January feelings
and giving yourself a present every day
Any person who loves a fresh new planner full of blank pages as much as I do loves the clean slate feeling of New Year's Day. The future is unwritten (feel the rain on your skin!). But 2025 began with a hangover, both literal, kicking off my own “damp January”1, and metaphorical, as we creep towards the world’s biggest case of Sunday Scaries this weekend before Inauguration Day. It has been heartbreaking to watch the news of the devastating fires in Los Angeles, my birthplace and first hometown. I donated to the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation and World Central Kitchen to feel a little less helpless about it all. It’s so close on the heels of the horrific flooding in Asheville and other towns in North Carolina last fall, and there is a collective anxiety over where the next climate change disaster will strike. What a month to be sober, amirite?
I started the New Year in a melancholy mood. As I explained to Kurt, I felt ‘antsy-pantsy.’ There was nothing on TV that I felt like watching, nothing in the fridge that I felt like eating, but I couldn’t articulate what I wanted to watch or eat. I bailed on plans on two consecutive days, blaming the cold that I’d been battering back with Vitamin D and continuous mugs of tea. My nose grew red and chafed from burning through half a box of Kleenex in 24 hours. I needed to pull myself out of the funk somehow, so I binge-watched a series of Mount Everest climbing disaster documentaries.
I’m not a mountain climber, nor would I ever want to be with my fear of extreme heights. But something about a climbing documentary reboots my brain. I can smell the ice, feel the damp layer of merino wool against my own skin, and it grounds me. My antsy-pantsness craved a mountain vista in whiteout blizzard conditions. I cracked open a Canada Dry Zero (I’ve been drinking diet soda at the rate of a Mormon housewife; I’m gonna need to do “Flat February”) and watched Sherpa on Amazon Prime, followed immediately by Aftershock: Everest and the Nepal Earthquake on Netflix. Both documentaries are excellent, filled with footage that put me right on the mountain, and emphasized the climbing community’s reliance on the support and labor of the Sherpa people native to the mountainous region.
Kurt can recognize a theme and suggested dinner at an Indian & Nepalese restaurant near our house, which further lifted my mood; I think it’s scientifically impossible to feel melancholy while eating butter chicken. Prayer flags hung on the walls and a television in the corner displayed a video slideshow of the Himalayas. I slid my phone out of my coat pocket to google discreetly under the table “how hard hike to Mount Everest base camp?”
Back in the early days of 2020, I made a resolution to visit a new restaurant, museum, or theater at least once a month. This felt like an attainable goal, a way to break my homebody out of the comfy indentation where I settle as soon after the closing click of my work laptop. Well, we all know how that goal turned out. Five years later in a little Nepalese restaurant, sitting across from my husband as he ate goat and rice off a copper platter, I was reminded of how nice it is to see a new corner of the city where I’ve lived my entire adult life.
The mood boost lasted for a while, but after another night of tossing and turning through gritted teeth, stuffy sinuses, and anxiety, my thought process leveled up and I concluded that I absolutely needed to see a snow leopard today. What else could complete the mental journey I had started with the first click of the Apple remote on a Mount Everest doc?
A few years ago, I read an article by the novelist Maggie Shipstead about embarking on an expedition in the Himalayas to spot a snow leopard in the wild. The story was promptly bookmarked in the collection of open tabs in my brain, and the recent Everest binge reminded me of it. Snow leopards are elusive creatures rarely spotted in the wild, resilient in the extreme condition of the most frigid high altitudes, and seeing one suddenly felt like the good omen I needed to start the year. I couldn’t book an impromptu flight to Kathmandu, but I am lucky to live in a city that is home to not one but two AZA-accredited zoos that are BOTH homes to snow leopards.
So on a gray, crispy cold January day, I set out on a solo day at the zoo.
I hadn’t visited Lincoln Park Zoo since perhaps college. Walking into the zoo as a middle-age visitor was a step back in time to the school field trips of my youth, memories of my blue plaid uniform jumper, a Lunchable stowed away in my backpack2, the distinctive smell of the school bus (sweaty feet, pencil lead, bologna, and exhaust). Everything so familiar and unchanged by time—the stately brick buildings, the curving paths, the Hancock building looming in the wintry background. A handful of other people milled around, but the zoo was mostly empty, the outdoor concessions boarded up. It felt like it was just me and the animals.
I booked it over to the Pepper Family Wildlife Center, where the big cats live. After watching the lions loll around on the rocks, I swung around the smaller exhibits in the back. The Canadian lynx was absent from visibility, opting for its indoor lair. I prepared myself for the potential disappointment of not seeing a snow leopard that day. But in the third habitat, there one was, ambling along a wooden walkway, its thick furry trademark tail swishing languidly. With one graceful leap, the leopard settled on a wooden platform, curling up into a ball the same way my cat Esteban does on my desk chair. In the cage next door, his neighbor sat atop the platform gazing into the distance. I was close enough to see its breath in the chilly winter air. What a world, where I could drive less than eight miles from home and stand outside and watch the breath of a snow leopard condense and dissipate on a crisp day in January.
For the next few hours, I wandered around the rest of the zoo exploring on my own. The antsy-pants feeling subsided; whether it was from the outdoor walk, the change of scenery, visiting a familiar place intertwined with good memories, or a combination of all of the above. Sometimes the answer is simple: pump some fresh air through your lungs, move your body, replace screens with trees and the sky, and your mindset will reset.
I don’t really believe in signs from the universe; I think humans have a natural tendency to create a narrative out of the random patterns of life so we see signs when we really just need a sense of assurance. But as I left the Regenstein African Journey exhibit, I noticed a sign inscribed with a quote near the exit door.
OK Margaret, you got me. My little amble through a comforting place from my childhood happened to land my eyeballs in front of a literal sign that gave me a much needed boost of New Year hope. There’s going to be hard days in 2025, but there will also be beautiful days.
Anyways now I’m going on an internet deep dive into the reason why Lincoln Park Zoo no longer has any mold-a-rama machines.
I had to add a last-minute addendum to this newsletter upon hearing the sad news that the filmmaker and artist David Lynch passed away. I’ll never forget watching the series Twin Peaks on network TV when I was in sixth grade and my mind being blown wide open; it was unlike anything I’d ever seen. I didn’t know art could do that. Lynch’s work and worldview awakened my sense of awe in the surreality of the universe. The only pop culture tattoo I have is a Twin Peaks tattoo. In his memory, I’ll end on one of my favorite quotes and life philosophies of Agent Dale Cooper: “Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it. Don't wait for it. Just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot black coffee.”
“damp” because I’m not made of stern enough stuff to spend Inauguration Day stone cold sober.
My family’s rule was that we only got Lunchables on field trip days, making it an even more special occasion.
Before even starting to read, I got weepy from the subhead! 😭 But then was happy to lol right after at "Feel the rain on your skin". Ha!
The Margaret Mead quote made me tear up. ❤