"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.

Is this thing on???

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

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

"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

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

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

Cosmic Debris

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

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.