sang "ooh baby baby its a wild world" to us accompanied by guitars in the Metro. I stayed at her parent's house outside the city for a weekend to recuperate from the flu I caught in Paris and was so grateful for the warm bed and holy shit the food. It was a warm cushy oasis between planes and trains. She was still talking about the ex, and I was still just trying to change the subject. But when she's got something on her mind it rules her world.

"I hope he sees how happy I am and how much I have changed the next time I see him."

"Who cares what he thinks?"

"I've learned so much English and I skate so much better now."

"It's not healthy to keep thinking about him anyways."

"I wonder what he'll think if he ever sees me again."

"Will you just get over it?!"

"Will you come with me to Cleveland in September to pick up my stuff? He never mailed my boxes to me. We'll take a road trip and skate at all the parks I know."

"Well I guess I'll go skate and make sure you don't get lost. And I've been meaning to slap that dude since that day I met you."

I wondered why she wasn't just jumping for joy that she had met so many new friends and got to know a city and party like a rockstar, instead of staying in Cleveland being someone's skater beeyatch. And why hadn't she gotten a new boyfriend yet? Guys were calling her up all the time and trying to hang out with "the French girl" before she left town. Did she honestly expect to get back together with the guy who abandoned her in a foreign country like Theseus did to Ariadne on the island of Naxos? I decided I wouldn't allow it.

The Rest Stop

When we got out of the car, we got hollered at five times as we slinked towards the bathroom. "Mamacitas!" some creepy breath hissed in the corner by the doorway. Cheryl hasn't eaten at McDonalds in three years and we're making her start again now. Everyone at the rest stop stared at us with zero inhibitions and they all had potbellies. We didn't even get into the "That's Your Boyfriend" game, we just put our heads down and ate as fast as we could.

The car was a mess just half an hour out of the city. Mineral water, cds, makeup, pillows, notebooks and birth control pills flew around when I tried to find some lip balm. I was alarmed by the amount of estrogen in the car, so I played Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville.

We were half an hour outside of Cleveland and the ex or any of his friends still hadn't called Corinne back. She paced by some faraway picnic tables checking her voicemail again. She was on the verge of tracking him down through his mother. Cheryl and I stretched our sciatic nerves next to the car and waited for a word.

"Plan B is I hijack the driver's seat and we drive straight to New York. Then we'll stop in Toronto and go shopping! Then lets go to Louisville," I whispered to her.

Coco came back to the car in tears. "His stupid friends hung up on me! They wouldn't tell me where he lives! They are always trying to keep me away from him! They always tell him things and turn him away from me!"

Cheryl and I rolled our eyes.

"We decided that I am a pirate and I am taking over the car, Corinne," I said after a long silence. "We're going to New York instead."

"That's not funny!!!" She stormed into the drivers seat and we hit the road in silence.

oHIo

In Cleveland, Coco drove us straight into the middle of downtown. It was 8:30 pm and she finally got a call back around the time we entered the city. "Where do we go?" she asked into the phone. Then she threw it into my lap like a hot potato. I wasn't prepared for that.

"Um hello. My name is Brenda Lee. I'm just a passenger in Corinne's car. We drove to Cleveland, now we're here, we are trying to meet up with some dude that has Corinne's stuff. Now we appear to be downtown. So do you think we should skate around here or is it a bust?"

"I'm that dude."

"Oh." I paused, drawing out the uncomfortable silence. "You are famous. You're the dude, huh? You should meet us somewhere."

"Ok, go to the middle of the city, where all buildings are, the brick area, and park. I'll call you when I get there."

"So just go to where the brick area is?"

"Yeah."

"Ok."

I wondered what he meant, while staring at all the terra cotta tiles on the buildings as we drove past all lit up. We were driving towards a monumental building that looked like Chicago's Board of Trade at the end of the street.

Cheryl woke up and looked around. "Where is everybody? This town is dead! Ghost Town!"

She was right. There were no cars, buses or people anywhere and all the businesses were closed.

Coco seemed to know what that dude meant by "brick area" and parked. We got out and stretched our shoulders backs and hamstrings while Corinne took out her makeup bag.

Corinne had said, "If you see a guy with tattoos, that's my ex!" A guy with tattoos on the street. Got it.

"Ooohhwee! YeeeeHaawww!"

"Can you believe he wanted to meet us in a safe rendezvous point?"

In mid-stretch, we noticed a guy slink up quietly out of the empty silence of the street. She was putting on red lipstick and changing into a pink tank top. It was him.

We looked up from touching our toes and just stared at him for one long moment. We could instantly sense his discomfort. He stopped too, but when no one said anything he proceeded past us and walked up to Corinne to hug her.

I lit a cigarette and gazed at the architecture. Cleveland has a few blocks of tall office buildings that look finely statuesque in the streetlamps. The street glowed like a movie set. The building in front of us had greek columns, a pediment and caryatids of nine goddesses lit upwards from their feet, holding sheaths of wheat books and instruments on top of their upswept hair. I tried to find my camera amongst the wreckage inside the car. Finally Cheryl broke the silence,

"Hi, I'm Cheryl."

He jumped out with a handshake.

"I'm Jeff"

I introduced myself and shook his hand limply.

"We can go to a bar down the street," he suggested after we had nothing more to say.

As we walked down the street Cheryl smiled evilly.

"I just think you should know, I know karate."

I giggled quietly in the back, remembering how we planned this moment out over dinner last week. I had suggested that we wear black suits, carry briefcases and pretend we don't speak English. Or better yet, Corinne could tell him we were rockstars from the Philippines. But upholding charades is way too tiring and he was being so meek that we eased off the menacing vibe. I pulled my hat lower and we proceeded to the bar.

Partytime.

As we rolled into an empty bar with woodpaneling and Irish football flags draped all around I noticed a sign that said Happy Hour $2 Beers. Alright then. I ordered a Harp.

Cheryl and I huddled and wished we spoke Cebuano better so we could gossip amongst ourselves. Corinne and Jeff were staring at each other talking non-stop and smiling.

"Look at her. We should slap her. She's grinning ear to ear."

They were thoroughly engrossed with each other and she twisted her back to us so she couldn't see the faces we were making at her. Her Bacardi and Cranberry was gone in three sips.

Cheryl and I amused ourselves by having a burping contest and lamented the lack of good looking young men. She busted into their conversation after a minute.

"Hey where are all the cute boys in this town?"

"Yeah, just point us towards wherever they hang out!"

Jeff didn't even crack a smile. "There are no cute boys in this town."

"Booooooooo," she said.

After a second they resumed their conversation.

"Well that didn't go anywhere."

The boredom was gaining on us and we watched the bartender stack some glasses.

"This sucks. I wonder what they're talking about."

Cheryl leaned into their space again.

"Where can we go dance around here?"

"Tonight? It's a Monday night! ... so, nowhere."

"Ok then. We are officially bored."

They resumed their conversation again as some terrible music from the light rock station droned.

"Look at that guy. He's drumming his hands. He likes this stuff!"

Finally Jeff took us to another bar when our beers were empty after consulting with his phone a few times. We thanked him for the drinks.

Partytime!

The next bar was way cooler, outside and on a deck. We all got carded by the bartender, who took the time to learn our ages and names.

"So what's your name?" Cheryl asked.

"Jude. Like 'Hey Jude!'" and he sang it.

We sang it back to him and we ordered a round of beers. Jeff had made some assurances that he had another friend coming by so we wouldn't be bored. Corinne told us in the car that she asked if he had a girlfriend and he said yes. So that's why he was acting so weird.

Then she said, "He's being so nice to me, I can't believe it!"

"Did you ask him why he never shipped your stuff?"

"Well he was mad at me because of the time I broke his window."

"What? You broke his window?"

"Yeah. And then I broke a bottle when I threw it at his couch."

"Girl, am I hearing you correctly!?!"

"Then I called him from a sailboat at five in the morning after a party in Chicago and told him my life is so much better without him. But he's not mad at me anymore!"

He told her he had to be home soon, but he stayed until the bar closed. Jude brought out a bottle of Jameson and Jeff's friends showed up. One of them was scared of us, but the other one warmed up to us instantly. Dan listened sympathetically as I described the travails of life and we drank shaking our heads at the cost of insurance. I asked him if we could crash at his house and he said yes. With that settled, we carried on, met people from Kentucky and Florida, Cheryl spilled her drink, the local muscle meathead beat his chest, clinked glasses and partied.

We all walked out into the street. After Jeff loaded the boxes of Corinne's stuff into the trunk we each hugged him and thanked him for all the beer. The next thing I remember was taking long swigs of tap water, collapsing on the corner of a futon and the room was spinning so I curled into a downward fetal position and crashed out.

The Next Day

I awoke to the sounds of a shower wrapped in my soft airplane blanket next to Coco who was wrapped up in hers. I was smiling before I even opened my eyes. We had so much fun! The pillows we brought came in handy - I was so glad to have my own drool stains under my face at that moment. Dan tiptoed gently around and got ready for work, it was 7:30 in the morning.

"I've got all Aveda products," Dan said as I headed into the shower.

"Oooh!"

"My mom's a beautician. So Jeff called me last night and was like "You gotta come out! I need help! These girls wanna dance!!!" We collapsed into giggles.

A sweet botanic smell wafted around as we woke up. Miraculously, my bag was neatly organized at the foot of the futon with my camera, cigarettes, hat and purse tucked away. How did I manage to remember to put away my stuff last night? While towelling my hair I chatted with Dan as he added me as his friendster.

"How the hell is a guy like you single? You're so nice, I am shocked that you don't have a girlfriend!"

"You asked him that like 20 times last night already!" Corinne protested.

"I did?"

"Yeah, and stop bringing up bad memories of girlfriends. You're making me sad. It didn't turn out so well the last time," Dan said.

"She must have been crazy, or psycho then."

Dan let us take our time getting ready and called in late to work as he escorted us to the diner. A skinny old hippie with beads in his hair waved to us as he passed us on the street.

"Watch out for all the weirdoes around here," he warned.

"Naww, we're the weirdoes!" Cheryl said as we all wrapped around Dan to thank him. I forgot my notebook at his house so we planned to meet up later. For now we would just eat and then go skate.

But as the day warmed up and we choked down our breakfasts the plan changed. Our hangovers - building up for the past six days at that point - were beginning to creep into our brains and our bodies and the orange juice and bacon were not helping.

"I think I'm dying!"

We decided to go to the skate shop afterwards, got lost a few times and had to call Dan to help us. We were quickly developing a real fondness for him every time he patiently answered our crazy questions.

"We don't know where we are! Where do we go? We're by a bridge!"

We skated at the skatepark in the hot afternoon sun which was a mistake, considering that my sweat felt fumey like alchohol was evaporating directly off of my skin. After a while I lay down on my stomach on the bench and wrote my story. The local skaters were weirded out by our presence, but in a good way.

Afterwards we went to a coffeeshop. We got smoothies and sat around a table and checked out some surprisingly good local artwork. Various instruments lay around, including 2 bongo drums, a cowbell, a mini piano and a big one, various percussion in every corner and a didgeridoo that I thik I misused. A five year old boy totally kicked it to Cheryl after he saw her play a few notes on the piano.

She told him to finish his pastry before he could play it with her. He flipped out his mini chair and sat down at the mini piano. "I like your song!" he told her.

He took her into a sunny nook and then crouched down as he made her a design on the Lite Brite. When he went back to finish his croissant she came back to the table.

"Dude," she whispered, "that kid just stroked my arm with his finger."

"Whaaaat?"

"I didn't think he'd do that! He's five!"

He was totally making the effort to bond with Cheryl, calling out "NO!" when his mother asked him if he was ready to leave.

I made them pose for a picture out front and took a moment to look through the lens.

"Goodbye!" we sang as the boy's mother as two sisters dragged him down the sidewalk.

Cheryl came over to me. "Dude, that kid put his hand directly on my ass when you took that picture!"

"Did he squeeze?"

"Yes!"

When we looked in the camera, her face indeed had a startled look of confusion. An old hippie on the sidewalk lit my cigarette.

"I wish I had a picture of that kid's hand on your ass, girl!" he told us before we pushed away and skated some banks and hills that we found.

We met Dan after work and toured his office, the coolest place in Cleveland. He took us to another bar where they had free food? We were like "Free food? What?" and it turned out to be pizza. Funds were running low all around from all the going out, so we were like "word!". Jeff had mentioned that there was a bar in town with free beer the night before. What the hell is going on in that town? The energy level was running low too, so we decided to not ask Dan if you could crash for another night and made plans to hit the road. This whole time, Corinne was off in the clouds in some faraway place where she must have been thinking about Jeff. We consoled her, and I was secretly glad that he had a girlfriend because it intimated a finality to everything.

We skated one more time at night, under some flood lights, when all the kids of Cleveland come out to skate. It was pretty crowded, but the strange thing was the silence. None of the loud groaning and moaning and complaining and hooting and hollering that I am used to in a skatepark. It was like a science fiction town where all the kids come out like zombies and skate without uttering a single word. Then I thought about the UFO sightings in Ohio and was glad that we weren't the strangest visitors this state was said to have. Finally after we were so tired and beat and cranky we decided to just head back. We gave Dan another hug and more kisses and honked our way out of town.

Home to Chicago

The Cebuano word for what I felt is "Kapoy". It just means thoroughly worn out. Cheryl was passed out in the backseat and I wrote in my journal and Coco steered us home.

After an hour or two, Cheryl spotted the cop behind us. "Poulet!" she called.

Coco pulled over to the side of the road and we turned off the music. The state trooper waddled up to my window. My eyes were so blown out and cashed that I considered pretending that I was crying. Allergic, I decided on, as I rolled down the window.

In a robot like voice he recited the following after looking all of us in the eyes:

"I'm gonna need your license and your registration I clocked you a few miles back going 85 miles and hour in a sixty five zone I will have to give you a ticket it will be a $100 fine of the violation and you can post a bond or you can give me your visa or your credit card."

Corinne reacted very slowly, pulling out her purse.

"I'm from France."

In Chicago, those three words got us into every bar we went to for free, plus rounds and rounds of free drinks. In Indiana, the trooper did not even react. She gave him her universal driver's license and a credit card and I pulled my hat over my face. We were paused for an eternity in front of those bright headlights and flashing red and blue. I was afraid of opening my mouth and getting us into more trouble. After what seemed like forever, he let us go after swiping her card.

"What a jerk."

No one said anything and the air was so sad. Cheryl rolled back over and went to sleep. I changed the cd and put on Coco's radiohead album before I put away my notebook and reclined my chair to do the same. As the music started and washed over the whole car I looked over and saw the tears start coming down her face as she stared directly forward. I searched around, then handed her some tissues. She cried even more and I almost started crying. I gave her the whole pile of tissues and closed my eyes and crashed out.

I woke up as we headed into Chicago, coming from the south. Chi-town! We're here! Coco steered us through the last toll booth and I peered at her face. We were listening to Snow Patrol now, and there were no tears in sight. But I swear that there were some new lines near her eyes and her face was just a little bit more angled than it was a few days ago. She didn't look like the same helpless waif that I met her as as she sat low with one hand on the wheel. She looked lighter, and just a bit older too. We dropped off Cheryl who was sleepwalking into her house and got home alright, we crashed completely.

And we have never again discussed her ex.

Cheers

2005-08-25T13:16:00.000-07:00

The plan I hatched to become a misanthrope and live out the rest of my life in solitude amongst the rustling bamboos and croaking tree frogs derailed when I found myself having such a great time catching up with old friends. It is hard to maintain the stance of a cranky curmudgeon when you can't stop smiling and your night is full of jameson shots music and beats; everywhere you turn there are people you've known for years, and there is so much to toast to - its all high fives and bumpy knuckles left and right. It is even harder when you are doing this in high heels dancing around and wearing a scandalous terry cloth jumpsuit. Renouncing humanity is not as easy as it sounds when the people that you know are so much fun. So it appears that I have a few more years before becoming anything that resembles a grumpy old jerk. Salud! to the good friends that I saw on my birthday, and to my cousin for making it happen. I've been lucky to know and be close to some of the most soulful people on the planet during these 26 years, and its because of all this time we've spent out there in this city seeking out good music and dancing.

Gifted at Making People Mad

2005-08-16T13:07:00.000-07:00

I wish this website had a section in your profile titled 'what makes you really mad', because it would be interesting to see what people say vs. what they live up to. Mine would read "phonies, hypocrisy and people who pick on people I love." Its probably not that simple though - people who've checked "in a relationship" are on a different level, and their section might read anything from "having my birthday forgotten" to "when girls hit on my boyfriend" to whatever sort of craziness blooms in that relationship. That's a different sort of mad altogether, not so topically substantial as things that affect a larger world, but with all the passion of railing against things beyond our control.

I have enraged a few people in my life, and it has always been over something extremely stupid. My dad almost disowned me when I was eighteen for writing a poem on the basement wall with an oil crayon. This was extremely strange to me at the time, considering the fact that in the same weekend, the rest of the house had been painted in bright Simpsons colors (flourescent pink, electric blue, and mustard yellow) and adorned with Hawaiin print curtains and berzerk tracks of paint all over the ceiling, and I had nothing to do with any of that. Caught up in the creative frenzy, I inscribed a poem in the wall that I hoped we could all learn from. For months he brought up "my disrespect for personal property" in his blackest moods, which was a total joke to me, especially with the parrot painting over his head and the bamboo curtain swinging at his back. It was so unfair.

At the skatepark, I made a sworn enemy for life for accidently taking a dude out when we dropped into the bowl at the same time. I just happened to be crouched low and wearing a helmet and aimed directly at his chest. I was actually aiming for the the curve in the wall behind him. It happens all the time, and an every day sort of occurence at the skatepark. People crash into me, I crash into them, its not personal. If it was, the skatepark would be a total kung fu hustle situation, and the personal vendettas would never end. After the collision I jumped up in a panic and tried to pull him up too. "Get up homey!"

"GET THE FUCK OFF ME, you bitch!!!" He couldn't quite breathe at the moment, but he could shout. I climbed out of the pool holding back my tears and almost cried in the corner just for being yelled at. When he staggered to his feet after a few minutes, the pool was lined with skaters waiting with wide eyes and baited breath. It was a very dramatic moment. You've never seen anyone more pissed off. I had never made anyone who wasn't related to me that upset, and never even seen anyone get that sort of mad.

This is the sort of mental dialogue and analysis that was going on in my head at that very moment: "breaking out into sobs is totally inappropriate right now - don't do it - no crying - why do I feel like crying? - did he just call me a bitch? - what do I do now? - must be stoic - warriors don't cry - must bite insides of cheeks - must make face cool down - he is gonna hate me for life - I wish he knocked me out instead - should I just go home? - stupid tears, stop crying - this is the worst day of my life - bite lip harder."

So I skated away with a clamped jaw and saved the crying until I went outside for a cigarette.

Later on that night after the skate session I got drunk enough to sing "Living on a Prayer" with G at the karaoke bar. I really didn't even want to sing the song at all, but felt as though I should be a good sport. I felt extremely creeped out midway through, when in the middle of the song - embarrassingly as I was in mid-falsetto shriek - I felt an evil stare slice through me. The guy I ran into was chainsmoking and giving me an intense, voodoo look of hatred. He thought I was having tons of fun, and he was completely mistaken. I had to keep singing though and finish the song - I couldn't drop the microphone and stare back at him. Divas don't drop the mike! That would be weird.

But I could tell from his eyes that I had made an enemy for life without even trying.

Once I almost got into a fight in the elevator at Trader Joes, after I looked backwards and flipped off a guy on the street who said "You can't ride that skateboard" as I skated past him. It was New Years Eve, and I was trying to pick up some olives and bread before a dinner party. I had already done my hair and put on makeup so I was this weird mixture of dressed up and dressed down in skate gear. There were two guys in their thirties, tube sock and sweatpants wearing meatheads, and they got into the elevator with me after I had been waiting for it, pressing the call button like fifty times. I was stuck. I pulled my hat over my face and held my board at my side.

"I bet you can't ride that thing." He started it, and I had been looking at the floor trying to avoid all this.

"I bet I can ride it way better than you. Because you have to be in shape to balance on it."

"I'd be acting really tough too if I had a weapon in my hands like you."

"It's not a weapon, but I guess I could hit you with it, and I am sure that it would hurt."

Looking into those eyes was like staring into a blank wall, and every muscle in his faced was getting harder. I wondered what would happen if he did have a skate board and it was a fair fight. His friend totally had his back at first, but as he peered over the dude's shoulder he had time to absorb the details. I made eye contact with him briefly before I locked eyes again with his buddy, who had all of his defenses up in his face. I am five foot two and small boned, I had diamond earrings on with my jeans and skateshoes, a fur scarf, mascara, eyeliner and lipgloss. My hair was braided so that I could have curly hair when I got home. I was in the midst of getting ready for a New Years party.

My perfume filled the elevator, emanating off my sweaty neck as the staredown continued. They were so confused, and I watched them grow uncomfortable.

"Wait, how old are you?" the friend said.

"How old did you think I was?"

"I don't know... we thought you were younger... he didn't mean it... I'm sorry." I was chagrined by the idea of a younger version of myself in a never ending staredown up and down all of the floors with these two knuckleheads. He pulled the other guy away as the doors finally opened. He was glad to be getting pulled away, but I think he was still pretty mad. The friend looked back a couple of times and soon they disappeared. That did not just happen, I thought to myself, before a smile crept across my face and I had to hide it.

Another time, a woman who was shopping in the boutique that I worked in blistered at my refusal to negotiate the price of a handbag with her. She wanted to exchange a coat for a purse, but the coat was used and out of season and it was just shady. I didn't like her attitude - she just came at me with unjustifiable rudeness. We were head to head just above the counter.

"Just sell it to me for a hundred dollars!!!!"

"I can't do it."

"I...have...never! heard of a business that treats people this way! I know a lot of women who shop here! How are you going to feel when I tell them that you are the worst salesperson that I have ever met?" She hissed it like a snake, dragging out each syllable.

"I am not the worst salesperson you have ever met. There's no way. And you know, you can't get something for nothing." I chuckled silently at the last part as I sang it in my head.

It grew worse. She was working herself up, and I just remained calm and still, and my refusal to react enraged her. I was tuning her out and looked her dead in the eyes, which started to water as she furiously freaked out. I was on the verge of kicking her out when she just stomped out, throwing the purse to the ground. "You can't just come in here and start throwing shit," I said to no one in particular as I picked up the purse and dusted it off.

I have the terrible habit of making things worse when people get mad at me. I have the unfortunate tendency to giggle when I am nervous, which has led to some terrible situations filled with shame. I have it under control now, but when I was younger my standard reaction to someone getting super emotional to me was a smile I tried to hide and a giggle that I'd bury in my hands. It was nervousness and just impossible to surpress. I got suspended in high school for giggling when I got caught smoking - I know I could have gotten out of it, but I had a nervous problem with authority which came out as a horrible smirk. I remember the look on one boyfriend's face when he realized that I was smiling as he was on an angry tirade. I was so disappointed in myself. He got so mad that he couldn't even talk, and the apologies flowed endlessly from me. "I'm so sorry, I wasn't laughing at you! I swear! I just can't help laughing in times like this! I should be crying, I know!" I felt like a genius in How to Make a Bad Situation Worse. Cat Stevens is right: it is a wild world, and it is hard to get by with a smile.

I am sure there are people who live their whole lives and dodge confrontations elegantly throughout them, like old ladies and nuns. People who don't do what I do and giggle nervously in the face of a fully charged individual, but defuse them. I wish I could inspire the opposite of anger, but it appears to be an uphill battle. How do people do it? When I was a little girl, I never made anyone seethe with anger with just a word or a glance; I guess that I just am not sure how to handle the very adult responsibility of bringing out emotions in people. The worst part is that I examine my intentions on a daily basis and try to be mindful and conscious of people's feelings so much, that it makes me neurotic. Doing so is worth it though, because I know that when I make people mad it wasn't because I was trying to. Even when I am driving, biking or street skating: I will yield to people, do what I can not to cut anyone off, maneuver around - whatever it takes not to get in anyone's way. I control everything that I can and try to look out as much as possible, but it appears that there is still no way to avoid making people mad. The things that make a person blow up come out of left field sometimes. It weirds me out that even though I long ago vowed to devote my life to perpetuating goodness in this world, I could still bring about the full extent of people's ire in ways I'd never dreamed of.

My Dog: a Defense

2005-07-20T13:04:00.000-07:00

English bulldogs are known to have mild temperaments and a very gentle demeanor. This fact has lead to often speculated questions as to what made Quasimodo the dog that we've come to know him as. I guess when you spend your formative years as the mascot for a junior high wrestling team, going by the name of Nelson, your environment is bound to take over your true nature completely. I often picture his baby puppy year, his clean pudgy fur being tossed about amongst mildewy rolled up mats, jock straps and used Gold's gym sweatshirts. He obviously would have been the center of attention - he has always absolutely dominated every room he's ever entered with his magnetism. I suspect these junior high aged boys of having gotten too carried away with their baby bulldog mascot. Even I have been accused of too ardently adoring this dog, and I have self-control.

Where I come from, the local junior high wrestling team was a notorious bastion of homoerotic cruel depravity; I feel so bad when I think of Quasi being subject to, as a baby, the boundless perversions of those asics-wearing sweaty jerks, all hormones high voices and braces. I have always suspected those fuckers of animal cruelty - to this day Quasi flinches when you hold any sort of broom or stick in your hand. He even barks at the maglight (even as he fondly chases its beam around).

We adopted him when he was one and a half years old. He had been hastily put on sale by his previous owner - the wrestling coach - who had a problem with his "constant barking at night". Quasi had been relegated to only living in their garage and apparently the whole family was too allergic to him to play with him. That was their story, but I think what actually happened was that his puppy adoribility wore off and suddenly they had an angry, abused, frustrated, full-grown dog with a snappy jaw on their hands so naturally they ran screaming and unloaded him. And gave him to us.

When he first joined our home we set up the basement for him, thinking he'd enjoy it like a little dog bachelor pad, with its wet bar, fireplace, full bathroom, photographic wall coverings of tropical jungles and easy access to the garden. The only thing about the basement is that you can hear the footsteps and doors of every floor all over the house. He couldn't stand feeling left out and only lasted a few hours down there, none of us had the heart to ignore his urgent howling at the door.

He made short work of the antique couches and rare persian rugs that me dad tried in futility to protect, covering them in brindle colored fur. Overnight, the brass studded leather of the furniture took on a chewed and worn patina that made them look centuries old overnight as he made himself comfortable. We stared at him, thoroughly entertained, as he cagily explored the baroque nooks and crannies of the house. What didn't get destroyed in that house as the four of us grew up got slimed by his drool and covered with fur when he entered the picture. My dad's authoritarian boundaries were once more overwhelmed, to our amusement, this time by Quasimodo's cuteness.

His personality began to reveal itself slowly and his odd quirks and idiosyncracies that define him emerged as he got used to his surroundings. Most famously, he bit my brother on the lip when he was trying to remove a pen from his mouth. Out of nowhere. I skidded on a small puddle of blood one night one I walked through the front door, saw my brother reclining with gauze on his face and the dog sulkily peering out from under a couch, chewing on a pen. We had a problem on our hands.

Luckily for Quasi, his problematic personality, violent outbursts and tendency to snap meshed quite well in that house, which was full of strong-willed teenagers during that time. We looked at him in awe; we all had it in us to react impulsively, emotionally, totally irrationally and recklessly, some of us wrote the book on territorialism; but who'd be so bold as to just go and bite someone? And then just sit there coolly and casually?

Any other dog owner would have marched that Nelson straight to the nearest dog clinic and shook their heads in contemptuous judgement as the euthanasia needle plunged into his fur. But the bells of fortune rang harmoniously for Quasi during this time - a number of coincidences conspired to keep him alive. We chose to look the other way, and actually welcomed him into our family with six sets of open arms. First of all, my brother has sustained far worse physical traumas in his time than a dog bite, so luckily the next day it was all water under the bridge. He couldn't have found a better household to be a rowdy dog in. Secondly, his greatest survival skill is his charming personality. He is so cute that it is impossible for anyone to stay mad at him, much less plan and execute his demise. Or properly discipline him. Third, the chaotic nature of the household that he entered allowed this charming personality to not only blend in, but to perfectly compliment his surroundings. If we were the type of household that would go around euthanizing those of us who were prone to behaving badly, we'd all be dead.

A few people have rudely commented throughout the years, upon being growled at by him, that if he was their dog he'd have been put to sleep a long time ago. I am not sure why they would think I care when everyone is happy with the current arrangement. It is an interesting observation when I hear it though. He's got a more finely honed bullshit detector than anyone I know - people that aren't right with themselves are never right with my dog, and the slightest hint of phoniness sets him off. He's very gentle and meek with kind souls, although he may demand that they take him for a drive in their car by getting into the passenger seat and stubbornly refusing to get out. But thats a sign that he likes someone.

By the end of the first month he occupied the couches and under the tables of the first floor. He liked small nooks and crannies, and chose the best hide and seek hiding spots that we used as kids as his lookout points. After a month and a half, he had worked his way upstairs and slept on a velvet pillow in the middle of the bed in the master bedroom. After a few years and a few too many flatulent nights, he wound up getting sent back downstairs. But his message was clear: this is no basement dog. He decided early on in his life that he'd never tolerate being locked in a garage and treated like some junkyard dog. He has always been at the forefront of any action in the house, breaks his usual lazy routine when anything exciting goes down, sits upright in a chair at the dinner table when guests come over, leads the tours through the garden like a brindled fat rolling lion.

He grew into his name, skulking about the house like a nomadic spirit. When you pull into the driveway he perches stoically in the windowsill like a sentinel, with great dignity. He urinates on rare exotic trees and shits by a pond with weeping willows and reeds. He gets bathed in a sunny rock garden amongst irises and lilies and rustling imported bamboos. His greatest pleasure is an enigmatic blue ball that mysteriously appeared in the backyard one day, with which he passionately consorts with on the grass for hours. He takes his yearly vacation to Lincoln Park, where he explores the alleys and parks of the city and commands crowds of pedestrians and strangers, whose attention he benevolently tolerates. He's got the karma of a boddhisattva.

As touchy as he is about things like personal space and eye contact with strangers, he has no problem with being dressed up like a doll. My mother, sister and I share the clotheshorse gene and have not been able to resist outfitting him in the cutest dog clothes in his size. So its a good thing he's so photogenic and loves to model for the camera. He has a denim vest with a matching motorcycle cap that makes him look like the Village People's short bodyguard. He's got all kinds of versions of the classic bulldog studded collar. The best was when we found in an old pile of doll clothes a pair of white shorts that someone squeezed him into. I got him a taffeta Christmas collar with bells that has saved many tense and awkward Christmas reunions with the sheer comic relief of the sound of a jangly lumbering little reindeer dog. Mostly though he prefers a simple bandana around his neck, a look adopted from my older brother, who also likes to decorate the white fur of his head with every flavor of kool-aid.

He's kept up with his fighting skills throughout the years and its nice to know that he's not so spoiled that he's gotten soft. He used to love to chase cars and faced down every car that passed the driveway, until the day he got hit by a car. We all had to admit through our tears that he'd brought it upon himself and acknowleged truthfully that he had been asking for it, but he took the impact like a soldier. Actually, more like a tank. My older brother did not take it like a tank at all; he carried him in a panic to the local vet and demanded immediate medical attention. It was a state of emergency. He is quite a sturdy dog - upon examination, he was found to be a little bit bruised but not at all broken.

Now he just sticks to challenging geese, raccoons, deer and cats. He absolutely despises little kids, another effect of his early miserable life as Nelson. They always want to pet him and kiss him, but as they soon become terrified and start running, I couldn't honestly call it a fair fight. He loves other dogs, the only species that he instantly warms up to. Last winter he lost an altercation with a skunk under the car which left him traumatized. He ran berzerk around the house, rubbing himself against every surface of the interior before he could be doused with tomato juice. Sometimes at night he escapes the house for solitary adventures and comes home panting and covered with feathers. He also, very cutely, attempts to hide the bones that he gets under a pile of blankets on the couch, acting upon his primal instincts. As dogs go, he's a formidable wrestling partner. At 75 pounds he has a lot of weight to throw around. What he lacks in height though he makes up for by trying to use his teeth and bite, a dirty cheating technique that I used myself when I was a little kid. I don't mess with him anymore; I'm a lover not a fighter, and I definitely lack a boy dog aggressive mentality. I would rather lounge with him, brush his hair, scratch his neck and sing along to him as we listen to old school soul music and r+b, Quasimodo's favorite rhythms.

Quasi demands attention and affection more effectively than anyone I have ever loved. He just sits on my feet and whimpers until I hug him. Then he splays out contentedly like a frog at my side until its time to do something else. No emotional blackmail, no passive aggressive poutiness, no dramatic antics or weird mind games. That shit is for cat people. When he needs a hug or a kiss, he just tells me. I always take time to make him feel like the most charming cute dog that he is. I'd never hold it against him for being needy, he taught me that it is a natural animal thing to want attention and to be loved.

There's something comforting in knowing that a creature you love so much can fend for itself and not be vulnerably subjected to the whims of anything else. He's a survivor and a tenacious scrapper, definitely not easily defeated. Once he even bit a Burr Ridge cop and got away with it. He's carved out a space in this world, which I'm lucky includes me and my family, that he protects loyally like Cerberus.

April / May / June 2005

2005-07-17T12:59:00.000-07:00

I am living in a cabin on a coral reef cliff with the ocean lapping at the foot of my bed, surrounded by landscaped paths of broken coral bones and flowering tropical plants and banana trees. Roosters from nipa huts around me wake me up in the morning before I snorkel to rinse off a night's worth of sweat from my hair and my skin. I collect my thoughts in a rope hammock swaying between banyan trees and wave down to the sea kayaks and outrigger boats that stop to say hello every morning.
I am not from here, but I am fully Cebuana by blood, and feel oddly comfortable in these surroundings. I am on a steady diet of fish, mangoes, bananas and rice.
My life revolves around a diving schedule, and I spend the hours in between expunging nitrogen from my blood, writing, smoking, training, stargazing and dreaming. The view beneath the water of life in the ocean stuns me every day. My friends are the fisherman and little girls of Panagsama Beach.