Rule Breaking

non-branded junk food, like fries a cheeseburger and a soda. Not even I diet soda!

I’ve been feeling hungry most of the afternoon. I want to clarify that this is a completely unrighteous hunger. I ate cereal for breakfast, a muffin top for elevensies, then had a proper lunch with two sides.

Unrighteous is truth. I tried to keep this phantom hunger at bay, first by working, then by drinking tea with fake sweetener and then by watching cute puppies on the internet. No good. I started gnawing at the inside of my cheek. I looked up and the clock said quitting time. I was out the door, looking forward to a healthy and satiating dinner. Then, it hit me.

The Beast needs food.

I punched myself in the head for blowing the task off this weekend. Punching made me less hungry for a second. Anyway, I literally drove by the dogfood store on Sunday after the dog park, but found no convenient parking. I couldn’t imagine success in trying to balance the insane 78 pound dog on one arm and a 35 pound bag of kibble in the other. I drove home. Now I am very sorry. Very sorry. And not less hungry. Maybe more hungry. I swallow reflexively.

My desperate mind races to the bottom of the food storage container. Even if I could scrape a scant dinner from the depths of his echoing bin, there would be nothing for tomorrow morning. That’s it. I have to buy dog food. I am without another choice.

I am feeling even more hungry. My stomach is eating itself. Not really, but the unrighteous hunger is unrelenting as I try to push it aside. Instead of going home and digging up some dinner, I need to hop in the car and drive to the store.

Now I’m thinking about what I can eat in the way to the dog food store. I don’t want to wait. I want to have something salty or sweet, or sweet and salty. I’m thinking of burger toppings. I’m thinking of filling up at a drive-thru.

Arrggh! I remember that it’s not food if arrives in the window of your car.  And I’d be breaking a bunch of other food rules, like only eating junk food that I make and only eating at a table. My steering wheel is not a table. And I already said muffin-top in the third sentence here, that’s as close as I want to be.

I start thinking about responsibilities. I call up those days–usually a sunny and warm day–when I get in my car and feel like I just want to drive. And drive. Drive right out of town. Maybe to the beach.

I want to roll down the windows and turn up the radio and sing as loud as I can. So loud that other motorists turn to see where the caterwauling is from. And I just laugh and sing even louder and with even more “feeling.” I don’t know where I’d go, but I’d go.

I’m at the train station. I walk out of the car to the platform. It’s sunny, but end of the day sunny with long shadows suggesting not much sun left. I’m wearing a coat and pull it a bit closer. It’s not that warm, either. I ride down the escalator and amble to the turnstile. I flash my pass and the gates open in front of me.

I’m not that hungry. I bet that The Beast is way hungrier than me. I near the house and see the car on the street. I can be back with the goods in a quick twenty minutes. A business walk and then just a few more minutes to get my plate on. I can hold out. And I can feel righteous in my choices.

My real dinner. Not junk. And Satisfying.
My real dinner. Not junk. And Satisfying.

 

Spares

bunch of shoes.

The lights are really bright in this basement. Most of the fixtures are bright but yellowish. There are two, though, that broadcast the brightest and whitest light. I bet they are new LED lamps. Energy efficiency and all.

The halls are lined with locked black metal storage cabinets. The cabinets are short and tall. Some of the short ones needed to be short because there were mysterious electrical boxes sticking out on the walls above them. There are plenty of mysterious boxes. There are also some short cabinets underneath free wall space. I guess they were all ordered at the same time and somebody didn’t do the measuring.

The tall black metal storage cabinets are deeper than the short ones. These were not all from the same order. There are slight variations among them. Just a few inches in height and a few inches in depth. They were randomly aligned–two tall and fat, one smaller, one taller, two smaller. The locks were also a hodgepodge. I don’t believe that the size of the lock was related to the value of the contents. But that’s just a guess.

The floors in this basement are peculiar. The hall is wide and the deck is primarily cement. There is about three and a half feet of steel in the middle. The steel is textured and bright. When you walk on the steel it feels hollow underneath. I stepped as lightly as I could to avoid the clank caused by my shoes. I preferred to walk on the edges, on the cement. The basement was empty and this made me feel less conspicuous. I didn’t want to sneak up on anyone, nor did I want to announce myself so loudly.

I stopped in the restroom. It was surprisingly nice for a non-public area. Lighting was excellent, no broken tiles, sturdy wooden doors for the stalls. The sinks were pedestal-style. I walked back out into the industrial underbuilding.

There is no wifi and only an ineffective blip of cell signal so there were no selfies. I waited for my colleagues outside the locked door. To the bowling alley. In the bowels of the White House.
bowling sign in the scary basement.
For those of you at home keeping score, I bowled in the bottom quartile of the bottom quartile. My solo tour of the basement was the best part of my game.

Eau de Toilette

Mint tea. And a sprig of mint.

So before, when I was having chemo, some days–some days at a time, to be honest–I would feel like I had to throw up. They call it a “side-effect.”

Now, let me be super clear. Feeling like you are going to puke, even for hours, even for days, is much better than being dead. So, my statement above is just conveying a fact. I am NOT complaining. [Please note if there are any cancer gods reading this, I am super grateful. This is not a post about tweaking you all. You did great by me!]

So that clarified, feeling like the contents of your stomach will soon be leaving via an overpass from your mouth is not great. It stops you from eating. It stops you from talking. It encourages you to roll up in as little a ball as you can, and to sit very, very quietly because you believe that if you move it would cause the volcano inside you to erupt.

There’s a difference between feeling like you have to barf when you’re hungover, for example, and feeling like you have to barf because of chemo. If you’re hungover and you let it go, you almost always feel better. Nausea gone. Eat a hotdog and drink a fountain coke and be on with your day. With chemo-induced queasiness, there is no such relief. You just feel like crap. Always. Seriously, so much better to have had too much whiskey last night. And for those of you keeping score at home, I can’t tell you how this compares to pregnancy-induced nausea. I feel quite blessed by that ignorance, thank you very much.

So here I am, curled up like my own little Poké Ball, giving a whole new meaning to Squirtle. Someone gifted me a handfull of a fluffy white bear. Let me tell you, new fluffy stuffed animals are amazing and surprisingly comforting. Anyway, holding that bear close, next to my chest,  under my chin and not moving a single muscle seemed to help keep the upchuck at bay.

I couldn’t drink it, but the smell of peppermint tea improved my stomach roils by orders of magnitude. I soon recognized that making tea that I couldn’t drink was less effective than just holding the peppermint tea bag directly in my nostrils. That was crazy effective. Summing up, if I didn’t move a muscle, held the fluffy stuffed bear under my chin and breathed in the tea bag, I was fine. I could fall asleep, which despite the chemo-exhaustion was blocked by feeling wretched or that I might just retch.

I could reuse that teabag for a few pre-snoozing sessions, but I manhandled my way through the box of Twinings Peppermint Tea. Gah!

“Doc,” said the boys, “you need anything?” Normally, there wasn’t much that they could do, but today, but today! I had a mission.

Almost before I could say, “Can you go up to the drugstore and get me some peppermint tea bags?” they were off.

I sat waiting with my legs tucked underneath me, perched on the arm of the couch. The dog-beast assumed his nurse’s position just on top of my feet. I was vewy vewy still, keeping the bear pressed to my breastbone awaiting their return.

They had gone to the drugstore to find no peppermint tea. Undaunted, they braved the late December cold five more blocks to the organic market. Surely there would be peppermint tea in the hippie-haven. They found many organic options including loose tea by the scoop. Pushing on, they rifled through boxes and boxes of rosehips, camomile, zingers–red and yellow, sleepytime, berry, ginger latte, revive, pomegranate pizazz, I<3Lemon, grateful heart, peach tranquility and citrus lavender sage herbal tea. There might have been more. There were more.

The voila! moment came when they ferreted the Candy Cane. It wasn’t pure mint, but, it seemed to them close to mission fulfilling.

They brought the tea home in a bag and with the story of their explore. When they took the plastic wrap off the box and handed me a fresh bag, I can tell you honestly that nothing ever before was that effective in quelling my quease. I propped the bag under my nose, squeezed the bear and sniffed deeply.

What nice boys. What a fluffy bear. What a scent. What a relief.

I had been told to not eat my favorite foods during chemotherapy. The association of those foods with nausea ruins a good relationship. I skipped some of my comfort foods so that they could comfort me into the future. Fortunately dark chocolate with hazelnuts was not spoiled. And, fortunately, I can still enjoy peppermint tea. Like I did tonight when it delivered this memory via it’s perfumed aroma.

 

Valor in Discretion

question authority

When I was but a wisp of a person, maybe all of 116 pounds soaking wet while wearing a heavy wet towel, I had this shirt. It was a black tee. It was a present. I forgot who gave it to me, but they thought it captured my essence well. It said “QUESTION AUTHORITY” in big white block letters. That wasn’t all, though.

The “QUESTION” part was X’d out and printed on top in a screaming red scrawl was a four-letter word that began with an Eff and completed with a Kay. You figure it out.

I wore it in public.

My world was a college campus populated primarily by 18-24 year olds. I don’t think that I would recognize old people or families with kids. If professors walked across campus, they didn’t register to me. I would buy my coffee from a student or maybe a recent student. The bar patrons were reflections of me. People in the library didn’t look up. If somebody thought that my shirt was an affront, I didn’t recognize it.

I told my kids about that shirt. And I told them I was sorry that I wore it.

Sure, it was my right to speech. Sure, I liked being provocative in a crude and danger-loving kind of way. Sure, nobody ever said anything to me. But I’m also sure that someone was upset or hurt or shocked. There was really no value to parading around in that shirt–other than to display my immaturity and self-absorption. Nope, not much value there.

But at that time, I was trying things out and was foolishly proud that I didn’t shirk from being on the wrong side of people who weren’t me and my narrow tribe. I was all id in formation of a grown-up ego.

It makes me think about that scene in a movie where the woman is trying to get someone to attend to her sick child and finally gets the attention of the insensitive doctor via tirade. Or the scene where the snooty sales clerk humiliates a shopper and the friend tears the clerk up one side and down the other. Or when the mild-mannered mom stands up against book burning at the PTA meeting of neanderthals. Or when a character finally and publicly tells off his boss in a most clever and profanity peppered speech. And there’s always the guy screaming out the window that he’s mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

All of us cheered for each one of them. We were all on the side of the person who pushed through polite mores and let loose. We were relieved by these moments when someone is not holding back, when they act free from the constraints of civilized society and when they are being righteous!

Civilized society, though, stops us from screaming at strangers when wronged. Mostly because screaming and giving in to our lizard brains feel good, but only for that minute. Mostly because our perceived slights are more slight than not. Mostly because we risk substituting our lack of control for being truly righteous.

Grown ups know that we damage our relationships with others when we act outrageously. Usually the goal is to come to a resolution versus stage an excellent colloquy in which the character we play “wins.”

I learned to measure my foot-stomping child-self. I sometimes fail, but I know that there is good reason to avoid most fights. It’s to make sure when you do fight, it’s worth fighting for.

Minor Accompaniment

seats on a plane with entertainment guide

Sitting on the plane from DCA to ORD next to someone bemoaning the lack of WiFi. This moaning is repeating at regular intervals. Or perhaps the intervals are getting shorter.

It’s not quite as annoying as it sounds.

More like talk radio in the background. Not like political diatribe talk radio. More like a sports show. Not like the sports show with the over the top loud guy. More like the sports talk radio where you have two or three guys doing analysis that makes you think about dialing the station and joining in.

First, there was the call for WiFi. I get nudged and asked, “Is there wifi on this plane?” I replied that there was, but with a charge. My companion fires up his phone and shows me that I am correct.

“Eight dollars!?” I suggested he use a credit card if he wanted to buy it. He doesn’t have one. I joked that I wasn’t paying.

He told me about all the limits he now had. Most of his games, especially the ones he wanted to play, require WiFi. Adding insult to injury he downloaded Spotify playlists–eighties rock–and didn’t remember headphones. “Oh,” said I.

“Look at this one. I can play these four parts but not the duel.”

“Is the duel playing with someone else?”

“It needs wifi.”

I’m thinking, “I got that.” I go back to my article. He plays a game.

“I really wish there was wifi. Check out the graphics on this London driving game. They’re amazing.”

He was right. Even on his smudged and worn screen, the resolution of the arches under the bridge and the crane shot up to the road were very good.

“Is there food?”

“It’s a short flight, but they usually give you peanuts.”

“I don’t like peanuts.”

“That’s too bad, but I’ll eat yours.” He ended up eating them. No extra peanuts for Doc.

“This game is very violent. You lose limbs and your head might blow off. But it doesn’t kill you. Well, it does when your head blows. I’m stuck on Level 8. See right here, (leans over again), I’m riding this bike and I can’t get past the rotating knives. You have to do it three times. ” His character’s head hits a knife and a splotch of cartoon blood dots his screen.

“Woah. That’s gotta hurt.”

“Not really. This is the longest time I’ve been sitting without WiFi.” He turns back to his game.

“Hey, can I put my trash in your cup?”

“Sure.” He turned the sound up on his game. I hear the tat tat tat cymbal crash of game gunfire. If he finishes this level he can earn a gun he really wants.

The flight attendant radios that we are approaching ORD and to put our tray tables up. He jerks his head towards me, “What about the trash?” He had a half drunk coke in front of him.

I took the cup with the lid and straw. “I’ll take it. She’ll be back.” Relieved, he went back to shooting some bad guys. WiFi or not.

He’s nine. It’s his first flight alone. I don’t mind sharing it with him.

Princess and the Pea

A chapter of a book that begins, "Once upon a time it was..."

Once upon a time there was a princess. She was lost. Or at least she didn’t know where she was. Or maybe she did know, and it was just too much work to figure it out at this juncture.

She found herself just passing from the state of sleep to the state of wake. Is it night or day, she thought. Did I just fall asleep or have I been sleeping for hours? Or even days? Where am I?

Clawing through the remnants of sleeping, her mind hit the bumpers of all of her senses like a metal ball shot from the chute and making its way down the lane. She waited and then hit the flippers to keep the ball in play.

She didn’t hear any bells, but there was the steady drone of machinery and the recurring squawk of a police radio. That radio was loud. Maybe that’s what woke her up.

It was dark, but there was a frame of bright light that must be from a door that was barely ajar. On the other side, in full light was the sound of the woman’s voice–the dispatcher–repeating the number ten. 10-12. 10-22. 10-23, stand-by. There were tall shadows of nothing or maybe something. On her right was a small round light hanging mid-air. Looking more closely the point was in some box on some type of pole. There was a window just behind her, to her left. She could see it at the furthest edge of her view, but she couldn’t see through it. Not that it mattered because it was dark out there, too. She was in a room. It wasn’t big. But even though the light on the other side of the door was bright, it didn’t illuminate her surroundings by much.

She licked her lips. They were dry, as was her mouth. She didn’t think that she brushed her teeth before she fell asleep. Her mouth tasted a little stale–maybe because of the dryness. Maybe, though, it was because she had thrown up. She wanted some water. Was there water?

A waft of staleness caught in her nostrils. That might be her. It wasn’t like work out sweat, but more like it had been a long warm day. In a ring or two outside of her, she could smell some chemical smell. It wasn’t like the astringency of Pine Sol, but it wasn’t far from that. There was less complexity to the caustic bouquet. It was less like northwest hops and more like laundry detergent with whitener. It wasn’t overwhelming, and she wasn’t either.

She did okay moving her head from side to side. She realized that she wasn’t lying down, more like half way between prone and sitting. She tried to sit up for real, but she couldn’t lift her head. Couldn’t lift her head. Why didn’t this concern her?

The door swung inward, and a shadow blocked much of the light. There was a clock above the door. It was 3:20, likely 3:20 a.m. The shadow pushed the door behind her. The shadow was accompanied by a rolling cart that she steered by a long pole. She approached the princess with a smile. Her greeting revealed her West Indian roots. She placed a cuff around the arm of the princess and put a probe under her tongue.

“Got it!” The princess knew she was in the hospital and was woozy from either the residuals of morphine or the peak of the percocet. The morphine did make her vomit. She remembered now. She asked if she was due for the anti-nausea meds. The shadow was named Carla and she said she would check with the nurse. She was the tech and was worried about the snow that was blizzarding down. She might have to work a double shift if the forecast held.

Carla checked the bulbs that hung from the princess’s neck. The bulbs were glued to two incisions to collect some post operative fluids. Carla was having none of the way they were hanging. She emptied them, after measuring the output and making positive clicking noises. She walked behind the bed and opened one and then another and then a third drawer. She searched in the dark and found some safety pins.

Carla walked back to the princess and pinned the bulbs to the princess’s gown. “This way they won’t pull. I didn’t like how they were.” She smiled again and helped the princess to the bathroom.

The princess felt queasy, so she swallowed to keep things down. “Is there a toothbrush?” Carla handed her one. She brushed her teeth and drank some water. After all that activity, she was tired. Or she was sore. Or maybe she was just high.

She shuffled back the seven shuffle-steps to the bed with her own pole-cart in tow. Carla had straightened her sheets. She backed into the bed and swung her legs up, schooched back and instead of leaning into the pillow her head dropped like a rag doll’s. She placed her hand on the back of her head to prop it up. She then used her hand to lower her head on the center of the pillow.

Her mind was clouded, but at least she knew where she was, now. She felt webs criss cross across her brain, behind her eyes and thought that she fell back to sleep. She wasn’t a princess. 

Matter Does Disappear

On today’s lunch hunt, I walked past the building I jokingly call The House That Doc Built.

I looked at the wall of glass and steel and concrete. Not gonna lie. I felt a prick of pride as my mind floated to creators, builders and fixers. Thinking about people who have a big impact and then fade away. In fiction, Harry Potter modestly worked in the bowels of a bureaucracy after setting the world free from evil. Katniss went back to the rubble of District 12 to anonymously raise a family with her co-victor.

If you look for “impact investing” and “social entrepreneurs” you’ll find names that once meant something. Scores of people who wore the green White House badges now toil away on whatever the next job is. Many still making a difference, just on a different, less sexy, stage.

Looking around the lunch place, I wonder how many of these people work in the building That Doc Built? They don’t know that the nondescript Doc eating the humana tahina salad in the corner knocked together a king-sized income stream that allows their revenue sucking programs to exist.

And I realized that sometimes things are from a long time ago in a galaxy far far away. Nobody remembered Luke anymore, either.

At My Fingertips 

There just may be something seriously wrong with me. It’s like I don’t need to wait for a physical internet implant. I think that maybe I’m becoming The Internet of Things. I’m reduced to an acronym: IoT.

How did this get to be?

So today I was hungry and thinking about lunch. That’s what you do when it’s 12:08 p.m., and you’re working on an epic procrastination. You exit your 11:30 a.m. meeting that was blissfully over by 11:48 a.m., even though you were seven minutes late. On that happy note, let’s think about lunch.

There’s tons of choices within a few blocks. I have the curse of choice. (Don’t hate. I used to work at a secure location with the only choices being the type of bread for your Subway sandwich. After 2 weeks, I recognized that all the meat choices tasted exactly the same, so I’d get the veggie and save a buck. Sometimes I’d order the the wheat bread and sometimes the salty spicy bread that I don’t remember what it was called. I’m trying to forget. I can’t even walk by a Subway today without gagging.)

Back to my surfeit of choice.

I didn’t know what I wanted. There was nobody to ask. I looked around, and they were all gone. Siri is more than (or is that less than?) useless. I looked at my screen and asked,

“What do I want to eat?”

Nothing. Fingers to keyboard,  I googled,

“What do I want to eat?”

I half-imagined, with great hope, that the results would be topped by one of those Google cards that you gives you the answer when you type, “How far to Dublin?”

Screen Shot 2016-03-15 at 8.10.58 PM

or what is the “French word for bread?”

Screen Shot 2016-03-15 at 8.09.40 PM

“What do I want to eat?”

 

 

 

 

 

Nope. Nothing. Nada.

Always hopeful, I looked down a bit. Sometimes there isn’t a card. Like when you say, who won The Bachelor last night? (Really, is winning what they do? Another post, another time.)

Screen Shot 2016-03-15 at 8.15.45 PM

The all knowing Google has a variety of ways to answer.

I looked down the search results. There was no answer. There was, however, a Buzzfeed Quiz.  A few clicks later (Do you eat meat? Are you hungry or hangry? Which image of the sky do you prefer? Unicorn or Winged Horse?), I had an answer.

A sandwich.

Fine. A sandwich it would be. At least I had an answer.

I pulled on my long black trench and made like Snape and his billowing robes around the corner and down the fire escape to the street. Before I reached ground, I grabbed my phone out of my pocket and powered up Yelp–location on–to find sandwiches, current location.

Standing outside on the sidewalk, I started poking the little pins on the screen. No. No. No. No. No. No.

Wait. Is that the one I was thinking of?

I click through to the restaurant deets. I don’t think it was the one, but maybe this is that other one I walked by before? I can’t tell for sure from the address. I pinch my fingers out on the map. Not the one I was thinking of but the one I walked by. Might as well try it. I’m now headed east at a clip.

It was a great sandwich. Bigger than The Dog’s big head. I sat there and looked out the window at the scurrying lunch goers as I munched away. Good choice, Yelp!

I pretty much finished my sandwich, tossed the paper remains in the trash, used the hand sanitizer to clean away the mayo that had leaked, ambled up the stairs back to the lunch-bustle and took the sidewalk headed back West.

My hand rested on the phone in my pocket and my mind went to another app. What am I going to enter for this calorie buster into my Fitness Program?

I decided to make a new entry. Big ass sandwich, 750 calories. But wait, nobody knows what I ate. I paid in cash. It’s a secret from my Internet life. Not even The Google knows, and I don’t have to ask. I can do whatever I want.

Ha! I got back my humanity.

How I Select My Brackets

Technical foul against Kentucky, NCAA.

First thing, I open up the app. I need to be able to see what’s happening and make frequent changes. A pencil and eraser would simply not work when you approach bracket making like Rothko.

I pick a quadrant and zoom in. I work in one quadrant at a time. Some years I think I’m done only to realize there’s a block that I missed. So, this year, I’m thinking quadrants. That’s four. I can likely realize if I don’t do four. Likely.

Here’s my next challenge. When I zoom in on a quadrant, I can’t see what I’m doing. So there’s a bit of blindness that I use to my advantage, like Zatoichi. At least that’s what I tell myself.

Next up, selection time. First things first, I’m looking to bump out my rival schools. Even if they’re a #1 seed. There’s always an upset early on. Why not those stupid schools that beat my team?

I click through a quadrant or two, only now I have to do something else. This bracket stuff takes a real time commitment. I can’t save my work. I have to leave it and redo it again later. I always think my second set of picks are likely better. Or, at least, no worse.

The quadrants don’t make any sense. Who can find Yale in the West? West of what? Providence? How does Buffalo get put in the South? Who placed University of SoCal in the East? Also, where is the North? Are there no North schools? Does the NCAA spell North as M-i-d-w-e-s-t? If there is a reason, I don’t feel like figuring it out. I have random teams to feed into my Final Four. If I’m googling anything, it’s where the hell is Weber State?

I select by schools I like, schools I like the name of, and schools playing against schools I hate–all with a splash of seeding. By the time I get to the 3rd and 4th brackets the second or third time, I’m more like working a divining rod. I let the cursor move itself toward a decision. It’s as good as anything else I do.

See Doc. Doc doesn’t know shit about college basketball and still plays March Madness. At least there’s no money on the line. Doc plays for pride. Don’t be like Doc.

A New Season

How beautiful is that blue on an early spring evening walking down 12th St to the Metro Center Station?

The newspaper has unequivocally declared winter over and spring sprung. Nothing like laying down the gauntlet to the pernicious weather gods. At least I know where to shake my angry fist if there’s a sleet storm next week.

I, therefore, am a bit hesitant to offer that I, too, feel the signs.

As is my habit, I flew down our building’s Cinderella staircase. I kept my shoes on my feet and stepped out to an unfamiliar feel on the street.

It was not warm warm, but there was a top layer of warm to the expected chill of the dusk. Maybe the sidewalks absorbed so much heat from the sunny day that it reflected back–like one of those propane heaters at a restaurant when you sit al fresco on a mild wintry day drinking your brunch. You feel that it’s cold, but the heat does some kind of inversion or some entropy thing and the heat insulates you top down like an airy feather quilt. No weight but the warmth is held in, close to you.

I drew in a breath to identify the scent of spring. All I got was foul diesel from the bus and the stench of a burning cigarette. So the spring wasn’t yet available in the scent sense.

I got off the train and stretched myself like the dog uncoiling his spine as he steps his front paws off the couch while his back end is still anchored there. This move is usually accompanied by a big-mouthed yawn, sometimes with a high-pitched yawly sound effect.

I’m feeling a spring metabolism, skipping down the steps, flirting with the turnstile as I swipe my farecard, and leaving the train station with my chest out, shoulders back and wearing a silly grin.

The escalator handrail didn’t get the memo. It was cold. But the breeze didn’t bully me in to pulling my collar close to my neck. Instead, I left the moving walkway with my jacket open and my gloves in my bag.

Feeling frisky I turned the corner, like la primavera. Ahhhhhh. Feels good.