I have run out of charming instagrams of the snow.

Walked home through Chiberia, the second round of something new that is really something old with a better name: Polar Vortex née Cold. Was very bundled and the walk is short, so honestly thought bitter temps and crunchy snow were better than slush or black ice.

These are our choices, Chicago.

It does this every day now.  

On the way home, two handsome men got on the train, separately but dressed sort of the same. Hats and scarves and salt-weathered, expensive shoes. Winter eye-candy leaves everything to the imagination. "Oh, I bet he looks nice under all those layers." A coworker mentioned seeing a man in the softest cashmere trench coat on the El. Standing, of course. In winter especially, those seats are suspect.

There are so many different ways we are coated. Puffy coats, wool coats, hoods with fake fur. The Chicago Way has nothing to do with hot dogs or politics or mobsters. It is a way of dressing: put on a knit hat, raise your hood, then secure it all in place by winding a very long scarf around your neck, trapping the hood to your noggin. You don’t have a hood? Go home, it’s not safe for you here.

This is my blueberry hat and I am not modeling the Chicago Way. Because this is inside a warm car on the weekend. Luxury!

Walked up the Chicago Ave. stairs encrusted in salt. My tongue is still covered in white fur after weeks of antibiotics that killed even the good bacteria in my mouth. Feeling so terrible for a month has made me entirely grateful for energy that is my own, not property of Sudafed et al. 

Survival of the fittest.

A family friend growing up said Chicago winters are good because the brutal cold "keeps the assholes out." Think he used this as a way to explain Los Angeles to us. I am often ready to go live with those lucky assholes. But then nearly every day something happens in this city that makes me glad I’m part of it.

This morning the Blue Line wasn’t too crowded, and a man with Einstein-like wiry gray hair was drawing in a sketchbook on the train. Everyone near him stared unabashedly as he worked. He smiled and nodded to the music in his earbuds, or maybe at us watching. Colored pencil sketches of marshmallowy figures popping out in primary colors filled his book. We were mesmerized. He and I got off at the same stop so I told him his drawings were beautiful and asked, “Do you teach down here?” He laughed. “Only on the El.”