Cats are always curious in the snow. As they sniff, the touch of their noses melt the snowflakes, and their tongues come out to lick away the moisture. They cautiously walk into it and inspect their paws, wondering how they suddenly became wet.

As for me, I’m comfortable at home with a warm drink and the glow of my monitors. The week has me burned out nowadays, and the weekends have become the only time for me to relax, the only time I can enjoy the sunlight during the shortened winter days. You can always recognize a winter sky by its paleness, causing particularly bright days and orange nights.

Christmas will be here soon. Vacation and trips home and family and the spirit of the season. Fall has come and gone. How does the time pass so quickly? Did I imagine I’d be here, at this stage in life, a year ago? Not at all.

I never realized how much I missed the winter, until the snow started falling.

Last week I was so sick that it felt like my brain was slowly leaking out of my head through my nose. I’ve had a jar of lingzhi, or powdered reishi mushroom, sitting on my kitchen counter for months, but I never felt like I was sick enough to have any until then. After one glass of “tea” and a night of decent sleep, I felt better than after anything else I tried. My sinuses cleared, my nose dried up, the headache at the back of my neck went away, and the only thing left was the scratchiness in my throat.

I’d heard of lingzhi before, as my dad started drinking it daily a few years ago, but never really understood, or believed, it’s magical properties until now. As a child growing up in a Chinese family, it’s not uncommon to be exposed to all sorts of esoteric appendages and vegetation, but nothing was as revered as the reishi mushroom, not even ginseng. It turns out that it has a history as the oldest mushroom to be used in medicine over 4000 years ago, and peasants were once executed for consuming such a valuable resource as it was reserved exclusively for the emperor and his family.

As described in Wikipedia:

Lingzhi is anti-tumor, immunomodulating and immunotherapeutic. It is also adaptogenic, anti-allergin and anti-hypertensive due to the presence of triterpenes. Apart from these properties, lingzhi has also been found to be anti-inflammatory, anti-viral, anti-parasitic, anti-fungal, anti-diabetic, anti-hypotensive, and hepatoprotective. It has also been found to inhibit platelet aggregations, and to lower blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar.

It makes me quite proud to have such a significant substance as a part of my cultural history, a little secret known only to those lucky enough. Perhaps I may feel the same way about tiger penises some day.

The only downside is the taste. I’m sure it’s nothing like eating cockroaches on Fear Factor, but it’s definitely a play on the palate that takes a bit of getting used to. The smell reminds me of the musty scent of old, dried, golden coloured lumber, that’s crumbly and falling apart. This comes as no surprise, as it only grows on the trunks of dead trees. Even though it comes in (clumpy) powder form, it doesn’t exactly dissolve in water. At all. The picture of the mug is after a good stir and five minutes of settling. For some reason, half of it sinks and half of it floats. I tried to describe it to John, and the best I could come up with is that somehow it’s an entire glass of dregs.

I received a birthday reminder two days ago in the form of a card from my parents (a Richard Scarry-esque drawing of a crowd of cats, cell-phones to their ears, with the line inside, “Can you hear me meow?”). I had mostly forgotten, although it came to mind about a month ago, and the thought remained dormant until Pat brought it up today.

During the week I made plans to meet Pat and Jen for dim sum, not knowing that they secretly invited Aaron and Karen as well, and that it was really to take me out for my birthday. Afterwards, we came back here to play some Donkey Konga and Mario Party. As simple as it may seem to sit around playing games with a bunch of friends, it’s rare to find a day that our schedules match. It’s even more rare to hang out with a group of people I can totally relax with and just have a good time, let alone be able to indulge in the pleasure of a bunch of addictive party games with them. These are real friends, people who remind me how good it is to laugh, and help me realize that I don’t do it nearly enough anymore.

On a day that I ask for nothing, I was given everything that I could have wanted.

Aaron and Karen adopted another cat, and named her Lacey. She’s a tiny thing, with downy white hair and ears like satellite dishes. So far she’s a bit shy, as Chaos follows her around often, but I think she’ll get used to it.

Until Lacey came along, I would have never suspected how much the cats look like their owners, but the resemblance, as difficult as it was to put my finger on at first, is striking. Chaos is the nearly overweight cat who sometimes has a goofy look on his face like he’s saying “WHATSGOINGONOVERHEREGUYS??”, and Lacey is much smaller with big ears and delicate features.

Over breakfast, a generous gorging of sausage links, over easy, and hashed browns, the realization dawns on me that out of the eight people seated, four of us have worked in the same office.

In fact, three of us had the same job; while Aaron was working as a developer, Pat was brought in to replace Jacques, and I was hired when Pat left. What a small world. That’s how Pat and I met Aaron, how Aaron met Jacques, and it was only on that day, four years later, that Pat was introduced to Jacques.

Now we can sit around a breakfast table, filling ourselves with greasy food and caffeine in preparation for a weekend of gaming.

How long ago those days seem, working in an unmotivated government office, dating someone I thought I wanted to make my wife. I remarked to Pat how funny it was to believe back then that I knew what I wanted in life, and with a smirk, he asked me, “You think you know what you want now?”.

The question was rhetorical, of course. Sometimes Pat knows me better than I know myself. In his way, he was reminding me that even now, after all my contemplation and all my conclusions, I still may not have figured that out yet.

Do I really know what I want?

Not really. In my career, my relationships, my short-term life I can say that there’s a path I’m moving towards, but I also know that this will most likely change. As I learn and grow, as new goals are met and made, what I want changes too.

And perhaps being sure of this is what I really want.