my life is a comedy

My professional cooking days are over.

Or at the very least, my professional cooking days are taking a long hiatus. Following the pattern of my previous cooking job, I became sick of Eleven and its disorganized atmosphere pretty quickly. I was being paid well enough, sure; but within the first two weeks I felt the familiar dread of going to work, looking for any opportunity to escape having to stare at a salamander for ten hours straight and cook with faulty equipment bought by the same cheapass corporation I made stir-fry for two years ago. As I quickly moved from the entry-level "hot apps" station on the line of the behemoth 150+ seat restaurant to saute, I realized that while I was getting good at my job, becoming a valuable member of the crew, I just didn't enjoy cooking at a restaurant level anymore.

You see, when I cook at home, it really is to make people happy. I can stand around, relax, and use the skills I've learned over the years to astonish people and generally improve my quality of life. Cooking is about friendship, to me, in a very literal as well as a metaphorical sense. Through the making of meals I get to know myself, I get to know my friends, and the food that I work with in a very intimate sense. It's perhaps an overly sentimental way of putting it, I know. But if growing up in coastal Texas taught me anything, it's that you really ought to take the time to sit down, cover the table with old newspapers, and eat twenty or thirty pounds of boiled crawdads with the people you love, taking all day to do so if necessary.

When I'm on the line at a restaurant, chef barking orders from behind a heat lamp (during my stay at Eleven Contemporary Kitchen, he threatened to burn a cook's house down with his children inside), my entire life, the meaning of my existence, seems like an endless list of tasks that will never finally be accomplished. I do not exaggerate when I say that I began to lose sleep and started having lucid nightmares about being at work, feeling the same maniacal urgency I did at the restaurant while in bed, unable to realize that the checks fluttering in the window (filet, rare! lamb saddle two times! chicken, sub roasted potatoes for risotto! where the fuck is that tomato app?) were a part of my imagination. I never got the four day weeks I requested when I started cooking there. Aside from the physical exhaustion I was experiencing, commuting 20 miles a day via bicycle in a city built in a river valley, drinking and sweating gallons of water on the line at night, I had no mental energy left whatsoever.

Ramblings about the nature of professional cooking aside, I am 21 years old and I have spent enough hours over a grill, in the dark, ultra respectable fine dining or not. The simple fact about it is this: there is no god and no afterlife, and I only have one short period of time to enjoy. I will not look back twenty years from now and remember nothing about my personal life because of all the time I spent working for money.

So, for the past two weeks I've been working at the Monroeville Mall, in a kiosk. The hours are easy and short I have time to read--I finally finished Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey and am almost done with What is the What by Dave Eggers. It's still evening hours for me, but I generally work from four or five to nine-thirty. I have a lot more free time. My girlfriend and I carved a pumpkin and I cook us dinner more often. In the mornings we go to Nancy's Diner, a genuine truck stop-style American spot in my modest neighborhood, for bacon and eggs. I harvested wild grapes on the Southside again this year and now I've got a bottle and a half of homemade wine aging in one of my dark closets in Wilkinsburg. I'm making pumpkin-infused vodka with various spices. My arms aren't covered in blisters, and my feet and back aren't killing me. And currently, my commute, while still a formidable distance, takes me through a nice space of suburban Pittsburgh, under the changing leaves of Autumn.

They're not paying me a ton there and I plan to find something better very soon, though I've finally climbed out of the hole I was in after quitting Legume. Tomorrow I interview downtown for some light office work at the Frick Building, which might be nice. I'm slowly getting it figured out, but I'd like to be working daylight hours. I'm doing research on choral groups in the area; if I'm not occupied from twelve to midnight for once in my life, I'll be able to attend rehearsals. Today, while I sit around at the mall which is constantly dead, I'll be brushing up on music theory.