Nourishment

My 4th day as a baker and the emotional and physical waves are still as potent as the first.  I did expect the difficulty, but I’m hoping that it gets on with being a comfortable routine sooner rather than later.

Day 1 became such a blur that I’ve confused parts of it with having been asleep.  I was reacting to every instruction without thinking about what I was doing, and by the end of the day (9:30am), I was trying not to throw up while I was laminating croissant dough.  I wasn’t absorbing information anymore, but in spite of the overwhelming exhaustion, I was unable to fall asleep for almost 2 hours.  When I finally did, it was restless and the hurt in my feet and back didn’t let me take much from it.

Day 2 had my energy up and I felt good through most of the day, having remembered things I wasn’t aware I had absorbed.  My sharpie was stolen almost immediately after I put it down.  I was told “you get one sharpie”; this one was quite shortlived.  I was guided by J who gave me a number of pointers that I would later find out contradicted the boss’ advice.  If there’s one thing apparent, it’s that consistency in your inconsitencies is somewhat the status quo.  I went home and my back cramped up while I tried not to swallow because of the sore throat that was getting worse.

Day 3 was a real crash.  I started off feeling totally useless, which unfortunately coincided with M’s notion that I was ready to do the station by myself while she watched.  I fucked up more than I had the entire time so far (including the tryout when I had no idea where I was).  I flattened morning buns after letting them sit too long to take in sugar, I overcooked the melon bread, the sticky buns were somewhat appropriately stuck to their cooking surface instead of their glaze, the muffins took too long to do and I couldn’t remember what was next to do.  I had to get bailed out repeatedly.  When I came home, I had a short whiskey at 10 am and slept for 5 hours.

Day 4 was after a break of a couple days and I got in gear immediately.  Because the shift began on one side of daylight savings time and ended in another, I lost half an hour of time right when I started.  The first half of the day was rather seamless considering how the last day went. I’m losing too much time egg-washing and can’t scoop muffins quickly enough, apparently.  I honestly don’t see any other way of getting through this station’s shift than by moving perfectly from one thing to the next while attending 10 oven racks at the same time.  I always intend to write more down, but the time taken to do that would start setting me back even further.  I did manage to make up about 15 minutes of the deficit, but things began to lose cohesion somewhere after wholesale baking and beginning retail.  So many different things to prepare in so many different ways.  Different cooktimes, variable proofing times, dough coming undone if you aren’t quick enough…

In spite of M’s constant pointers and assistance, I left on a good note.  I had done pretty well. My morning buns had good color.

The truth is, though… I’m not sure if I’m strong enough for this.  The shift is intended to only be two or three times a week, but it’s incredibly taxing at even one or two nights.  I’ve been trying to decide whether to simply stay up when I get home and then go to sleep early in the evening (which is M’s recommendation) or to continue trying to sleep when I get home in the morning, then have an afternoon breakfast and another nap.  The sleep isn’t as hard to deal with, because once I’m at work, the work takes over and it’s hard to even think about being tired.  Being away from S and knowing she has to go to sleep alone is the hard part.  The other guy who works my shift goes home and stays up til about 4pm then sleeps, but according to M, he doesn’t have a life at all.  If I didn’t have a life going on, maybe I’d be more comfortable with this idea, but I’ve had my life falling into place in a way I’m not willing to compromise.  I’ve been lucky enough to find a home, which is something I’ve largely been without for the last several years, and telling her goodnight while walking out the door is not easy.  Do I think we’re strong enough for it?  Absolutely.  The ‘us’ isn’t conditional.  But I’m not sure I was ready for it to be quite this hard.

I thought about it when I was at work – that if she had a job that required her to go out and begin the day while I went to sleep alone, I’m not sure I’d handle it as well as she has.  She has been taking care of me so kindly and I’ve been stupid enough to repay her by waking up in a bad mood because I intended to nap instead of sleep all day.  Partially, I’m sure this is because by the time I wake up in the afternoon, I haven’t eaten for 18 hours or so and I’m dehydrated and achy and burned.  But I still could hold myself together a bit more – if I were where she was and I saw her suffering because of something that kept her away from me, I only hope I’d be able to support her as unconditionally as she has me.  Whoever sent her my way, thank you.

Tonight/tomorrow will be the 5th day, and though I’ve had some misconceptions about what the job would be, I think it’s still possible for me to get the experience I want out of it. I thought I’d be coming in early and working on dough and then putting it in the oven and seeing its creation from beginning to end, but the professional bakery has much more assembly line in it than contemplative artisanal process.  As I move on to other stations I will see the rest of this process in its pieces, though, and will hopefully start to get that experience in its own way.  Maybe this is a quarter-life crisis and the lesson is simply going to be teaching me that I’ve been too idealistic about work to let less ‘pretty’ opportunities be heard as much as they should, or maybe it really will be a calling for me and it lets me open my own business down the line… Either way, “tomorrow,” M said, “egg washing and muffin scooping.  Otherwise, you did pretty good today.”

it’s ok to return to san francisco

hello kiddos-

as you may or may not know, i’m moving back across the country to san francisco.  it’s been a long time in the works and has taken months of agonizing decision-making to get to this point, but i am now living in an apartment with shit strewn every which way, trying to piece together the fractured segments of my life that are on the floor and partially in boxes.  i am homeless and yet still live here.  the difficulty in transition, for me, is never in the change once committed, but in the transitional period itself.  if i was on a plane or if i had a bed, things would be simpler – regardless of where i was bound to be or bound to remain.

but that’s the problem, isn’t it?  if we could all flip a switch and try a new reality, we’d all be a lot less prone to commit.  and we appreciate those who seem to be able to defy our wont to be dynamic – they buck the trend.

regardless, i’ve had to bookend this experience somehow, and as such, here is a special and deeply personal edition of it’s ok to cry.  i hope you love it.

http://drop.io/itsoktoreturn/asset/its-ok-to-return-to-sf-mp3

always,

-z

transition / translation

as i get older, these times of tumult seem to be more difficult to convey. the question of why i’m even trying to communicate myself to others seems more unanswerable, and i find that i get dissatisfied with my inability to make an exchange more valuable than reticence.  i used to find the act alone offered some kind of mollification; that by somehow making the changes and difficulties in my life more real to others, i’d made them more real, less intangible, more digestible.  these days i feel like it’s more effort than return—a chance to inform instead of a chance to meditate.

i have set a deadline, and in doing so, my final days here are taking on a new lustre.  with mortality, the pains of life here are now the novelty of it. i have briefly considered that i may have been capable of this mindset all along, and that i’ve just been keeping myself from it… but can any of us truly control ourselves to that extent, or should we?

i worry that i’ve simplified my answers and stopped myself short on a path that may have opened in time, but i’m not foolish enough to think that there won’t be others… that there won’t be opportunity wherever i decide to be.  it certainly is easier to see the potential in the known than to gamble on it elsewhere.

even with all that’s going on, i have only less to say.

tomorrow i will wake up and, for a moment, forget where i am.  i will have changed, and that is as much as anyone can hope to do with their time—to change and be grateful for it.

quitting facebook

the first time i “used the internet” was an aol chat room that a family friend’s son showed me.  if i remember correctly, his screenname was romeo666; clearly he had evolved an attitude i was only beginning to taste in my pre-teen years.  thinking about it now, that first encounter was incredibly lackluster by today’s standards – almost no GUI, text was hardly even formatted – but i was blown away by the “/roll” command whereby you could ‘roll’ a virtual die of ANY size and it would generate a random number.  imagine the possibilities.

somewhere along the line the attitude of our place on the internet completely changed.  in those days, the idea was that there was this other world to experience and you could present yourself in it however you saw fit.  i doubt very much that this family friend was much of a romeo in those days, and i don’t think he was into devil-worship (at least beyond a casual flirtation), but he was given this freedom to play with his identity.  i think nearly anyone who grew up with the internet in some way has gone through several of these identities and screen names by virtue of this flexibility and impermanence.

today, we go by our real names online.  it changed so slowly that i’d be hard-pressed to say when exactly this shift happened, but i think it’d be difficult to argue that social networking sites were the central element in robbing us of our disposable personae.  perhaps ‘rob’ is a strong word, and i’m definitely not ready to make a judgment call on whether this is a positive or negative turn, but i think this combining of the distant and personal is something we simply aren’t capable of managing that well at this point.  the internet gives us some amount of padding with our interactions in it, which makes much more sense when we’re projecting a portrait of ourselves instead of an extension of our ‘real’ self.  with this separation, people get more aggressive, more flirtatious, more callous than they might be face-to-face. it isn’t about the origin of these tendencies (a screenname vs a real one), but rather that there is this ‘moat’ separating our internet selves from our real selves and we are spending a lot of energy trying to exist in both simultaneously – reconciling interaction that was once anonymous with how we act when we’re standing next to someone.

there certainly isn’t an answer as to whether or not we’re better off being anonymous, especially considering the opportunity for malice, but i would argue that this aggregation of our internet identities is something that people haven’t fully considered yet.

for me, the move towards social networking actually reduced the amount i interacted in a communal way online.  before facebook came about, i spent a fair bit of time with livejournal.  yes, the output was angsty and full of bad poetry, but i used to actually write things that were longer than a soundbite and i cared about what i said.  there was a crossfade from livejournal to facebook as the amount of people i knew grew in the latter.  i slowly stopped writing altogether, stopped checking in on the communities i belonged to, and i didn’t even really notice.  certainly this could just be part of ‘growing up’, but to me now, it seems a terrible loss.  i can say pretty safely that in the times since my last, sporadic entries, i’ve had significant experiences and emotions; these are now saved only as little photo albums and a few comments from friends. undoubtedly there’s a social element to that, but i can say assuredly that if it wasn’t for facebook, i would have put a lot more thought and time into that sharing.

so that is why i’m giving it up.  the reasons listed on quitfacebookday.com are important, but privacy is not my primary concern at all – my data is out there, there’s not much to change that. i’m stopping it because everything i contribute to it is in a controlled, limited way.  there’s no real archive of experience there, just blurbs and compressed photos presented in a painful interface.  do i really need to have my internet presence restricted by facebook’s api?  there’s so many great services out there that do what facebook does and more.  the ubiquity may not be there, but the little bit of effort goes to something so much more personal and cohesive.  i’m getting off of facebook because decentralizing my internet persona gives me the chance to be creative with it again.

i’m not suggesting that this is an option for everyone, and i doubt that there’s going to be a return to the ‘wild west’ days of internet anonymity, but since we’re going to be representing ourselves, why do it in a homogenized format?  i can certainly understand how it’s ‘easier’, but we never seem to take that route in reality.

we’re at an odd time where we still aren’t quite sure what role the internet plays in our lives.  we see facebook as a distraction, but there’s certainly potential ramifications (both good and bad) that we garner by spending time with it.  we may not see it to be as real as it is.  the internet isn’t going away any time soon, and people are beginning to understand that it will be a significant part of their life.  perhaps in a few years, people will stop saying that they’re ‘killing time’ when using facebook and see it as something that actually has bearing on their lives.  and perhaps when that point has been reached, people will decide that social networking isn’t and shouldn’t be the only vein for expressing that aspect of themselves.

see you on the other side, friends 1-554.

love,

-z

it’s ok to cry valentine’s day 2k10

hello kiddos-

back with a new episode and it’s the v-day special.  cuddle up with a loved one and ignore the technical problems about halfway through (audio will cut out for a mere few seconds – a small price to pay for an otherwise enjoyable hour of music).

DOWNLOAD HERE: http://www.mediafire.com/?vtjwuido2im

check out the fancy pictures of the ‘studio’.  oooooh, candles.

dark. moody.

obtuse. jacket.

snowy. dim.

and i always say it but seriously this time…

love,

-z

p.s. an alternate link for those of you who can’t roll with mediafire:  http://www.sendspace.com/file/rxnur4

it’s ok to cry – 11.08.09

hello kiddos-

as you can tell, the site has been changed around a bit.  i decided there was no need to pay for full hosting when i can get most storage/blog stuff for free, so i’m having to redo things a bit.  i finally got around to a new show.  next on the list is getting the old ones back up.

working on it, slowly but steadily.

in the meantime, enjoy the new show. hope it finds you well.

love,

-z

http://drop.io/itsok110809/asset/itsok-11-08-09-mp3