Dilemmas, Distresses, and Driving

Since my last post, humble reader, my life has continued to twist and turn.

After saying how great work had been so far, I ended up tired and disgruntled after Saturday night's time at the store.  And, just yesterday, I got a call from Trader Joe's offering me an interview this Thursday.

Let's discuss the first item...  The problem with work on Saturday night wasn't the majority of the time.  No, in fact, it was the aftermath of work.  The store closes at nine.  My end of the night duty was to wash dishes:  all of the various coffee machine parts, elements of the juicer that had been demonstrated earlier, and various other bits and pieces used throughout the very long weekend day.

It took me almost forty minutes to scrub the bowls, hoppers, grills, tubes, containers, mesh screens, and ten thousand other pieces that make up our machines.  Hence, a shift that was to end at 9:30 became walking out the door (as a group) at 9:50.

From there, the drive home was frustration piled upon frustration... a driver from Maryland unable to figure out that you have to pay before leaving the parking garage (in spite of dozens of posted signs); stupid, slow people driving through Oakland; almost getting smashed by a Duquesne University student bus; dangerous drivers in the East End... the usual suspects.  But heap that onto my worn out, achy exhaustion and I was fit to be tied.

It hadn't been all bad, though.  The highlight of the night, though, was my official knife training.  Getting to play with gorgeous, expensive cutlery is fun - no two ways about it.  Those skills came in handy on Sunday when I had two knife demos, one of which turned into a very nice sale.  Said demonstrations kept me from having to work the registers, which I was trained to do on Sunday and which stresses me out.

It's not a complicated system by any means.  It's just laid out in the least intuitive way possible.  One has to log in.  Then one is told that their password - only a week old and never used once - had expired.  (Makes sense...)  One is then prompted, even before ringing a single item, to enter the customer's name into the system.  Then we can get around to the actual sale itself.

I still enjoy the place.  I like my co-workers, even if I'm still trying to figure out how to read a couple of them.  I like the customers so far.  The first time I ever answered the phone, a woman was calling to ask if we carried the Le Creuset tagine (kismet, right?).  I was able to expound at length on the wonders of the thing, impressing my manager hovering nearby.  I even showed the staff how the ceramic tagine top fits on the 4.5 quart round Le Creuset oven, thereby making a larger base for cooking - and blowing my co-workers' minds.

That brings me to the dilemma... the Trader Joe's interview.

I'd applied there even before I did at SLT.  SLT just happened to fall into my lap while TJs wasn't hiring at the time.  Trader Joe's is close - like walking distance close... 0.9 miles to be exact.  If I chose to bike there, the road has dedicated bike lanes.  Drive?  Parking is free.

This is all quite the opposite of SLT, which is over five miles away.  In Pittsburgh terms, that's at least a twenty minute drive each way.  I'd die if I biked there and I have to pay to park - $30 for 10 ins and 10 outs from the garage.

What remains to be seen is the number of hours, the pay per hour, and other minutia.  I like SLT because we're a smaller crew and, let's face it, I can talk about kitchen goods until I go blue in the face.  Trader Joe's always seems to be busy, has an enormous staff, and carries a dizzying array of products.  It might be trading driving stress for a larger world of stress, but we'll see all about that.

Until then, friends, I'll try to keep sane and have this roller coaster car I call my life attached to the crazy tracks!

Radio Silence

Sorry about that... it's been a while.  But in this short expanse of time much has happened.  The journey, it seems, has really taken off!

What's been going on, you ask?  Well, I was phoned on the night of Thursday the 7th and offered a sales position with Sur La Table at Pittsburgh's SouthSide Works.  I had my first day of work on Sunday the 10th and have worked twice since.

Thus far, I've been trained in cookware (a venue in which I shall shine - and even taught the woman training me a few things) and on how one uses the incredibly expensive (and in my eyes, incredibly unnecessary since I don't drink coffee...) coffee-making machines.  These range from a few hundred upward to three thousand dollars and can make a staggering range of coffee drinks.

Naturally, I've been plotting how I will use my very generous 40% employee discount (and still bring home some pay) in the time I am there, which I hope will be limited by the coming-along of a full-time job.

In other news, I've unofficially/officially moved in with Matt.  There's still much more to bring down, seek out, and make happen, but I'm here.  Much of the decor is already mine and has been here since last year, but working out storage and what I really need here will take some time.

We celebrated a low-key Valentine's Day yesterday.  We never make much of the holiday since our anniversary falls ten days later, but I still took the time to make a pretty cake, which my marginal icing and piping skills made at least a little pretty.

The top looks like a mix between Keith Haring and Cornelli Lace, but it was fun.  I was happy that I did the piped green border around the bottom as that detail made the piece really pop against the background of my red Le Creuset tray.

Word of warning:  Do not - even in desperation - buy the Dr. Oetker chocolate cake mix at Whole Foods.  The cake's texture is only so-so and it only tastes of chocolate due to my slathering chocolate frosting ovedr it and chips to the middle layer.  I will continue to place my faith in Uncle Dunkie and Aunt Betty (Duncan Hines and Betty Crocker to the rest of you) when it comes to boxed mixes.

I spent time today getting a tie-rod replaced on my car at the Sears Auto Center at Ross Park Mall, which I only found out needed changing when I had an oil change on Tuesday morning.  Thankfully, I successfully sold an extra clarinet I'd purchased back in 2004/5 and made more money on that transaction than I'd even hoped.  That takes the sting out of car repairs, even if they still make one grumble.

My struggle to find a desk I like for the apartment continues.  The one that came with Matt's furniture some years ago is insufficient for both of us.  If I'm permitted, it'd be very easy to just bring my Drexel Heritage mission-style desk from home, but I don't know how the mother is going to rule on that idea.  I keep finding things I marginally like that cost far too much and things I hate that cost even more.  I guess I'm just picky.

After departing Ross Park, I took time to walk around the Strip District for the first time in a while.  I bought a half-pound of loose-leaf Irish Breakfast tea and am enjoying a cup of it right now while I write.  I also lugged home an eleven pound sack of Arborio rice.  That should keep us in risotto for a few months!

I'm afraid I don't have much more to offer right now as far as news goes.  My mother is being frightfully neurotic about my absence and it's really wearing on me, but that's not much that bears repeating.  I know she's lonely without me, but there's only so much I can do about that and only so many times I can pretend I really care when she won't go out and make something happen with her life in retirement.

I don't work today/tonight, but am scheduled to close tomorrow and receive register training, thereby making me a real employee rather than one who can only wander about and help people find things that I, myself, am struggling to find among the thousands of products.

Until next time, dear readers, I send you my best wishes.  I've gotta say in closing that the three shifts I've worked so far at Sur La Table have flown by.  Never before have four-hour spans just disappeared like this.  While I don't love being part-time, I guess I do like the place pretty well.  They say if you do what you love - and we all know I love cooking (or at least its paraphernalia) - you don't truly work.  It's work, but it's been fun so far!

- Bill

Why Didn't I Learn It In College?

One of the few loose ends in need of tying up since I've left YSU is what to do with my retirement funds.

Over the course of six and a half years, I haven't accrued that much since we weren't paid much to begin with.  Truly, looking at the number on my annual statement never fails to disappoint me.  It's just one more reminder of how utterly broken my employer, the state education system, and the larger system that allows adjunct faculty to be paid and treated so poorly all are.

Last week, I met with the Allstate Financial Services representative who oversees my mother's investments and retirement.  He handed me paperwork for an annuity that will, by the time I am sixty (some thirty years from now) not even double the money I would be moving to him.  Now, I know that interest rates are terrible and that it's a lot to ask to get some sort of decent return on funds, but that just seems to me like I'm being suckered.

I can understand the need for prudence when a person is within a few years of retirement - no risky investments that one can't weather the possibly negative outcome of.  But I'm thirty.  How is it that I can't make my money do more for me?

All I can think, sitting here today at the shop, is that universities should have a financial wisdom component in their general education requirements.

Seriously, I'm thirty years old and at a complete loss on how to do any of this.

When I was a freshman at John Carroll we had to take a First Year Seminar course that, other than waking me up for an 8 a.m. class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, taught me nothing.  We read Peter Singer's The Great Ape Project, about apes and chimpanzees having rights; Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart; and Martha Nussbaum's Cultivating Humanity:  A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.  I think you can discern for yourself how little any of those texts meant to an eighteen year-old me.

The professor who taught my particular section of said course was - and still is - an Associate Professor of Marketing in John Carroll's Boler School of Business.  Her approach was to have to do as little as possible for the course because she knew all too well that this time every week could be so much better spent.  Instead of using that time for better purposes though, we just didn't do much on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8:00-9:15 a.m.

Imagine how much someone with a PhD and a business background could have taught us about far more important things like finances, investing, retirement - things we could actually put to more use than considering the issues pertaining to British colonial policy in Africa and Chimpanzees being afforded rights on par with human beings.

Instead, I sit here on the cusp of age thirty-one all at sea about my retirement funds.  My very expensive Jesuit education - the one at the university with a renowned school of business - should have provided me with some sort of idea on how this goes.

To my dying breath, I'll defend the humanities and the role that literature, art, philosophy, and religions play in the formation of the well-rounded person.  However, I'm well-rounded with an obvious flat deformity when it comes to money.

During my sophomore year of high school, when we had a course called Principals of Democracy, we learned how to do tax returns.  We were quizzed and tested on them. Why can't colleges offer a "Here's how not to totally screw up your finances 101" class?  It seems well worth it to me and, at the very least, a public service that would help keep many college-aged students from falling into credit card debt.

As I solicit advice from friends on Facebook and ponder what will become of this money, I just wish that somewhere along the line a person who actually knows these things would have taught them to naive little me instead of letting me blindly wander this forest.

The Why and the How

After finishing yet another book, E.L. Doctorow's work of historical fiction, Homer & Langley, I picked a book off the stack on my nightstand that I'd begun reading a while back, but that I hadn't been in the right place to pursue to its end.

Bread Upon the Waters is written by Peter Reinhart, the man who wrote the award winning The Bread Baker's Apprentice, the inspiration and urtext on my learning journey of baking bread.  This earlier book functions as a memoir with recipes, a recounting of the author's path from hippie commune-living college student to religious brother to his current iteration as professor of bread baking at Johnson and Wales University.

I can't even say why I wasn't prepared to read the book before now.  (I purchased it over two years ago).  But the time finally seemed apropos for something like a bildungsroman as I transition out of the classroom and into the real world.

More than evolution into manhood or learning to make bread, Reinhart's Bread Upon the Waters is an extended metaphor of how the process behind making world-class bread mirrors our personal journeys into life and faith.

As I understand it, we begin as rough, unfinished materials.  We're stirred into being.  We're given time to mature and develop.  We may well get punched around and need more time to grow.  If we're lucky, we're formed by experienced, caring hands.    We're tested by fire.  And, ultimately, we're given to the world to share of ourselves.

While reading last night, nearing the end of my chapter, I read a quote from Holocaust survivor and Austrian neurologist Viktor Frankl.  Reinhart writes:

His (Frankl's) premise was that a person's search for meaning in life is a primary force, and frustration in this search is often the cause of our anxieties.  The solution he proposed was, of course, to reconnect a person with a sense of meaning.  This may not clear our lives of problems or obstacles but it enables us to bear the inevitable suffering of life with dignity and purpose.  Frankl adopted the existential truism, "He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how."  (Emphasis added)

That statement stuck with me and, frankly, kept me awake for a while.

I think it's fair that any single one of us asks the questions:  Why do I live?   Who or what do I live for?

It's also fair to say that, for the first question anyway, I don't have a solid answer at the moment.  I live for the prospect of a real job.  I live for the idea of independence.  I live for the eventuality of being able to pay off my student loans, to be able to go on vacations like my friends do, and to not have to worry so much about money.

But are those enough?  Beyond those things, I'm at a bit of a loss.  Should I have some deeper goal, some philanthropic/idealistic notion of what my job will be able to help me do or become?

This book has already accomplished one thing:  it's made me reconsider prayer.  I've been very troubled in my faith as of late.  That was born out of hypocrisies I see in the Catholic Church, friends who have similarly fallen away from religion, and, being completely honest, my own doubts.  I have, once more, considered the positive reassurances of invoking divine intervention.  Even if it falls on deaf ears, it somehow calms me.  That alone makes the time well-spent.

While I've always stood by the idea that when a door closes a window - somewhere - opens, I guess I've been waiting for that window to appear for far too long without actually looking for it.  No one ever tells you that... that you need to look for the light sometimes rather than just wait for it to find you.  It's my fault I stayed at YSU for so long.  I accepted the darkness and never sought out light and a life outside of my dissatisfaction with what mine had become.

If Frankl was able to survive three years in concentration camps by finding meaning in what his life had been reduced to, I think I can (at the very least) work to identify the meaning behind my existence in far less perilous circumstances.  Frankl found meaning in work, in love, and in courage.

I'm working on work.  Love?  Well, I have that.  I just need to appreciate it more.  And, as the Cowardly Lion once did, I need to believe in my own courage.   It took courage to walk away from my job.  It took courage to tell my mother about Matt.  I have it... I just need to remember it's there once in a while.

The journey continues...

- Bill

Maintaining Momentum

This week has found me struggling to keep up the positive momentum I've felt since resigning from YSU.  No one thing is the center of blame, but I have known for the past few days that I've felt kinda crappy.  Among the top things I can blame:  today would have been payday.

It's not that I haven't had forward movement.  I have a second job interview tomorrow with Sur La Table in Pittsburgh.  It's retail, sure, but getting that job would accomplish the following:  1.)  It gets me to Pittsburgh; 2.)  It brings some income hopefully above and beyond what I'm getting at the cigar shop; 3.)  It allows me to show that I have no gap in my work history, even while not teaching.

I know I made the right decision to leave Youngstown State.  I had to open my email from there the other night to find a contact and found a few emails that needed reply.  Almost immediately, I felt the same anxiety, the tightening in my chest, the stress response that has so characterized my teaching experience in recent years.  No measly $400 paycheck for two weeks of work is worth that sort of harm to my body.

Yesterday, I had lunch with an old friend who I haven't seen in about three years.  We sat around for two and a half hours catching up.  During that time, she asked where I saw myself going outside of education.  Sadly, I couldn't even come up with a solid answer.

My life since the age of four has revolved around the classroom.  As undergrad, graduate student, and then professor, my existence has centered on semesters, spring breaks, and summers off since the end of the Clinton administration.  It's tough to shed so much of one's identity all at once and then immediately know what's supposed to come next.

I legitimately felt bad that I couldn't pinpoint a direction in my life.  While it's difficult to identify that off the top of my head, it's probably well worth it to figure out some things and chart how I get to them.

The simplest thing that I need to remember is my own worth.  I am worth more than Youngstown State University paid me.  I am worthy of job security, health benefits, and a sense of well-being in my career that I didn't get any of there.  While I might be a wee bit adrift at the moment, I think the biggest landmark I have to try and identify as a mooring point is that I deserve better than they were giving me.

I wish I could sit down with humanities undergraduates and tell them the truth.  Yes, you get to spend your time thinking pretty thoughts, analyzing pretty writing, juxtaposing pretty ideas with your own oddly-conceived notions.  But like the tens of thousands of high school football players who dream of someday playing in the NFL, there's a similar likelihood that you, my dear English major, will get that PhD that seems so meritorious and for the good of humankind and, even then, there's a smaller chance that you will get the tenure track job of your dreams at that ivy-clad Oxford Gothic designed university, the image of which floats through your head like so many sugarplums.

That, my friends, is winning the Super Bowl.  And you can ask a whole lot of NFL players how many ever made it to the big game, let alone winning it.

The best I have to offer today, I guess, is to let this cloud of negative energy and inertia pass and then, as I have so many times before, move on.

The End of Food Porn?

An article published within the pages of last Wednesday's New York Times tells readers how many restaurateurs are putting the kibosh on their patrons' need to photograph their meals.  Helene Stapinski's "Restaurants Turn Camera Shy" exhibits something that I know so many of us - myself included - are guilty of.

But how guilty are we?

Some people are incredibly culpable.  I have witnessed the cardinal sin spoken of within the article - the firing of a camera's flash - many times.  People who use a flash within a fancy, dimly lit restaurant should have their faces bruleed beneath a thick layer of sugar by the power of a mighty torch.  Though that might just be my perspective.

But what harm is properly documenting a meal that is, for so many, a real occasion?  (Sans flash, naturalment...)

Matt and I, from time to time, will treat ourselves to a lovely meal out at a very special place, usually one we've long talked about going to.  When the check is going into three-digit territory, I guess I don't see the harm in a lousy picture or two of the meal I hope both to remember and share with friends, at least in a visual sense.

I enjoy eating.  I don't know many people who don't.  But how does one preserve those sensory memories from what was, potentially, a meal of a lifetime?  Adjectives only go so far.  Gustatory descriptions evoke snippets of the moment, but a picture (proverbially) is worth a thousand words.

Take, for instance, this image:

It was taken on the 18th of March 2011 in Frederick, MD at VOLT.  Sitting here - honestly - I can tell you that this is rockfish atop a bed of forbidden rice and black trumpet mushrooms.  The foam cloud on the fish was soy-based.

That's without looking at the actual decription, which I have typed elsewhere.  The only thing I cannot put immediate words to is the orange reduction, which I'd wager to have been carrot-based, and what sort of radish that is on the side.  

Nearly two years later, without a photograph, I'd have a truly difficult time remembering anything much about the meal.  (In fact, I was right on the mark - having looked at my contemporary description of the meal.  The only things I missed were the exact nature of the watermelon radishes and the fact that it is indeed a carrot puree... maroon carrots, to be exact.)  

I can tell you the carrots' sweetness played against the earthy nature of the mushrooms.  The slightly toothsome texture of the black forbidden rice juxtaposed with the yielding flesh of the fish was layered with the delicate, salty air of soy foam.  The radishes provided the crisp snap and a bit of spiciness.  

But the picture... oh my.  Seeing it all and hearing how it came together completes an image beyond cost.

I guess we need to think about it this way:  

• Did I pack my hefty DSLR camera?  No, I brought a small point and shoot.  
• Did I harm anyone in the taking of this picture?  Not to my knowledge.
• Did I have to perform some feat of acrobatics to achieve the shot?  Nope.
• Did I somehow break an intellectual property law of the chef's creation?  Not unless you're a real stickler.

The long and short of things is that unless you're being unnecessarily disruptive to a.) your fellow diners; b.) the restaurant staff; or c.) the flow of the courses being presented, I don't see why some of these places are getting a bug up their buns.

The luncheon that day at Volt set us back well over $100.  For that cost we both had a delicious three-course meal and, courtesy of my photographs, a vehicle to remember how wonderful the taste details were, the lovely plating, and a wonderful day out together in a beautiful place.  

In the end, the photographs are worth far more than the meal itself.  

- Bill

The Inaugural Luncheon - Beyond the Food

While the news world has spent the past 48 hours chasing its tail on whether or not Beyonce Knowles-Carter did or did not pre-record the Star Spangled Banner, I've been on a not too dissimilar quest...

Obsessed by the gorgeous table settings at the Inaugural Luncheon, I have scoured the internet for information on the patterns of the china and silver.  For all that these two pieces of information have been kept secret, you'd think that they were in a North Korean intelligence file or a deep, dark room where the secret behind JFK's assassination is kept under multiple locks.

But beyond the lovely meal of hickory grilled bison and Hudson Valley apple pies, the speeches and now-famed eye roll performed by the First Lady, I am completely fascinated by the color palette conjured to dress up a rather dour, classically-appointed space and make it a showplace within which an elegant luncheon would unfold.

The color scheme of Statuary Hall, just outside the Chamber of the House of Representatives, is hard to work with.  Grey columns, deep wine-colored draperies, a tiled black and white floor, and dozens of statues executed, variously, in bronze and marble dominate the half-round room.  Cap that off with a creme, puce, and gold coffered ceiling and you have a slightly nightmarish room to dress up when the moment comes.

So what did this year's luncheon planners do?  They went with cerulean blue for the head table, bright orange floral settings, tables dressed with metallic woven cloths, and place settings that can best be described as banded with Tiffany blue and a gold rim.

The combination sounds like it should be some nightmarish agglomeration of disparate elements.

Instead, it was incredibly bold and wholly gorgeous.

It shouldn't work.  On paper, blue, metallics, pink, black, and white should not combine to create a dignified, sublime environment for one of the most exclusive luncheons in the political world.

I think all credit must begin with the flowers.  The orange reminds me of the robes worn by Buddhist monks and Jeanne-Claude and Christo's 2010 Central Park art installation, The Gates.  It's Japanese Torii and Fuyu Persimmons.  It's shocking, gorgeous, and it lights up the room.

The arrangements were created by Jesse Bailey of Jack Lucky Floral in Alexandria, VA.  Bright citrus shades, always appropriate to lift a pale winter mood, draw the eye to the center of each table as one soaks in the enlivened colors dotting the room.  Large silver cachepots anchored the mounded orange Ranunculus and Free Spirit roses, yet allowed the sightlines to remain open for conversation.

Can we talk a minute about those cane back chairs?  All at once, they're incredibly retro and yet so much more noteworthy than the oh-so-typical ladderback ballroom chair that one so often sees as these events.  The wood stain ends up echoing the bronze statues more perfectly than should be allowed.  But in the end, the cerulean velvet cushions win the day, bringing an unexpected note of color - and one's gaze - down, elevating the humdrum black and white floors.

The plates and silver are, of course, lovely, but since I lack information about them, we need to talk about the linens upon which they sat.  The head table, as you see above, was swathed in the same cerulean velvet that covers the chair pads.  It provides a visual anchor at the front of the room and breaks up the monotony of grey columns and creme walls.

The many individual tables, though, are where the real triumph is to be found.

This is no play out of the written rules.  The table linens tie the entire product together effortlessly.  One could easily overlook them except for the fact that they combine the bronzed metallics echoed by the chairs and statuary, the cerulean blue evoked in the chairs and head table, and the creme that suffuses the room's natural, staid decor.

I can only believe that they were custom work that was commissioned for the occasion because if this design existed beforehand, it's Kismet that they found their way into this overall look.

All too often the word "triumph" is tossed around regarding a design.  I cannot but think that this was a 12th round knockout won by the designers.  Gone are the expected reds, whites, and blues.  In their place, a bold, wholly interesting look animates and energizes a space distinctly lacking in visual spice.  The colors are optimistic, unifying, and the kind of audacious desertion of the same old same old we have come to expect in the land of Brooks Brothers suits and flag lapel pins.