In that cookin' mood

Needed to mellow out one night. All with a bottle of Chianti.




Ribeye with black peppercorns and sea salt in garlic butter with Rosemary garlic-prosciutto mashed potatoes and roasted mushrooms and caramelized onions simmered with a Dijon-red wine glaze. Sounds fancier after I've written it out, but it's actually pretty easy to make! Props to roommate for the great photos.

Fate of the World!

In keeping with the theme of this blog, I just really feel like I want to write this dream down while it's still vivid and alive in my head. Like most of my dreams, it hits me pretty heavily and leaves me either emotionally drained or emotionally amped when I wake up. Sometimes (like this one) I'm not quite sure which it is.

So welcome to the subconscious of Jonathan. =D

I'm sitting in an old, gray swivel chair like the ones you'd find in a barbershop from the 40's, my fingertips brushing repeatedly against the numerous rivulets of rough, ancient, cracked leather that webs across its arms. My eyes narrow slightly from the dull brightness of the afternoon sun that filters in through rusted windows and half-drawn blinds, my ears barely hearing the cacophony of sounds that play back and forth in the thriving heart of Chinatown. Here, in this room that smells like old, heady incense soaked into the aging mahogany that paves the floor and cabinets, with the click-clack of swaying beads echoing lightly, I try to make sense of the red and gold tattoo that spirals across my left arm.

I see a phoenix and a griffin, which in turn becomes just a griffin, resplendent in brilliant golds and reds and while being a notably European creature, seems for the purpose of this dream to be a myth born of ancient Chinese lore. There's an aura of mystery and power that surrounds the art, and as I look at its picture it seems to writhe and twist its form across the length of my forearm.

Then in what seems like mere seconds, some form of shadowed enemies burst into the room and I find myself running across rooftops and alleyways, my heart pounding in my ears, the knowledge that I needed more time a mysterious but very definite, undeniable reality.

So I end up cutting off my forearm and eating it to keep its secrets from the enemy.

Eventually, I somehow end up with two additional tattoos at what seems like a much later time. Two coy-fish, red and gold intertwine around my right leg while a huge dragon runs across the length of my back. At this point my arm had grown back (like Wolverine) but the original tattoo wasn't there anymore, and I knew that I needed to get it back as fast as I could or the world was doomed. It seemed as if the fate of the world hung in the balance.

So I travel the world now, trying to find the old man who originally gave me that tattoo and complete the triad of creatures that represent power, fortune, and immortality. Somehow, with these powers I would be able to save the world.

And then I wake up, and have to go to work.

Adventure

5 mile hike to the Bridge to Nowhere

Azusa Mountains

Asians in mountains

The edge of the Bridge to Nowhere

BUNGEE!!!

Oh baby

The jumpers

Familiar fears

"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love." - Ranier Maria Rilke

How many of us live in reaving fear, lashing out to quell the many storms around us before they, in their own terrors lash out against us? How many of us, hushed into pale denial by the staggering immensity of our own self-loathing, seek so fanatically, so fervently to rend apart from the shaded lives of strangers, that very horror that we know lies treacherously within ourselves? It is as if the level of ferociousness our hatred carries is rivaled only by the depths of our fear and the starkness of our understanding. Though the ignorant may respond in fear to the unknown, it is the wise, the ones living in undeniable familiarity that must struggle between the freedom of a far-leaping grace and the temptation of an alluring, dark hate. As creatures whose passions rise and fall so easily upon life's capricious whims, we fall all too often within the grasp of our own hated weaknesses found in another. And thus, we do not always attack to win, we do not always fight to triumph or to survive; there are times when our desperate struggles are for nothing more than the sake of shattering mirrors so that we will not be haunted by our own familiar, lingering truth. Perhaps we have all become dragons of a sort, eagerly hunting each other down in our own desperation to end a self-afflicted misery too blind to accept love with grace, and so unable to offer it in turn to another. And so we shall remain, preying upon others in a constant attempt to flee from ourselves, until we finally grasp the courage to withstand such familiar, well-worn fears and to love and pull one another out of drowning shadows with a powerful grace whose soft touch carries with it it's own strong, forgotten familiarity as well.

Indulgence

Nostalgia

I can't count the number of times I walk around a bookstore like Barnes or Borders and I'm literally tingling with anticipation. God, I absolutely love bookstores. The soft, over-stuffed leather chairs, my some-sort-of-iced-vanilla-latte, that entire parade of people, all different sizes and shapes and colors rummaging around in some form of intellectual/creative cliche. I can sit in the coffee-shop cafe and with absolutely no shame, bask in that smooth, rich, trendy coffee-atmosphere. I succumb eagerly and willfully to the mass marketing and the terrors of Starbucksology and feel completely, wonderfully at home.

Every time I walk into a bookstore it's like walking into a treasure trove. I suppose that makes me a nerd of some sort, but usually I'm enjoying myself far too greatly to care very much as to what kind of nerd that is. The only thought that vexes me to any degree is what book to read first.

Speaking of which...I was recommended to a novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, by a good friend a few months back. Since then I have in turn recommended this book to numerous other people, one of whom started reading it recently. Our conversations have whipped up some of that good ol' nostalgia and I'm recalling again just how much I was...entraptured by that book.
It wasn't just the poignant spin on romance, on love beyond love, beyond time, beyond strength and impossibilities, and it wasn't just the intricate details the author so painstakingly thought out that drew me in. What appealed to me the most, that wholeheartedly captured me and drowned me in its pages was the author's ability to weave absolutely beautiful, passionate moments that dotted the entire novel. I love how she writes with such honest, uncompromising, and at times a hauntingly sorrowful beauty that in the midst of all the Complications and Obstacles of life, presents a very simple, infinitly strong Love that pulses and throbs with all the desperate heartache of two people who will not and cannot let go of one another. She takes Love and dissects it down to its intricate core, and finds that when all the pieces are cut apart and laid down and minutely examined, there exists nothing but a simple, honest, undeniable love that is not great in its perfection, but great in its unrelenting passion.

It's a story about two people who desperately and fiercly love each other not because of the circumstances that bring them together, but inspite of the ones that try to keep them apart.

Great book.