close encounter of a different kind

so it was one thing to be driving in a popular national park with two other friends and seeing a bear cross the road in front of us, but yesterday was a whole different animal (pun intended!).  yesterday, i was completely alone, 3 miles from my car on a remote-ish trail still covered in slush and snow and about to take bite #2 from a peanut butter sandwich, when a huge, black ball of fur appeared out of nowhere within 10 feet in front of me.  my first encounter with an alaskan bear.  i was instantly torn between childish delight, scientific fascination, and utter terror, and OF COURSE, the very first thing i do was text "SHIT BEAR OMG" to JS.  which didn't help because i was being quiet as a mouse and the bear was now walking leisurely towards my sandwich (in hindsight, if i HAD to be stupid, i should take a picture instead of texting someone 10 miles away, because at least then i would be able to post the picture in this entry). 

luckily, my brain started working at this point, and not seeing any rocks to throw at the bear, i quickly put the food away, stood up to my full, intimidating 5-foot-1 figure and started to make as much noise as i could by rattling my car keys and talking shit to the bear.  for a few seconds and against all my bear-encounter knowledge, i considered turning around and running (terrible response) as fast as i could back uphill, but thank god the pure logistics of running anywhere in 2 feet of slushy snow prevented me from giving in to my flight impulse.  thank god, as well, that the bear must have heard my valiant attempt at being intimidating, and began to retreat -- but if there ever was a reluctant retreat, this bear got it down. it must have turned around to eye the invisible food five times on it's way out before it finally disappeared down the hill.  so i'd avoided a confrontation with a hungry bear, but now i must follow its track down hill for 3 miles to get back to the car.  i was told by phone to keep being loud while hiking by "singing a song or something," so i ended up giving the bear a free concert of all the Brandi Carlile songs I knew before running into a big group of hikers coming up who had not seen the bear.  i felt much, much better.

i never did see that big, black ball of fur again and later that night, i found a big bouquet of roses waiting on the windshield of my car, so "all's well that ends well," no?

"and who are you? the mom?...are you in the same grade?" -- AKA lessons learned from the ER

for someone headed to spend a good portion of my upcoming years in a hospital, i have almost zero experience being a patient in one.  the hazy 4am ER visit that lasted only a couple hours freshman year was really the only legitimate hospital experience.

last week, however, i had to take a client to the ER, and it was a new experience.  i drove there thinking that i'd just let the doctors do whatever they had to do and just be supportive company for the client, but as soon as we stepped inside, i immediately became so protective of my client that i was ready to fight whomever was going to be less than perfectly friendly to my client.  starting from the triage nurse, who couldn't believe that my client didn't know what "abdominal" meant ("Do you have abdominal pain?" "i don't know what that means" "ABDOMINAL? like, your belly?!"). I wanted to pull her aside and be like, "look, she's only 16 years old and probably hasn't even taken biology yet because of all the different schools she's been transferred to, so why don't you just try to pretend that you are not judging." but i didn't, because that would have been poor role modeling of communication skills. 

then we got lucky and got a very nice nurse (the one who asked us "so are you both in school? are you in the same grade?").  she was the one who completely understood my client's fear of needles and coaxed her through the entire process effortlessly, and who also told me that the single most important thing in working in the medical field was making people comfortable and being able to still do so with all the craziness going on in a hospital -- making patients feel like the doctor had all time time in the world even when you only had 60 seconds.  i told her she was doing such a great job with that.  unlike the older male doctor who barged in later, obvious that he was in a huge hurry and was like, "so you are the patient, and who are you? the mom?" before i could even answer, he got pulled away again.  he came back to confirm her medical history, saying, "so you have ADHD? is that why you are in a mental health treatment facility?"  NO! that is NOT why, and how is that any of your business anyway? plus, do you really want to know the real reasons? how about rape, incest, physical abuse, paternal abandonment, maternal drug addiction and periodic homelessness?  but my client handled it so well and just said, "no, i'm in treatment for a variety of reasons."  way to go, girl.

THEN, the doctor wanted to do a rectal exam on her despite her protests told her dismissively that there weren't any female doctors around.  at this point, i remembered one of my interviewers asking what i would do if a patient asked me to get him a doctor of his own gender.  i remembered thinking that it was just one of those stereotypical scenarios that everyone always hears about but never ends up being a big deal.  now i know just how big of a deal it could be.  working in an environment where just the word "sex" could trigger a flashback of a rape, or witnessing a seizure could trigger flashbacks of mothers overdosing on crack, i'm getting very good at never assuming what anybody has gone through.  after all, who am i to say, "just get over it," when a girl that may have been through hell and back doesn't want a male doctor poking around her area?  everyone has their issues and i'm all about going out of one's comfort zone, but not at the expense of adding more trauma to the most vulnerable people in the world.  the tricky thing is, sometimes you really can't tell who they are.

"Jar of Hearts" cover!

maybe one of these days, i'll get my act together to actually play/record some of my own songs, but in the mean time, i'll procrastinate by covering Christina Perry's "Jar of Hearts," which is actually one of my favorites  -- easy, angsty and lovely.  enjoy!

i want YOU...

here is my Official Travel Partner Wanted ad:

WANTED -- an adventure-seeking soul who wants to visit the highest peak in North America with me (and maybe cuddle with bears and moose along the way): Mt. McKinley in Denali National Park for a flexible number of days this summer.  Preferably someone who enjoys the Great Outdoors, BUT no worries, we will NOT actually be climbing McKinley since it would be analogous to climbing Everest and gear alone would cost >$1000.  but yeah, google-image Denali National Park and McKinley and i dare you to pass up this opportunity ;) 

contact me for details :)

sneak preview (none of the following photos belong to me -- please don't sue!)

Sunrise in Denali. (c) Ron Niebrugge



Bear cubs in Denali (c) Ron Niebrugge



Hiking in Denali (c) WildNatureImages.com

i swear i'm not that girl who can't live without a mall...

...but I MISS MY WARDROBE!

there, now that that's over with, i do want to elaborate a bit.  three-quarters of my wardrobe -- and about 95% of my spring/summer clothes -- are in ann arbor, and i brought exactly 7 pieces of thick sweaters/jackets and 1 cardigan, just enough to fit into a medium-sized suitcase.  it didn't help that the world was frozen solid when i left, and when it's january and 15F outside, spring somehow seems like a made-up bedtime story.  so long story short, now that it's a balmy 45F out and people are busting out the flip-flops, i pretty much look inside my closet and say the all-too-familiar line, "i have nothing to wear" (but at least it's less of a lie now than it was before!)

so it's the perfect time to go shopping, right? wrong.  i've made up my mind 2 weeks into juneau that i will try my hardest not to buy clothing here, because the the two places to shop are walmart and fred meyer (aka meijer), and before you know it, you're staring at the fugliest clothes you've ever seen and saying to yourself, "well, this one is the least hideous of them all, and it's only $20, so at least i could cover it up with a sweater..." and this is how you get sucked into buying fugly clothes that half the town will end up wearing.  don't get me wrong, i've actually gotten cute clothes at walmart and meijer in michigan, but for some reason, i have yet to see a single piece of clothing here i would want to spend money on.  the couple expensive downtown boutiques that my housemate took me to were definitely a few notches better, but the price tag made me miss target and forever 21 just that much more. oh, and american eagle and my dress-shopping trips with KE last summer.  maybe i'll finally get over my phobia of buying clothes online and get just ONE skirt for the summer.

side note: if you are thinking about getting into shape for the summer and whatnot, the best trainer is a beagle.  yes, those dogs can RUN.  when you're only on Mile 0.6 and feeling like maybe you should stop very soon, those puppies will just be trotting besides you with such joyous nonchalance that you just won't be able to resist the strange desire to trot with them for the next 3.4 miles and end the run by racing to the front door.  because of such experiences, i've concluded most of running really is psychological.

we are told to keep an emotional distance from our clients, but it's pretty difficult when you spend 8 hours a day with 6 teenaged girls who love to start drama and yell to our face and say things like, "i don't mean be rude, but..." followed by something super rude.  it's also difficult to keep that emotional distance when a client does so much better after the year in treatment and is now graduating from the program as successfully as can ever be expected.  there's nothing like a graduation party to remind us why we are here in the first place, and because of their such infrequent nature, we are told to "cling" to these successes.  trust me, i will -- the next time i'm being manipulatively lied to or ran away on.

also, whenever i have to get off from work at 10:30pm only to sleep and get up again at 7am to go back to work, i pretty much wish i wasn't alive.  BUT now that the days are considerably longer, i'm starting to like the early shift days, because now i can easily get me some after-work meditation and music sessions by the ocean while the sun is setting. a pretty perfect way to end the day, i'd say.

My new album cover? "Caliente" thinks so!

in the spirit of st. patrick's...

...i decided that i'd share with you all the fact that i've moved into the third place in juneau ("why do you move so much, are you like, on the run or something?" ~coworker)...and pictures of "my" new beagle puppies!

 

ok, not the best quality pictures, and i only managed to get pics of one of the two puppies, but they are the most adorable things and will rest their heads on your lap for hours and give you kisses on the lips. 

but anyway, i spent this st. patrick's day hiking (of course), and hanging out with my new housemate (we saw "love and other drugs," which was actually pretty terrible, but that is another story), so i didn't get to drink anything green, BUT the following excerpt pretty much sums up how it's done in alaska:

"Colleen wanted to make margaritas— she’d schlepped all the necessary ingredients to our U.S. Forest Service cabin hidden in the woods along Shoup Bay just outside Valdez. But we’d been camping for days, spending the afternoons kayaking the bay, reading good books while tucked in our sleeping bags and talking by the campfire...

And we had no ice. You can’t have a good margarita without ice.

So, while gazing out at the hazy turquoise waters that lead to Shoup Glacier, we hatched a plan. The small icebergs bobbing in the water had been drifting within site of our camp, and they beckoned us to come put them to good use.

We climbed into our kayak, with a length of camp rope tied in a lasso, and approached the first piece of ice, clear as glass and about the size of a small cooler. The sun had melted the ice in the middle, so it formed a natural barbell with fat ends and a skinny center—perfect for capturing. Within a few tries, we had secured the ice and began hauling it back to camp. For the remainder of the trip we were able to chip away at that natural ice and enjoy our margaritas in style.

Now that’s what I call camping."

~"It's Better Outside" Alaska Magazine

aurora/northern lights (AKA i love my life)

"Maria, put some clothes on and come outside!" my housemate yelled from the living room.

i was like, "wtf, it's 11pm!" but he wouldn't budge, nor would he tell me what the hell was going on outside, so finally i put on a jacket and shoes, and luckily had the good sense to bring a camera, because...THE NORTHERN LIGHTS WERE OUT!!!

it was vibrant green in the sky just outside the house, but we decided to drive a few miles out to the glacier, where there was absolutely no light pollution. i had long given up trying to catch one of these, since juneau is generally too south to experience much northern lights, and i had been disappointed the couple times that conditions had been right (clear and COLD). today was not very cold and only sort of clear, but there they were, green and morphing constantly across the sky. and when you whistle, you can cause the lights to shift and dance according to the rhythm of your whistles ("old indian trick," said the housemate). this all sounds completely nuts, but i was there!

northern lights over the mountain and trees by the glacier

Then i made the mistake of googling "northern lights" and found pictures on this blog that pretty much blew my friggin mind. Enjoy!

devil's club & hudson bay tea (AKA lessons learned from bears)

i'd written about traditional chinese medicine in application essay for med school, but little did i know i was going to experience traditional medicine of a completely different kind -- native american, namely Tlingit, medicine.

you may or may not already know that i live with 3 other guys, a middle-aged landlord, a hobbit-like student my age who walks around barefoot in the snow and talks to himself incessantly, and a Tlingit native student (i'll identify as NH) in his late 20's who has his own tattooing business in his bedroom. an interesting mix for sure, but so far it's worked out (minus maybe one incident which Fuzz knows about).

but anyway, after half the house and some of my clients had been sick this past week, i was feeling a little under the weather yesterday. NH quickly offered to brew me some "indian medicine," which turned out to be two plants that he had picked himself in Juneau: devil's club and hudson bay tea. i was rather alarmed at the words "devil's club," which, not unlike its name, is a very common plant that "conveniently grows everywhere that you want to put your hands on in the forest," as a friend once said. he meant it as an insult, because devil's club looks like this and if you're hiking off-trail in the forest (which people do a lot) and happen to slip, the first thing you would want to grab would always be the devil's club's thorny bark, which would immediately become dislodged in the flesh of your hands. i couldn't help but wonder how a plant as ubiquitous as dandelions and prickly as the devil be of medicinal value? but apparently, the natives learned to use devil's club from watching bears: NH said that a long time ago during hunting, when a bear was speared in the back but did not die, it immediately pulled out devil's club from the ground and rubbed the juices from the ends on its wound.  nice to hear that bears are cute AND smart ;)

anyway, so NH added a handful of both devil's club and hudson bay tea (also called labrador tea and looks like this) to a ton of boiling water and boiled the concoction for ~30 minutes, and the aroma became refreshingly earthy, like the scent after a rainstorm. interestingly, i later found this description of hudson bay tea online (selling for $8/packet):

"Hudson Bay Tea...grows everywhere at a certain latitude, and prolifically in Southeast Alaska. It is even known to grow in China. It is a delicious brewed tea, equal in flavor or bouquet to any fine tea in the world.  Hudson Bay Tea has healing and soothing properties. Be careful not to drink too much at a time, because it is also a soporific (it will make you go to sleep)! Mixed with devils club, together they make a tea that tastes like the earth in its purest form."

sounds accurate enough.  i can't vouch for any "soporific" properties though, because after drinking a cup or two, i felt as energized as having drank two cups of coffee.  but maybe not, for i ended up sleeping for 11 hours, and there was no hint of a cold when i woke up. 

somewhere in the back of my mind, it had registered that spring break is this week in the mitten, but considering it's been below 20F for the past 2 weeks and the fact that i am leading an "adult life," it was difficult to remember that concept. i had today off and went on another long hike up a hill into the meadows, but trail conditions were less than ideal and every once in a while, i would step into loose snow and sink down to my knee or thigh. it was almost comical, if a little disconcerting, to have every third or fourth step fall through on me. but eventually i learned to roll with it and stopped panicking each time i sunk, like a free fall on one foot.

sometime in the middle of the journey, i thought about spring break and tried to remember what had happened last year. it took some time, because apparently 1.5 months of adult life was enough to convince my short term memory that any life before this was just an illusion. when i did remember, i had to smile: last spring break, i was just getting back MCAT scores while trying skiing for the first time at Mt. Holly. then i had done biotransport homework and woke up absurdly early to interview nurses at the hospital for senior design (FlowBlue!). a year later, i am hiking alone in thigh-deep snow in alaska, having already applied and interviewed and now waiting to hear back from the last of the schools. soon, this too, will seem like another illusion. but instead of being sad or nostalgic, i was merely amused, as if i had long given up trying to control every detail that happens in my life. "all that yoga and meditation must be working," i thought, as i partially detached and floated above to observe the lovely moment, balanced between physical motion and inner stillness, body heat and chilled air. lovely moments like this used to always make me slightly panicky, as if i had to do everything possible to capture it and keep it forever. this time, i took a deep breath and just be. being, not doing. then i let the moment go and moved on.
"It's time for something that was beautiful to turn into something else that is beautiful." ~e. gilbert


John Muir cabin on top of the hill

livin' a dream

i'd been eyeing those three days of sun on the forecast for a week now, and the first of which finally arrived on tuesday. it wasn't my day off yet, but i got up early enough (aka 10am) to get a lovely hike in before going to work. on wednesday, i rented snowshoes and went out to the coast and did a 5.5-mile hike that took most of the afternoon before catchin' the sunset and the moonrise. today, i slept in, and snowshoed some more by a creek, and now getting ready for my first geomagnetic storm (aka aurora/northern lights), which a friend and i will watch by the glacier at midnight. oh i do LOVE my life (so what if i still have to do my taxes? still got 4 hours before the weekend ends).

Day 1: short hike up a mountain to a meadow:



where people have been cross country skiiing




Day 2, driving to the northern shoreline of Juneau to snowshoe in the woods



seagull or eagle? i'm leaning towards seagull because of its rather fat underside!




first time snowshoeing. snowshoes distribute your weight over a larger surface so you kind of "float" above the snow, or sink at most a couple inches before the surface, no matter how thick the snow is. it's also super easy to learn, since you walk exactly the same way with snowshoes on as you would normally. it just feel like you have very, very big flip flops on.




tall trees in the forest.



mystical winter scene (aka there was ice on the camera lens)




taking a short break (yes, i peed in the snow (not pictured); no, there was nobody around)




more hiking after lunch. by this point, i was getting kind of tired, considering i'd been out for almost 4 hours in 15-degree weather. but happy as a clam





on my way back into town, i stopped by the coast again. my awesome (but temporary) 2009 subaru patiently waiting for the sunset.














sunset, moonrise.




moonrise over the "valley"
the wolves could come anytime now :P




day 3, more snowshoeing along a creek



skier and dog on glacial lake



on another note, valentine's day flowers from work! (i got to work on monday and the dinner table was covered in pink tablecloth, with pink daisies, and pink napkins!)

fancy bread and candles a valentine dinner make

the days pass by in a topsy-turvy rainy mist: fridays become mondays and tuesdays become fridays. each week feels twice as long -- with two "mondays" -- and yet twice as fast, with two "fridays." so it wasn't exactly a surprise that up until a couple days ago, i had thought that tomorrow was already President's Day.

even after i remembered Valentine's Day, i vaguely wondered what, exactly, it had to do with me, since i'd be working till 10:30pm that day. it wasn't until later that i felt so adult about this response of pure indifference. in fact, i had always been pretty giddy and girlish when it came to v-day, and had celebrated the past 5 of them each with a unique plan and a different boy in an ascending level of romantic settings, starting with "i don't remember" in 12th grade, progressing to "dorm room" freshman year, followed by "dinner," "movie," and "ice skating."

this year, i am single on v-day for the first time and if i'd been concerned at some point about spending it alone, i must have forgotten about it. so with neither love nor hate towards this holiday, i didn't think to celebrate it at all. but when the snow kept falling and i was coming to the end of groceries and the loan of an all-wheel-drive 2009 subaru (AKA the "i-got-sold-a-lemon-and-the-dealership-is-now-trying-to-cover-their-ass-while-doing-repairs" car), i figured i should really get to the store in case the city shuts down from snow and i'm left stranded with no car and no food. when i had finished shopping and on my way to pay, i walked by the bakery section and my eyes fell upon some dark and mysterious loaves of bread, freshly baked and wrapped in stiff paper. "fancy bread," i thought, "just the kind my mom would trade anything for." and suddenly, i realized i DID want to celebrate v-day, but not with the customary 79% dark chocolate that i devour and collect, but with this darling of a loaf:



the "olive" caught my eye first, for i'm particularly partial to anything olive-related. then i noticed just how cute it was: at only 8 ounces, the loaf was surely petite, but subtly shined with such wholesomeness and health that i couldn't think of anything else i'd rather eat for dessert tonight.





and so i stepped out of the snow storm, sat by the fire at home, and enjoyed Zingerman-quality bread with the sun-bathed olive flavor of the Mediterranean, complete with this:





and this:


Happy Valentine' s Day <3

there's this coping technique called "riding the wave" that my clients use to...well, cope -- with anything from being frustrated that they can't have seconds at dinner to having flashbacks of past traumas. and every night, they sit in a big circle and tell each other the coping skills that they've used that day. there are self-explanatory ones like deep breathing, and idiosyncratic ones like "making lemonade (out of lemons)" and "turtling (rolling with it)." but i like "riding the wave" the best because it speaks of the inconstant and cyclical nature of almost everything. the only constant in life is change. everything that goes down must come up again, like a wave. everything that we pass through is just a phase, a season. it also reminds me of what liz gilbert said of meditaion and buddhist philosophy in Eat, Pray, Love:

"In our real lives, we are constantly hopping around to adjust
ourselves around discomfort -- physical, emotional and psychological -- in
order to evade the reality of grief and nuisance. Vipassana meditation
teaches that grief and nuisance are inevitable in this life, but if you plant
yourself in stillness long enough, you will, in time, experience the truth
that everything (both uncomfortable and lovely) does eventually pass. 'The
world is afflicted with death and decay, therefore the wise do not grieve,
knowing the terms of the world,' says an old Buddhist teaching."

and that is one of the reasons i chose to come here. to discover how to be still with myself for a little while, to stop running away from the "bad me," to just ride the wave through all the different colors and shades of me until they've all made peace with each other, or at least until they've all learned how to make peace. i just figured it would be a little bit easier to do so among these (deceivingly) still mountains and waters than a city that never sleeps, for example.

birthday, alaskan style!

my 23-year-old self sure has had a lot of cake in the past few days :)

in the evening before my birthday, my coworker H cooked all the girls in the house and i a delicious thai meal, and then brought out a surprise cake and all the clients sang happy birthday and then blew silly string all over my face! even better, we later took the girls out to watch the stars since the night was absolutely dark and the sky absolutely clear, and i learned that the constellation orion is NOT the bigger dipper after all, and that the little dipper is way littl-er than i could ever have imagined! it was already a great b-day even before the b-day.

the next day, after having worked since 8am, i got was ready to continue the celebration with my favorite people in town. B had a very minty surprise for me, along with another lovely dinner and chocolate cake, and the best present ever -- "90 Short Walks around Juneau," which pretty much has every hiking trail mapped and described, even "short walks" of up to 20 miles round-trip! then B, L, G and i all played several competitive rounds of darts, as well as other activities not appropriate for 4th graders :P

in conclusion: the alaskan birthday was filled with good food, great fun, and lovely friends -- so not SO different from lower-48 birthdays after all :P

BONUS: 3 days of pure sunshine in a row!



same glacier (as "a black and white glacier") under the sun




how a glacier recedes as "flakes" of ice plunges into the lake


you can sort of see the blue "flakes" in this photo




i followed a trail to a waterfall!! the left half of the waterfall is flowing water; the right half is frozen




the trail was solid ice, but surprisingly not slippery at all! and the views along the way were well worth the effort:




same guy in the red jacket as the one in the waterfall picture. poor dude probably thought i was stalking him. but it was really the pop of color provided by his jacket that i was stalking





obligatory macro shot




the rocks made it seem almost beachy





i love giant icebergs broken off of glaciers. oh and long walks on the beach




with sunglasses on, this could totally pass for a dessert scene!