"Submissive To Only One Wolf"

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

Secret Garden

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

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

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

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

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

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.