Few things require patience like training horses does. When I was working with horses, I noticed I had an increased level of patience for everything, maybe because I was actively practicing trying to understand another creature and his reactions to me.

I begin to believe that I do not express my opinions too rapidly, but rather that I form them too rapidly.

Midwesterners as a whole seem to be a far more patient breed than we West Coasters, with our stereotypical obsessions: fast cars, hard living, and perpetual youth. Watching my team work has been mind-opening. I’ve watched my boss quietly listen to reasons we should change something in our plans — reasons that sometimes seem ridiculous. Why doesn’t he say something? I often think. But he usually holds his reaction until the speaker has finished, and it’s only then that he decides whether he agrees. I’ve seen him do a complete about-face when he realizes he was on the wrong path.

I get red in the face when confronted with something I don’t agree with. I fear I turn red a lot in meetings. Part of this is that I’m some young smartass who thinks stuff needs disrupting. By default, I think that most stakeholders in old media don’t understand “the future” or are too beholden to other interests. I am automatically suspicious of any argument that is based on doing something a certain way because it has always been done that way, or because changing it has failed in the past. But the truth is that I don’t have magic answers. Sometimes things have always been done a certain way because that way works. Sometimes they don’t need disrupting.

Sometimes I am wrong.

This, I think, is the key to patience: knowing that you do not have all the answers. It goes hand-in-hand with humility, another trait I sometimes forget in my other pants. Pride is the enemy of patience. Patience is more concerned with the welfare of all than it is with what it thinks or how it feels. As a Christian, I am painfully aware of my own hypocrisy. While my current take on this came about in a rather corporate setting, I certainly intend to apply it to everything from maintaining long-distance friendships to learning code.

When you acknowledge how limited your own understanding truly is, you realize that forming solid opinions quickly is dangerous. It closes off possibilities, puts you at risk of making avoidable mistakes, and makes you look like an immature asshat half the time. And it makes it that much more compelling when you do stick to your guns.

Patience is taking the time to understand something — or someone — fully. Patience is thinking more and speaking less.

One lasting benefit of student-athletehood: The letterman's jacket. Too heavy to wear in Fresno, it's proven invaluable in Chicago.

Fresno State put a milk locker in the athletes’ gym back in 2007, I think. It came about after someone did research that showed that drinking chocolate milk after weightlifting promoted faster muscle recovery. They mostly intended it for the football players (like they intended everything), but they couldn’t discriminate. So three days a week after workouts, the equestrian team would straggle toward the fridge. I usually got plain ol’ milk, and when I did snag a chocolate one, sometimes I saved it for my little brother, who commuted with me for my last two years. (Other times, I downed it right away.)

I had totally forgotten about all of this until I started working out again recently. (Having a metabolism that could burn off anything is another thing I miss about being an athlete. Alongside, you know, riding horses all the time.) Today I ran four miles. When I stumbled back into my apartment, I was red in the face, soaked in sweat. I haven’t felt like that since I ran suicides in team workout. As I stood there panting, wondering why the hell I’d decided to do this to myself again, I had an intense craving for chocolate milk. I started giggling, which is not a good thing to do when you already can’t breathe. I think I’ll have to get myself a bottle, and I’ll drink it in honor of all the poor girls who currently clean tequila and nachos off the ceilings of skyboxes.

I got in very late Wednesday evening. She picked me up and drove me to her house, where we talked (quietly, as her sister was asleep upstairs) until neither of us could finish a sentence without yawning. She pointed me to the downstairs bathroom and bid me good evening.

Half asleep, cold, and with a racehorse-like need to pee, I slipped into the bathroom to change into my PJs. My jeans jangled as I unbuttoned them.

Oh, right, I put a bunch of change in my pocket earlier.

I folded the jeans carefully so the coins wouldn’t fall out of the pocket and clang noisily.

Shh, Michelle is sleeping, I thought to myself.

The toilet flush was weird and muffled, as if there wasn’t enough water pressure. I continued my boring bedtime ritual, ignoring the whoosh of water. Brush teeth, comb hair, wash face.

Hmm, toilet’s still running.

Tiptoe out to sofa, arrange blankets and pillows.

It really should have stopped by now.

Sneak back to bathroom to remove dirty clothes and toiletries.

Geeze, that thing is kind of loud. I should fix this.

It had been about eight minutes by this time, and I didn’t feel right just leaving it running. So carefully, slowly, and ever so quietly I removed the porcelain top of the tank.

I used to know how to do this…

I flushed the toilet again, hoping it would just fix itself. It was incredibly loud with the lid off. I shushed it. It didn’t help.

It also continued running. I started poking levers, trying to remember which one controlled what. There aren’t that many parts in a toilet, and finally I popped the right thing. Instant silence. I replaced the lid with the grace of winter’s first snow, making no more noise than a butterfly kiss. Triumphantly, I grabbed the toiletries and clothes I had originally returned to remove, sending several dollars in change rattling like tambourines against the hard tile floor.

First irregularly timed Jayhawks (aka Ladies of @tribapps) planning meeting convened at XOCO. Consensus=omg churros! twitter.com/hbillings/stat…

— Heather Billings (@hbillings) April 7, 2012

I swore to myself that I was going to leave early for work today in order to attend 7 p.m. Good Friday service. That would leave plenty of time, I decided, to down a granola bar dinner and get to a 10 p.m. concert — if I still felt awake enough to go.

At 6:45, my boss was sitting on my desk, helping me figure out what stupid thing I’d done to break the nav bar I was trying to style. At 7:15, our project manager came back from the gym and asked why I hadn’t gone home yet. At 7:30, she said she was just going to abduct me for dinner.

It’s nice to have another woman on the team. We do, however, really need to stop discovering similarities between ourselves, because it will reach frightening, clone-like levels if it goes much further. The first similarity we ever found was that we both share the middle name “Jay,” and that neither of us had ever encountered another woman with that name. This week, when thanks to her determination, we finally got to order nameplates, we both decided to flaunt the “Jay.” But the coolest idea came from one of her friends: If we were a crimefighting duo, our name should be the Jayhawks.

Jayhawks are hungry animals, I have decided.

Neither of us has really explored Chicago enough to know what’s a.) good, b.) uncrowded, and c.) on the way home. So after some preliminary Yelping, we settled on XOCO, which is sort of like what Chipotle would be like if Rick Bayless took over and made it kick ass. We walked in and immediately wanted one of everything, including soft-serve vanilla ice cream swirled with honey maple syrup and sprinkled with streusel topping and bacon. BACON. We convened our first Jayhawks meeting over two tortas, the aforementioned ice cream and a churro, which was altogether too much food (though rest assured, we let none of it go to waste). It was easily the most delicious churro I’ve ever had, which I consider something of an endorsement. (Altogether, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the quality of Mexican food in Chicago.)

We sat and ate and talked and ate and talked and ate for a couple of hours. And at this important business meeting, we decided that churros are delicious, bacon on ice cream is delicious, avocado is delicious, we both feel lucky to work with such wonderful people, and neither of us can get used to the idea of living in “the Midwest.”

Around 10:30, we got on the red line and headed toward our respective homes. I was glad I hadn’t spent much on my concert tickets, because I’d missed half the opening act and was feeling more sluggish than social after so much food. I’d bought the tickets at the prodding of the same friend who had introduced me to the band several months ago. So while I knew I enjoyed the duo’s harmonies, I wasn’t severely personally invested. But when I checked my Twitter feed, I saw that another friend of mine was going to be there and was encouraging me to come out.

Noooo, you’re tired, said my brain, the logical part of me. That was the part made me start walking toward home before I thought, “This is dumb,” and flagged a cab. What did I have to lose, besides the $18 I’d paid for the ticket?

The downside to being late was that we couldn’t actually get in the auditorium, so my friend, her friend and I sat in the bar area and half-listened, half-talked. I’d love to see First Aid Kit again when I’m situated better, but it was a great, low-key way to end the evening. I even got to duck outside to call my dad and wish him a happy birthday.

And we managed to squeeze in for the last two songs, including the finale, which encapsulates so much of my life so well.

I keep running around, trying to find the ground, but my head is in the stars and my feet are in the sky.

I’m nobody’s baby, but I’m everybody’s girl. I’m the queen of nothing. I’m the king of the world.

Contrary to what this image may suggest, my brother's name is not, in fact, "Craig."

“CRAIG SCHOOL OF BUSINESS” read the front of the card. “CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FRESNO.”

My little brother is graduating from college in May. Cum laude, with a degree in business finance, specialization in real estate and “urban land economics.” I don’t think they’ll be able to get the full title on his diploma.

I can’t believe it’s been five years. I remember commuting with him for his first two (and my last two) years of college. I purposely bothered him sometimes by singing loudly to music that he didn’t like. He whined when I got in the car smelling like horses. His last year of college, he and his best friend and I all commuted together in my little Ford Ranger. We took turns toughing it out in the suicide seats.

He stuck it out at late nights at the Collegian, waiting for me to finish up my webmasterly duties so we could drive the hour home. (He tried desperately not to schedule class for Tuesdays or Thursdays, when he knew I’d be late.) And he missed my privileged faculty parking pass, which came with my Collegian gig, when I finally graduated.

I left the state in his sophomore year, which means I missed out on a lot. But I’ve loved hearing how he’s slowly discovered his passion, gotten involved with student leadership, and pursued activities that I never would have predicted (Financial Management Association?! Who is this guy?). I can’t wait to go home for his ceremony — even if it IS at 8 in the morning. (Kid, you owe me.)

Normal.

I detest crowds, loud drunkards, gaggles of has-been frat boys, and did I mention crowds? It’s probably obvious, then, why St. Patrick’s at my house has always been celebrated with a dinner of corned beef and cabbage, and nothing more. But my brother was in town with twelve of his closest friends — his financial management club, here for a conference — and they were hell-bent on having a good time. I, as the older sister who was “a Chicagan” (I had to explain that unlike Fresno natives, who drop the “o,” people in Chicago called themselves “Chicagoans”) knew I was going to have to step up to the plate.

Carson, being the adorably stoic little brother he is, came up to Boystown to visit me Saturday morning while his friends were asleep from their ridiculously late Friday night (and tempered this tender, self-sacrificial gesture by farting so obnoxiously in my apartment that we had to vacate the premises). I fixed his hangover with a redeye from Intelligentsia, and then some music browsing at Reckless Records. I’d anticipated taking him to breakfast, and had my mouth all set for some pancakes, but he informed me that he was dying to try this “Italian beef thing” that my dad had talked so much about after his last visit. I cringed inside. That meant we were going to have to go downtown. On St. Patrick’s.

I've never seen anyone eat anything so fast.

We couldn’t even get on the first bus that stopped. I felt my stomach tighten. Crowds and I are not friends. When we finally got downtown, I could not believe the number of people, all in green, flooding the sidewalks. It felt like Manhattan at rush hour. And Portillo’s was, of course, completely packed. A cop at the door was waving people in one at a time. Carson looked at me.

“This really isn’t your thing, is it?”

Perceptive, that one.

Portillo’s, being the kitschy place it is, was advertising green beer. Carson asked if I wanted one. I still wanted pancakes. I tried not to make a face.

“I’ll get one with you if you want one.”

“Do you want one?”

It was beer. It tasted green. Green is not a good flavor for beer.

He ended up buying us both one after we’d elbowed our way through the line and ordered our sandwiches. It was indeed as nasty as I thought it was going to be (made no better by someone spilling theirs down my back). But the food came, Carson wolfed his and half of mine down in a matter of minutes, muttering all the while about how Fresno needed to learn what Italian beef was.

As we fought our way back to Tribune Tower, where we met his friends, we stopped to look at the Chicago river. It had been dyed green that morning, and to my surprise was still quite neon. The sun was out, I was hanging with my little bro, the river looked like something from Dr. Seuss. I caught myself smiling despite the crowds and the silliness of it all.

I’d promised Carson and his friends a tour of the Tower, since they had nothing else better to do (and being from California, were scared to death of taking the bus anywhere). I was expecting it to bore them, but they actually got quite a kick out of it. They stood for a long time in front of the old newspaper printing plates, examining headlines about “Reds” murdering “thousands of peasants in village” and men walking on the moon. I showed them the Pulitzers, the ed board conference room, the radio station. And then, at the end of the tour, at about 4:30 on St. Paddy’s, I told them to follow me to the Billy Goat.

“Is that the bar that’s under the overpass?” one of them exclaimed excitedly. We set the standards high here.

I bought a round of cheap beer for everyone, and they gorged themselves on greasy burgers. I pointed out headlines of yellowing papers and explained that this used to be where the Sun-Times journalists and Tribune journalists came to argue with each other.

I think that's almost a smile on his face.

In a weird way, the whole crazy experience made me feel like Chicago is finally becoming my home. My crazy-ass town: Let me show you it.

Carson headed back to his hotel to pack after the Billy Goat, but he walked me to the bus stop first. I didn’t tell him, but I’d drink ten nasty green Miller Lites in a heartbeat to make those memories all over again.

Say, "Cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeese!"

He and fifteen of his closest friends landed at O’Hare yesterday for a financial management conference (geekery runs in the family). The plan was to meet them all for dinner somewhere.

At 4:30, my stomach started rumbling. This is the downside to being skinny: You’re hungry a LOT. I can wait, I told myself. He texted me: “We’re gonna eat around 5:30.”

At 5:30, he texted me to say that it was going to be another hour.

At 6:30, I texted him to say that I was leaving work, and if they weren’t ready for dinner I would just swing by the hotel to say hi.

He gave me the room number they were hanging out in. He texted me a few minutes later to say they were moving to a different room. When I finally got to the hotel (after making a right instead of a left because I am talented like that), I knocked on the specified door. Silence.

My phone buzzed. “Were r u?”

“I AM OUTSIDE YOUR DOOR.”

“were gonna be in the lobby”

Sigh. Okay. Fine. Back to the lobby.

…which was completely devoid of anyone resembling my brother, or a gaggle of college kids. I called him.

“Oh, we’re just outside the revolving door.”

Can’t you just STAY PUT? screamed my feet, which I had wedged into high heels that morning for the first time in weeks.

I walked out the door. “No, Carson, you are NOT outside the revolving door,” I said. “Are there perhaps TWO revolving doors?”

“Uh…I dunno?”

“Here is what you are going to do,” I said. “You are going to walk back into the lobby. I am also going to walk back into the lobby. You are going to stay there until you see me.”

As I went back inside, I saw him enter the building from the opposite end. A sheepish grin spread across his face, and he tried to hug me while simultaneously acting cool.

I choked back the primitive instinct that told me to give him a wedgie.

He’d brought me some dried herbs from Mom, and also picked up yesterday’s copy of my old school newspaper, The Collegian. “I thought you might like to see it.” (It’s now on my coffee table, where it will probably stay until it gets completely ratty and has to be thrown away.)

The group meandered toward Giordano’s for deep-dish pizza. It was so cool — and so weird — to walk down Michigan Avenue with my brother, narrating as I went: “Dao has good, cheapish Thai food. Descartes is good for coffee. Millenium Park’s just down this way.” And, of course: “Oh, yeah, this is Tribune Tower. I work here.”

Six months in, I’m still incredibly blown away that I get to walk into that tower every day. But that’s another post.

We ate pizza, Carson’s friends showed me video of him conquering the Buffalo Wild Wings hot wing challenge, I gave him a noogie, and he gave me a hug goodnight (which, for my brother, is the ultimate sign of affection, considering he usually dodges all attempts at human touch). I hope we’ll get to hang out again while he’s here, but it meant a lot that he wanted his dorky older sister to hang out with him and his (also dorky) friends, just for an evening.

Sludge and I went home. We had to think about the case. I made pancakes for myself. I gave Sludge a bone.

—Nate the Great and the Stolen Base

Delicious, delicious pancakes.

I spent Saturday recovering from a cold. Sometimes, when you’re sick, you want one certain food and nothing else will do. Yesterday, that food was pancakes.

Sadly for me, the state of my larder (as illustrated in my last blog post) is not exactly conducive to making anything that is not toast with peanut butter. One might think that that would be close enough to pancakes to satisfy. But I wanted *pancakes*, and I was too sick to want to go out to buy ingredients. So I pouted in front of my cupboard for a few minutes. And like Nate the Great, I watched the pieces of my puzzle come together in a way that made me feel extraordinarily grateful.

When I was in grad school, my friend Jennie sent me a care package. It was a marvelous box full of chocolate, green army men, granola bars and a small bottle of shake-and-make Bisquick pancake mix. This was not long before I left Phoenix, so I took the uneaten items back home to Squaw Valley when I moved and left them there. I didn’t know where I was going and didn’t want to cart them all over the country. So this pancake mix sat in my mother’s pantry for eight months. Over Christmas, while she was cleaning the pantry, she asked if I wanted it. I didn’t see the point in carting it back to Chicago with me.

Unbeknownst to me, my imp of a brother thought it would be funny to slip the mix into my suitcase without my knowing it. When I unpacked in January, I found the bottle, laughed, and stuck it in the back corner of my pantry.

Suddenly, standing in my kitchen nearly a year after I’d received the mix originally, the lightbulb went off. I dug it out and verified that you only needed water. Voila, pancakes.

But what to put on them? Pancake aficionados appreciate the importance of proper toppings. I had no syrup. Molasses? Ew. Honey? Maybe. Fruit would be ideal, but all I had was a boatload of oranges.

Back in January, Mom and I had gone grocery shopping. As parents do, she bought a few things that she felt I might need but I was certain I would never use.

One of those was a bag of frozen strawberries. “Just in case you run out of fresh fruit for your yogurt,” she said at the time.

So I fried me some cakes and chopped up a few strawberries. While microwaving them (to make them disintegrate into a syrup), I thought that the only thing that would make this the perfect breakfast was the presence of bacon. But I was out of that, too.

However, since it had previously yielded fruitful (see what I did there?), I checked my freezer.

Dad, like Mom, occasionally likes to buy me things that he thinks are important. The conversation usually goes like this:

“Will you use this?”

“Er, maybe?”

“Okay, cool!”

Usually, I end up with something like a flashlight, air pressure gauge, computer part or other gadget. But since Dad visited me in February and had heard that sometimes people in Chicago get snowed in, his focus was on making sure I had emergency food.

In this case, “emergency food” meant a pack of frozen, precooked sausages.

Score.

So, thanks in absolutely no part to my own doing, but rather due to about 6,000 miles of travel and the love of my family and friends from across the U.S., Saturday morning offered up the pancake breakfast I desperately wanted. I ate it in bed, watching the snow, feeling like the most blessed person alive.

I have not gone grocery shopping for about three weeks. As you can see, oranges are currently the only thing keeping me from starvation.

But first, before any of them, come the oranges. February and early March are orange season. The Central Valley right now will be dotted with packing crates and trucks full of bright orange spheres.

I don’t know about you, but most of the folks I know are sort of lukewarm about oranges. They’ll buy them to juice or make smoothies from. Very rarely do people seem to eat them whole. This, my friends, is the tragedy of the grocery store orange.

My theory is that most people have never had a really good, fresh orange. In fact, the very best oranges in the United States are not sold in the United States. The best oranges (at least in the part of citrus country I’m from) are sold to Japan.

Whaaaat. Japan. Yes.

However, if you happen to live near the orange orchards, you’re in luck. Every year, my dad makes a trip to the local Sunkist plant to buy a box of culls — the oranges that are too ugly to sell — for dirt cheap. Man, are they good. And every once in a while, he’ll also buy a box of what’s known as “McSweeny’s Prides.” These are boxes right off the packing line headed for Japan (it’s bizarre to see the familiar orange crates printed in Japanese characters). And yes, there is a Mr. McSweeny — apparently Dad had to convince one of the employees to go get him this year so that the employee could confirm it was okay to sell Dad the box.

Naturally, when I learned about this, I begged Mom to mail me a few. A FEW. Six, at the most. They don’t keep very long at their freshest.

A few days later, I received in the mail not six oranges, but approximately two dozen. I meant to share them with my coworkers, but as timing worked out, a week-long conference got in the way. By the time I got back, those beauties tasted like they were fresh off the grocery store shelf.

Maybe I can convince Dad to wheedle some more out of Mr. McSweeny before orange season ends…

Amy, me, Hannah and Sam (Leen is both camera-shy AND a photographer). The sofa was such that it sloped in toward the middle, resulting in awkward inadvertent snuggling. Hannah has wisely chosen to use the pillows to keep Sam away. ;-)

Three days later — this past Sunday — I was speeding across Indiana with my friend Hannah, heading toward Ohio and our good friends Sam and Leen, whom neither of us had seen for nearly six years.

I didn’t think it was going to work. My Phoenix friend Alex was in Chicago Saturday, and I’d been looking forward to hanging out with him. Neither Greyhound nor Amtrak had available routes at decent times scheduled between Chicago and…well, and anywhere. I tried Indianapolis, where Hannah had said she could pick me up. I tried Fort Wayne. I tried Muncie, Warsaw, and Cincinnati. Nothing.

And then someone suggested I try Megabus. Lo and behold, one lone route could work. I could leave late Saturday afternoon — thereby getting to spend most of the day with Alex & co. — and return late Sunday evening.

The race was on.

The whole trip is a blur now. I hung out with my Phoenix friends for several hours, and was struck by how quickly I’d “gone native.” The 35-degree day was sunny and brisk in my estimation. My companions spent the afternoon with their scarves around their noses and continually commented on which extremities had frozen off. (Granted, they said it was 70 in Scottsdale when they left…) We walked around Navy Pier and Downtown, I showed them where to get deep-dish pizza, and then I ran to catch the bus back to my apartment. Grabbed my luggage, ran back to the bus stop, and arrived just in time to grab a seat on top level of the double-decker coach to Indy.

We pulled into Indianapolis around 10 p.m. As I got off the bus, I was overwhelmed by the strangeness of the city. I had no bearings, I didn’t know which direction Hannah would come from, and I had no idea what was near me. But a few minutes later, I was in Hannah’s car helping her navigate. Turns out she was almost just as lost as I. We took a left turn to the highway and ended up in a very creepy driveway that we swore could have been home to a maniac with a chainsaw. We kept missing turn offs because we were talking. We got turned around on the side streets near Hannah’s college campus, where I crashed for the evening.

Sleep is for the weak, however, and we were up bright and early to go see Hannah’s boyfriend sing at church. (Good lord, that boy has a voice!) It was a Lutheran church, which I had never been to one of. It was communion Sunday, too, which proved interesting. The congregation of about fifty people invited us to take communion with them. Now, keep in mind that I’ve been a Christian my entire life and have taken communion since I can remember. You pass the plate of crackers, the array of grape juice, drink and eat, done. Not so here. Members of the congregation gathered around the altar, kneeled, and were passed the sacraments — which included actual red wine instead of grape juice. I very nearly gagged (I can’t stand red wine and certainly was not expecting it).

With a blood alcohol level of something like .00000008%, Hannah got behind the wheel and sped us off across Indiana and into Ohio. Along the way, we had some deep conversations and prank-texted another friend (because we are actually twelve-year-olds), discussed religious stereotyping and listened to the Book of Mormon soundtrack (today I have had, stuck in my head, “I aaaam a Mormoooon!” which is not the sort of thing one wants to go around singing out loud even if one is a Mormon), belted out random Weebls songs, tried three times to get into vehicles that were not actually ours, got lost on mile 118 of a 120-mile trip, and finally, finally, pulled up to a little house in Monroe, Ohio.

There were Sam and Leen (and another friend, Amy, whose house it was). There were many hugs and a lot of laughter. Sam and Leen, who are New Hampshire-ites, were there sealing up final loose ends for what will, with any luck, be the adoption of their first child. It’s incredible to think about how long we’ve all been friends, especially considering all of us met each other online. Yes, it sounds creepy. No, it really isn’t. I’ve known these people for nearly half of my life now. They’ve been there for me through high school, college, my first boyfriend and my first breakup. Through moving for the first, second, third times. Sam, who is about eight years older than I, coached me through my first real programming of any kind. Leen shares my obsession with horses. They’ve both been Christian role models, great advice-givers, silly-story tellers, and just generally friends of the best kind. In return, I’ve been lucky enough to share some of their moments, big and small.

For three hours, we talked and made silly jokes and reminisced. There is no way I can recount the conversations in a way that makes sense. That is how fantastic they were.

Then Sam and Leen left to catch their flight, and Hannah and I turned back around to head for Indianapolis. I boarded a bus back to Chicago at 9 p.m., fully intending to work on my lightning talk for an upcoming conference. Instead, I watched Wrath of Khan. I have no regrets.

I finally got home just after midnight. Nearly fifteen hours of travel for a three-hour visit.

It was worth every second. I am so glad to be at a point in my life when I can take a weekend to spend having last-minute adventures with friends — and so grateful to have crazy, wonderful people like that in my life.