The distant beat of a drum circle
It is Saturday night. It is 9:30 p.m. What am I doing, you ask? (Or maybe you don't ask. How should I know what you are doing?). I am sitting in my little studio, wrapped in a sleeping bag, hunched in front of my computer, working on grad school applications. Periodically I get up to eat something sweet, or to trap a spider under a glass and throw it out the front door. In print, life sounds rather dire. I haven't made up my mind whether the reality is also in fact dire, too.
I intended for this blog to be a diary about the myriad food and wine experiences I was going to have in California, but so far it's hard to prevent the personal living-type stuff from overtaking recollections of the few paltry foodelicious events I have enjoyed so far. One hopes this will change soon, or I shant be sure why exactly I came out here. It certainly can't be for the money. I could take a 75 cent (that's cent, not percent) paycut and go work for In-n-Out Burger. Plus, then I would get health insurance. And, ya know, free burgers.
But alas, I will not give up after only two days of work as a retail assistant (is it assistant, or associate? I can't remember) at Ramekins Culinary School in Sonoma, because that's not the kind of person I am. I have committed to the whole three months, dammit, and I will stick it out! I guess I am kind of scraping the bottom of the tenacity barrel here, but I have never been known for my long-term commitment to anything, so please pretend to be impressed by my diligent work ethic and ever-so-un-Gen-X pledge to stay at my job for three whole months.
Right now, those three months are taking shape in my mind's eye as a kind of monolith that stretches out endlessly before me, day after day passing with excruciating monotony. It's really not sooo bad, but I have to be honest, the time at work sure can drag on. It speeds up the moment it is announced that there is extra food in the kitchen for the staff to eat, and then slows down once again when I am faced with the prospect of pricing hundreds of glass mise-en-place bowls.
Which is what I was doing yesterday, at Hour Four, when one of the bowls made it known to my finger that it had cracked en route from Portugal by slicing open a nice-sized gash, which instantly began to drip slightly gross amounts of blood. Pretty classy first day maneuver, I must say! My other tasks included bagging various culinary items purchased by cooking school students, and restocking julienne peelers and lettuce knives.
I'm not sure, but I don't think I have much of a future in retail. I haven't actually assisted any customers yet, but I know already that I don't have a great mind for details, quantitative things or process-oriented activities, so I'm pretty much screwed. I always seem to zoom right into a job that relies on all the things I'm wretched at, while the Victorian-studies-creative-thinker-problem-solver side of my brain lapses into squalid decay and decline. But hey, now I know how to use a price gun.
Anyway, I'm not sure what I expected, and I'm still a little bit reluctant to reveal any more juicy details about the ins and outs of cooking school politics and personalities in an ostensibly public forum, but hell, maybe I'll just throw caution to the wind on my next post.
I intended for this blog to be a diary about the myriad food and wine experiences I was going to have in California, but so far it's hard to prevent the personal living-type stuff from overtaking recollections of the few paltry foodelicious events I have enjoyed so far. One hopes this will change soon, or I shant be sure why exactly I came out here. It certainly can't be for the money. I could take a 75 cent (that's cent, not percent) paycut and go work for In-n-Out Burger. Plus, then I would get health insurance. And, ya know, free burgers.
But alas, I will not give up after only two days of work as a retail assistant (is it assistant, or associate? I can't remember) at Ramekins Culinary School in Sonoma, because that's not the kind of person I am. I have committed to the whole three months, dammit, and I will stick it out! I guess I am kind of scraping the bottom of the tenacity barrel here, but I have never been known for my long-term commitment to anything, so please pretend to be impressed by my diligent work ethic and ever-so-un-Gen-X pledge to stay at my job for three whole months.
Right now, those three months are taking shape in my mind's eye as a kind of monolith that stretches out endlessly before me, day after day passing with excruciating monotony. It's really not sooo bad, but I have to be honest, the time at work sure can drag on. It speeds up the moment it is announced that there is extra food in the kitchen for the staff to eat, and then slows down once again when I am faced with the prospect of pricing hundreds of glass mise-en-place bowls.
Which is what I was doing yesterday, at Hour Four, when one of the bowls made it known to my finger that it had cracked en route from Portugal by slicing open a nice-sized gash, which instantly began to drip slightly gross amounts of blood. Pretty classy first day maneuver, I must say! My other tasks included bagging various culinary items purchased by cooking school students, and restocking julienne peelers and lettuce knives.
I'm not sure, but I don't think I have much of a future in retail. I haven't actually assisted any customers yet, but I know already that I don't have a great mind for details, quantitative things or process-oriented activities, so I'm pretty much screwed. I always seem to zoom right into a job that relies on all the things I'm wretched at, while the Victorian-studies-creative-thinker-problem-solver side of my brain lapses into squalid decay and decline. But hey, now I know how to use a price gun.
Anyway, I'm not sure what I expected, and I'm still a little bit reluctant to reveal any more juicy details about the ins and outs of cooking school politics and personalities in an ostensibly public forum, but hell, maybe I'll just throw caution to the wind on my next post.
posted by cindym at 9:35 PM
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