So it has been a very busy month. The first week of May brought my very first visitor: a friend of mine from Australia. For the first time since I moved here, I did all the touristy things: Pike Place Market, the Space Needle, a Sounders Game, eating at my favorite restaurants (oysters anyone?). It was pretty awesome.
After Luke's visit was the Mobile Food Rodeo, in Fremont. A nice, big gathering of food trucks. I had a lazy morning, so didn't have nearly the time I wanted to have for all the glorious foodie love, but I got to spend some time with a few of my favorite people, and that was worth the time.
I'm settling in nicely at my new job, and packing up my life for the second time in the last year. This time I'm only moving a couple miles away, but it's still quite a pain in the arse to dismantle and box everything I have here. Luckily, Nav and I are moving into the new place a whole week before we have to be out of the old, so we have enough time to really do it right, and make sure the place is clean and tip top before we hand over the keys.
Speaking of which, time for me to get back to it. I have six empty boxes to fill, and I'm working lunch tomorrow.
Tonight, my Aussie friend, Luke, is visiting before he goes back to Australia after the ski season. Molly and I cooked a huge PNW feast for us. 85% of the food came from the farmer's market yesterday. The salad was made from foraged greens and fiddlehead ferns, we used local Manila clams and Blue Pool oysters (Thanks Dan!), and locally made fresh pasta, rhubarb strawberry compote over a lemon curd-meringue style pie. Oh. My. God.
Yesterday I had orientation for my new job as a server at a somewhat large restaurant group. I've worked for groups with numerous locations before, and not been such a fan of a couple (one was super corporate and the bullshit was just not something I could swallow, and with the other, my restaurant was treated as the red-headed-step-child of the company, uncool), so I've been excited, but kinda wary. Then we read the company mission statement:
We share the common goal of creating deliciousness served with graciousness. Exceeding expectations and surpassing each success. Showing compassion to others and to ourselves. Building a vibrant, innovative, and profitable company which has the will and economic strength to give back to the community.
I'm so glad I took this job.
It is not right for the world to keep two such fantastic friends apart.
I love and miss my sister!
Please comment below to donate to a fund I'm starting to get her ass out here for a visit.
Two months ago, I turned 29. It didn't really freak me out: I'm not thirty yet, and well, I think I sailed through it quite nicely, complete with a tiara, Twilight stickers, and amazing friends. But such grace and happiness with my impending midlife status was not to last, and about a month later, I started to fall apart, like an appliance that breaks a month after the warranty expires. This week has been full of nice big fat reminders of my impending cronedom (cronehood?). It's kind of depressing. Thus when I'm done here, I will be joining my friends for a nice rich evening of beer and bar games to attempt to recapture some of my sadly waning youth.
10. A "big" day now involves errands, balancing my bank account, my modern version of "correspondence," including a myriad of emails and phone calls, studying menus or reading wine books, and maybe curling up on the couch with some Hulu or Netflix (I do love my NerdTV). Since when did I start being productive on my days off? And enjoying it?
9. I am willing to pay over $100 for a haircut and highlights to maintain my vain grip on youth (something I NEVER would have done a year ago).
8. I started doing research on opening an IRA. And I actually have money to go into it.
7. About a month ago, I started hurting in places and ways I never have before, which lead to:
6. I bought Epsom salts. For the second time this month. And I use them just about daily.
5. I have been sleeping with my shoulder wrapped in a heating pad, as I have a muscle knot that I can't get rid of despite stretching, yoga, a massage, and changes to my daily routine (carrying a small backpack instead of a purse, retraining myself to use my non-dominant hand more often so as not to stress my muscles out, you get the idea).
4. I got sick last week, and instead of working and pushing through it, I slept through the only 4 consecutive days off I've had in months. Which also lead to:
3. I haven't been out of my house after midnight in over two weeks. And I haven't had an entire alcoholic beverage in probably just as long. I am turning into a cheap date (which I prefer to thinking of myself as a light weight...just my pride). Or I'm just getting boring. Even right now it's only 8:15, and I'm already yawning and I washed all my makeup off hours ago.
2. I am fairly certain that I have a Bunion on my left foot, which has been causing me SEVERE pain for almost two months. I have taken to using the previously mentioned epsom salts to soak my poor tootsies in my bathroom sink (while perched on the counter), when I get home after work, because even though I've been searching for another pair of work shoes for three weeks, I have yet to find a pair that don't leave me in a state of severe limp after a normal shift. And this has lead me to perhaps the most depressing symptom of aging:
1. I haven't worn heels in weeks. When I went shoe shopping, and in my online perusing, I have only considered paying money for comfortable, sensible, shoes. I have officially never written a more depressing sentence in my life.
I am new to blogging. Oh sure, I've had a blog for years now, but I have never been able to just write about myself and my life and experiences. That amount of vulnerability is just way to big for me. I've spent most of my life believing the assumptions and easy untruths about myself, which has mostly lead me to flounder about in many different arenas of my life: my studies, my career, my friendships, my love life, my health and self image. For years, my life was a series of fantastic revelations that lead nowhere but disappointment: I want to help people, I want to dance, I want to teach, I want to write, I want to sing, etc. At the end of each new and fruitless endeavor, I was usually left feeling like I had wasted time and energy, and yet still didn't see a path or a future ahead of me.
I studied creative writting back in school, and in those few years of writing every day, producing something new every week for class, and writing a poetic thesis, I found a voice as a writer, as an adult and as a woman. For a while after graduation, I tried to keep up with those patterns, but I felt flat, like a dried out sponge, with no vibrance in my words, as if that final thesis push (and it was a big one) had exhausted my verbal reserves. And then, life got in the way. Time after time after time. The world, the one every graduation speaker and professor and mentor had assured me would be mine for the taking, had gotten too big and heavy, and my dreams too far away for me to grasp. In the first two and a half years after graduation, I worked in education, life insurance, and human resources. I made great friends, and met amazing people. But none of the jobs themselves were enough to make me want to get out of bed in the morning. In the midst of all the fumbling, the voice I had cultivated so carefully was lost.
In January 2007, a month after yet another career disappointment, I found myself working as a hostess at a new restaurant in the wealthy Boston suburb of Wellesley, MA, a job that I can honestly say I took without any idea what I was getting myself into. To me it was just another necessary pit stop on the road to somewhere else. A month later, I quit my crappy day job, and by May I was a server. In early 2008, I started seriously studying wine. In the fall of 2009, I became an assistant wine director. In July of 2011, I became a certified Sommelier. Four months later, I got on a plane, and into a cab, and walked into a new life, three thousand miles from that first kitchen, that first dining room, that first tasting class, that first order, that first bottle opened, and that first step I never knew would lead me here.
I've written a lot of posts like this in the last few months, as I'm trying to sort through my past, make sense and order of my present, and chase my future. I haven't quite found my voice again, and I'm not sure how it'll sound when I do. It's been almost seven years since I handed in my thesis, intending it to be only one piece of a larger body of work. I hope to finish it someday. Thanks for listening to me while I figure out who I will be when I do.
Note: for those of you unfamiliar with "Supertroopers," rent it, buy it, download it, and then watch it. It will prepare you for my thought process.
A friend of mine, we'll call him Jonah, grew a moustache a couple months back, with mixed reviews. He named him Garry. Garry has fans, and Garry has detractors. Garry forgot to buy someone a valentine, some find him slightly offensive, and a bit of a racist, and some just think he's creepy looking. But Garry has been a great conversation started with random Seattle hipsters, and brought much joy to many. Last week, Garry left us. Tonight was the first night where we were really able to talk about Garry's disappearance.
Conversation between 6-9 mature adults, with jobs (mostly), transcribed as closely as I can remember
"What happened to Garry?"
Jonah: "I shaved him off last week"
"Is he going reappear at some point? Maybe a reunion tour?"
Jonah: "Garry is always with me in spirit, but no, the next moustache will be 'Sancho'."
"Eww, really?!?"
Jonah: "Not SANCHEZ, Sancho."
"Is there a difference?"
Jonah: "A huge difference! Sancho is slang for the guy who comes into your house and bangs your wife and plays with your kids while you're working to pay the bills."
"I can explain a Dirty Sanchez if you'd like."
"What would Sancho look like?"
Jonah: "Probably a lot like Garry."
"You don't want to go for something a little new and different? Something you can wax?"
"Or Charlie Chaplin's moustache!"
"That's the same as Hitler's."
Jonah: "yeah, I don't think I can pull that off."
"I totally could!"
Jonah: "but you're a chick so the whole growing a moustache thing wouldn't work out so well for you."
"I may not have hair on my face, but I have plenty of other hair."
"Oh My GOD!!! that would be the best landing strip ever!"
Ergo, I am now on the hunt for a waxer, fluent in idiomatic English (because I want my instructions to be followed), with a good sense of humor (because really, this is funny), who is willing to be a bit creative and expressive (because things are gonna get weird).
Moustache: not just for your face anymore.
The Moustache Ride: now open to interpretation.
P.S. Because it's fun and awesome, check out the World Beard and Moustache Championshipswebsite. I am particularly fond of the "freestyle" categories.
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