my name is john, and I'm a workaholic. i've been sober for a month.

I wonder if anyone still reads. I know I'm the kind of person that checks old friends' abandoned blogs every once in awhile, just to make sure. I'm not much of a writer anymore. Although, I've been thinking of starting a work of fiction. Fiction has traditionally not been my thing, but I think my priorities in life have shifted. I've quit reading food (read:work)-related non-fiction all the time and started to pick up stories.

I quit Legume. I lost my mind and walked right out just before dinner service. It's not really like me to go insane like that, and I tell myself that it maybe had something to do with working on little sleep after Alayna was in the hospital for a few days and I spent my time visiting, but it would've happened anyway. That restaurant, as all the restaurants I have worked in eventually have done, made me unhappy. I was overworked and exhausted all the time, and while I felt good about the work I was doing, I realize now that I honestly didn't give a shit. Or, I should say, I take pride in good work, but only when I have a life to enjoy aside from it. And I no longer want work to be the biggest part of my life. I'm 21, and this is not a time to waste sweating in front of a broiler sixty hours a week. There is never a time for that.

So, during a week of unemployment, I looked for jobs outside the culinary field, but it wasn't exactly a good time. Seasonal labor in things that I wanted to get my head into, like jobs at bike shops and road construction, and even landscaping, is over right now. It's about to start getting cold. I even put myself on the list to ride for Jet Messenger, but that season hasn't really started yet.

Like anyone that started out in the culinary industry, I desperately turned back to the stove and now I'm working for Big Burrito again at Eleven, a gigantic clusterfuck of a restaurant downtown that employs four sous-chefs. The schedule is three pages long and we did 220 covers on my first night. Two weeks in, they put me on the saute station, so here I am, riding 20 miles a day to commute to work, cooking my ass off until late at night. And while it might be a much more fast-paced restaurant with a menu eight times the size of my last gig's, it's about twenty hours less than what I'm used to. So now, I'm sleeping enough. And on top of that, I asked to only work four days a week. Usually that happens; last week it did, and this week I'm working five days. But eventually, since the company is happy to give out less overtime, it should be a regular thing for me. The idea is to actually enjoy life, not have burns all over my arms constantly, and not burn out. And, although I'm still in a period of some financial turmoil due to the unemployment, I should be fine on 35-40 hours a week with the wage I negotiated when I got hired. Things are looking up.