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