Snow (for a non-homeowner)

There are two types of California natives living in New England. The first type wears sandals and shorts at all cost, complains about the lack of good Mexican food here, and starts lots of sentences with "If I were in California right now..." whenever it starts to snow. The second type dresses sensibly, complains about the lack of good Mexican food here, and starts lots of sentences with "This is so fucking cool" when it starts to snow. I'm in the latter category.

When I was growing up in California, snow was a chilly, cotton ball backdrop for dreams and dream vacations, not a reality. For one weekend a year, I sledded and froze to my heart's content on a Cub Scouts trip to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, but otherwise I had to settle for reading Snowy Day and watching Frosty the Snowman on repeat during Christmas season.

Now I'm in Massachusetts, and things are awesome. I'm in my room, the place where I live, where my own bed is, not being on vacation or watching movies or reading pictures books or anything, and the world is fucking white outside. I love it, and if my love is naive, simple, and overly innocent, it is a love marked by the same purity that characterizes freshly fallen snow.

See, I live in a dormitory. I don't own a car. In fact, almost everything that I own is in this room with me, safe from the snow, and one of those things is a warm jacket. The walkways I use to get to class are maintained by a round-the-clock crew of salters and plowers, and I never half to walk more than half a mile anyway. The dining hall keeps turning out a dependable, squash-heavy menu regardless of the weather, and my heater works most of the time. My fellow DeWolfePack members are in the same boat, and it's probably fair to say that all of these conditions are Things which we Like.

Not having to shovel snow is nice, and that fortunate privilege, plus my own relative lack of experience with snow, has allowed it to become one of my absolute favorite things about living in New England. Here, without a single original thought, is why.

Life is boring and often kind of sucky. I, along with my fellow students, my professors, my parents, my parents' colleagues, and everyone else, get up in the morning and do the same stuff that I usually do. A lot of it is work. A lot of it is repetitive. Then I go to bed, wake up, and do it again. I get sick of the monotony, weary of the constant pressure, and tired of the struggles that, at their conclusion, produce more struggle. Very often I need, to borrow a phrase from the cesspool of banality in which I paddle, a change of scenery. Vacations are nice, but they're only a momentary evasion of the tasks, responsibilities, and pressures that I need to address. They're a break from life, as opposed to a change in life. Besides, they're always too short.

Snow does what the most carefully planned spiritual retreat or longest globe-trotting sabbatical cannot: it changes life. We sense the change before it occurs, as the temperature in our tired environment grows colder, then warmer again. We trudge along past the people we're tired of seeing and the buildings we're tired of living and working in, but something has started to feel different: anticipation, as if the world is holding its breath. People become animated and business becomes hurried even as the world seems to slow to a crawl - better get this done before the weather sets in, don't want to be caught outside in the storm.

Then it begins to snow. If we're lucky, we notice the first flakes as they fall, the movie flakes that mean something wonderful. When the snow picks up, everyone heads inside. Maybe we don't want to ruin our coats, or maybe we're subconsciously expressing reverence for whoever is making this happen. But we return to our offices and classrooms and homes and dorm rooms and turn on the lights and turn up the heat, casting furtive glances out the window to check the progress of the storm. We tell each other it's still snowing in half-whispers, prompting more brief looks out the windows.

Finally, it stops snowing. It might be 3am or 2pm or any other time, but if we're awake, we head outside to find the change of scenery we have longed for. The world, coated in white and restarting after its pause, is new again (naive and innocent, no?). The buildings, the vegetation, the ground itself are all remade by their new covering. The terrain is different, so we wear boots and keep our eyes mostly straight down in front of us. But when we look up, the views are spectacularly beautiful, especially considering our discontent with the same place just hours before. Tree branches, previously unnoticed, are now individually capped with stripes of bright white. Lampposts, an empty songwriter cliche earlier in the day, suddenly warrant a few of their frequent mentions. Our reality has changed to accomodate this new, cold thing that covers everything and refuses to be disposed of easily. We have no choice but to adapt - something new to do.

This makes people more interesting too. The same coworkers and friends and family we could barely stand to speak to in the Old World are now engaged in the same struggle to adapt that occupies us. Furthermore, that excitement we feel as we step outside - they're feeling that too. For a brief moment, entire communities share a collective thought about the weather. For a brief moment, entire communities are united.

Plus, we act ridiculous in the snow. Snowball fights, like nursing young avoiding fire, seem to be engrained in the human psyche as a basic survival instinct. If there is snow, we must act like children. We just must. And it is fun. We like fun.

Of course, the snow doesn't stay white and new forever. It melts, and the ends of our sidewalks disintegrate into slush pools six inches deep as we try to avoid the incessant dripping of tree branches and overhangs. Even before the melt, we people do our best to ruin the snow, trampling it with boots and bicycles and soaking it in exhaust fumes. Before long, the New World of snow becomes old and perhaps even more insufferable than the world we left behind. Once again, we resume our routines and reclaim responsibilities and get tired of everything.

Maybe it's proof that there's some benevolent force out there, then, that for several months of the year, we get second chance after second chance. We take our new toy, break it, and get bored with it, but we can always hope for another snow to send us back inside, stealing glances out the window, as the world makes itself new for us once more.

I might be accurate with all the making-new, but then again, maybe the key here is that I don't have to shovel.

The Bottle of Wine

This one seems obvious, but the fact remains: Few things are as pleasing as a good bottle of wine. Saving the delicious stuff inside perhaps for a later date, I draw your attention to the vessel. A 750ml container is the perfect thing for storing, transporting, and enjoying the nectar of the gods. True, there are those mondo bottles of Yellow Tail and those itty bitty single-serve bottles popular at pizza joints in states that aren't run by Mr. Hester Prynn. And there's the box, the bag, the utter, whatever. To each its purpose, but none are as versatile as the slender, chic standby.


Use #1: The Social Gathering
The typical glass of wine measures 5 oz. In a standard bottle, then, there are about six glasses. [citation needed] General rule of thumb is to take the number of people you expect at your party and divide by three. This allows for two glasses per person and thus a fun time and a safe drive home. Variations on this equation are clearly accepted and in some cases encouraged, but it's nice to know that the bottle of wine is doing its part to provide a ballpark figure. In an appeal to my New-Englander sense of utilitas, a very useful unit of measure!

Use #2: Dinner for Two
"Why don't we split a bottle of wine?" Standard ice-breaker and signal to begin paying some mind to the menu, the question arises. Why don't we, indeed!

Economical, bond-building, and generally convenient, ordering a bottle of wine to start off a meal is a sure-fire way to leave happy. Beyond the practical implications involved, 750ml of wine split two ways is the perfect passage to wanderlust. Each party joined by the effort to fulfill their end of the bargain, the quest to the bottom becomes an art in collaborative pacing and eventually leads to consensual heaviness and levity of mind. There's no telling what could happen from there.

Use #3: The Personal Adventure
Taboo though it no doubt is, drinking a bottle of wine by oneself sports a host of advantages. Rarely does one's attention focus intently on taste for a period exceeding an instant. Unlike the songs that remind us of youth, the photos that become our sharp memories, and the smells that hover above our control, establishing taste as an experience that colors a series of moments rewards the attentive tongue with the gift of prolonged repetition. Life goes on while the palate keeps nodding to precedents rising and rising again. Sip after sip, the present receives a reminder that it too shall pass.

Drinking an entire bottle will also, I admit, get you drunk. Good or bad, however, the 750ml unit establishes an expectation while also imposing a limit: You will have this much disorientation for now. It will be attributed to me. The taste of this night and its angles will bear the name of my label. You chose rationally to be exactly this irrational.

I support the informed approach to this choice.


The method is tried and the method is true; industry standard has no doubt learned what works best. The bottle of wine is an icon at least, and these days the thought of some constant is reason enough to start clinging and clinging some more.

HUDS Chicken Tempura

The men of the DeWolfePack used to look forward to popcorn chicken days in the dining hall, eagerly checking the Dining Services' online menu at the start of each week and telling themselves, "Cancel all lunchtime meetings and prepare to skip Latin American Economy section on Tuesday because I'll be busy putting breaded, deep-fried chicken in my mouth. OMFG yes I will," other statements like that, usually with subtle, unintentionally homoerotic undertones. Just like almost everything we say or think.

Popcorn chicken is good, no doubt, and we've all made many a lunch out of a pile of crispy-brown strips, half a bottle of barbecue sauce, and french fries stuffed into all of the extra spaces between chicken pieces. But really, for all its passability with the condiments and satisfying greasiness (two nouns in that sentence that shouldn't be, and probably aren't, real nouns), popcorn chicken is really not all that different from regular chicken; and after pasta, regular chicken is the most boring food on the planet.

Luckily, as we all sat around worshipping a false, secretly really boring idol, the merciful gods of food decided to have pity on us. One day last spring - I can't remember the date or the time, just the taste and a feeling of overwhelming happiness - we walked into the dining hall and felt the scales lift from our eyes and the shackles drop from our taste buds. It was crispy. It was juicy. It was salty and fried-y and ultra-processed. It was HUDS Chicken Tempura.

Normally, chicken tempura looks something like this on the left (if, instead of a college dining hall, you're eating it at a Thai restaurant)...

Or like this to the right, if you're eating it at a Japanese restaurant or some place where your chicken looks exactly like shrimp. Chicken tempura is good white people food at Asian restaurants: you want to order something other than California rolls/Pad Thai/straight up veggie rolls, but you don't really want anything that couldn't easily be frozen and packaged by the people who make Hot Pockets. You get the chicken tempura, which is like KFC except cut into thin strips, fried in an even lighter and crispier outside, and somehow way greasier. Overall, it's a pretty solid dish and is a fairly dependable choice. Except in Harvard dining halls.

That's because HUDS chicken tempura is an extremely solid dish and a marriage-worthy choice (not settling here, either: dependable, but also sexy, successful, not going to gain weight, and totally loves you back). That's because HUDS chicken tempura is nirvana in disguise. That's because HUDS chicken tempura is basically the McDonald's Chicken McNugget.

Your liberally-educated outrage is totally legitimate, so let it out: animal rights, globalization, rising obesity, food classism, working conditions, Morgan Spurlock. I know, I know, this shit is bad for you, but suspend your disapproval for a second. Chicken McNuggets - and the chicken nugget in general - are really fucking good.

Chicken nuggets are one of the original smart foods, invented in the 1950s by a professor at Cornell. They're pure science: chicken ground up into tiny pieces, then pasted back together with salts and skin, breaded, and deep fried. They can be molded into dinosaur shapes. They are easily anthropomorphized.


Years ago, Chicken McNuggets were one of my favorite foods - the perfect post-game baseball meal and minimum day after-school lunch treat. The nuggets, the sauce, the french fries, the soda, and the toy: for an eight year-old, they made up the pefect five course meal. Then I read Fast Food Nation and starting caring about my body and the world and became a vegetarian and shit. Times were dark in America, and there was no change I could believe in.

I thank you, HUDS chicken tempura, for tasting of better days and bringing light and flavor back into my life. You have reminded me that the greatest joys in life are selfish and self-destructive. Also fried and dipped in barbecue sauce.

-GD

Negative-Space Hearts

As much as I love cloud computing, my search for an image to go along with a post about it lead me to discover something way, way cooler. Perhaps influenced by some mystical after-image from reading E. Po's last post, I learned of my unnerving affinity for the negative-space heart.

Part of me is tempted to make a cool analysis about the heart as a symbol for love and how love is the interface between two people but has no actual matter. Part of me wants to prove, with God=Love and a little transitive property, that negative-space hearts are positively divine. Most of me doesn't.

Most of me wants to leave these wonders of nature to the realm of mystery and awe. How majestic a moment it is, be it day or night, to suddenly find oneself awakened to the formation of such a figure! What Providence, what appearance of Asha, what clarity!

Perhaps the examination of an example might prove how the accidental qualities of these formations is really the most important reason why negative-space hearts are so amazing. Take this majestic negative-space heart at right. It's beautiful! The picture seems taken as if from the perspective of the discoverer who, having just realized that it's possible to create this form with his own hands, blinks from the shock, resulting in this image that will permanently be lodged in his memory as the turning point in his life: The Great Awakening to the Wonders of the World. This image inspires me to be tomorrow more than I am today; it leads me to believe that simply being open to accident and chance is the best way to do so.

On the other hand (yes, punsters, yes), problems begin to arise when this wonder falls victim to greedy, clever douchebags who over-think everything and try to capitalize on nice people who are open to beauty. Take this negative-space heart for example. I found it on an adoption website, and it totally sucks. All of the wonder is gone. Clearly, one person had to think to themselves, "Self, I should try to recreate that wonderful feeling I had when I discovered that my hands could form a heart and try to make that experience better by filtering it through ME. I must convince someone to help me make a bigger, better negative-space heart." What a jerk! I feel bad for the hands making the V portion, because they're totally taking it on this one.

So maybe I don't like all negative-space hearts. But most of them are great. Most of them surprise and delight with the deft of a delicate tickle. I hope you like them, too.

<3
P

Sleeping in for Inappropriate Amounts of Time

With the exception of Christian, who has to get up every morning at 5 a.m. to start washing his fro, members of the Dewolfepack enjoy their sleep. But that sleep often continues far, far beyond the normal limits of human endurance. Sleeping in till noon? That's for amateurs.

Whether due to alcohol consumption, frantic late night essay-writing, marathon late-night masturbation sessions or general laziness, sleep often lasts past lunchtime in their abodes.

In the Cambridge winters, that often means that members of the Dewolfepack only experience two to three hours of sunlight a day, rendering them pale and vampiric for months on end.

The master of this art is, undeniably, Monticello. Although others might push themselves to hit the snooze button for an hour or two, this man has the unique ability to completely reset his sleep rhythm, become fully nocturnal, and sleep till 2 p.m. He can be seen almost any afternoon, sprawled across his bed like a beached whale, a gorgeous behemoth slowly drying in the sun.

Although these sleep schedules are socially unacceptable and often cause them to miss important life events (class, meals, basic hygiene routines, social interaction of any kind), the members of the Dewolfepack like sleep too much to ever change their ways. Until we get jobs, maybe.

Mannie Fresh

Everybody likes Lil Wayne. His lyrics are unpredictably brilliant, his mic presence is dynamic and always surprising, and he's also completely batshit insane. Basically, dude is like the DSM IV on top of kick drum and snare.

But most people don't remember that ten years ago (even five years ago), nobody bought The Greatest Rapper Alive's albums to hear him rap. At least, not in my idealized hip-hop past, nobody did. Ten years ago Lil Wayne was actually little, and he was good for one reason: Mannie Fresh.

Ladies and gentlemen, people with jobs, people without jobs, middle class, upper class, high class, all that, cats, snacks, chickens, ducks, elderly people, and twerkers, I present to you: DJ Mannie Fresh, greatest hip-hop producer of all time and a Person that DeWolfePeople Like. Nobody else has as strong a mastery over the stuttering snare, the hyperactive hi-hat, and the self-repping intro as Mannie does. Nobody else has turned out as many brilliant party tracks that sound exactly the same as Mannie has. And that's totally a good thing.

Mannie Fresh, all I ever want to do is sound like you. For years, you defined a label - and a region - serving as in-house producer for Cash Money Records. In their late-90s heyday, you managed to take the New Orleans "churn shit out and rake in the money" philosophy and achieve some degree of consistency. Yes, that's because most of your productions were pretty much the same song, but it was a damn good song. You helped define my suburban middle school dance experience by producing "Back That Azz Up." You released a solo album with 30 fucking tracks. Hell, you even started Big Tymers with Birdman and put up with that talentless "rap-talker" for five albums. You've done it all. Here's some of the best of the best producer ever:


Mannie's solo album, "The Mind of Mannie Fresh," featured the single "Real Big." The song never charted and the album never sold, which makes absolutely no sense. Mannie raps over his own beat about having a fish tank in the dashboard of his car and then stops the beat for "the part where I give my phoe number to all the girls that's hot." Fire.

Real Big - Mannie Fresh

Hot Boys: a group name that could have only existed in the pre-Google age. Here, Mannie, Birdman, B.G., Young Turk, and Lil Wayne wax misogynistic over a beat that's half hand-claps and half harpsichord or something. Also, on the hook, B.G. sounds like a pedophile.

I Need A Hot Girl - Hot Boys

Trina featuring Lil Wayne, back when he was good enough to sound crazy but not too good to rap fast over what may be the most Mannie Fresh-like Mannie Fresh beat ever. The snare drums slip all over the place, the synths bang, and the whistles keep everything high energy. Trina tries to rap about how dirty she is, like usual, but it doesn't work: this beat makes everything good, clean fun.

Dont Trip - Trina

And of course, Lil Wayne, off Tha Carter. Mannie does good intros about old people and animals. He also does good hooks. Don't you just love him by now???

Bring It Back - Lil Wayne

Victory Brewing Co.

I know at least E.Po will agree, Victory Brewing Co. is one of the best micro brews around. Every beer produced is really hoppy, really flavorful and very high in alcohol content. I am consistently impressed by all of their products. This is not to say that they are the best brewery for any single beer - far from it. I just believe their overall beer selection is consistently high quality.