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Because I usually am in Vino ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** In 2009, I gave up my studies as a medievalist and musician, left my home, my family, my life and moved to Provence in southern France for a guy. In 2012, I moved away from him to study wine. Today, I'm a vagabond sommelier working in Paris at one of the oldest and most famous restaurants in the world, struggling to find some purpose to what I deem the rest of my life. I'm still married and after 8 10 years, I'm still trying to fit-in with French life and culture and to understand why the French are the way they are. Because they're weird in a different way that I think Americans are weird. Perhaps it's me who's weird. |
| I really want a glass of Muscadet. It's the wine I've been craving lately. A nice salty freshness. I think it would go well with some good, tangy olives. My husband bought olives from Provence a few days ago because he was sick of all our olives coming from places like Turkey and Morocco. "We're surrounded by olive trees and our olives come from Morocco. Please explain how that works," he said. We have the same complaint about figs. There are wild fig trees on my running route. I could bring a basket and harvest them in the fall if I wanted. But that we buy at the market and in the store come from Turkey. I should look up if there is anything to be afraid of when picking from wild fig trees, because if there isn't, I'm going nuts next year. Apparently, one can ask the local pharmacist about these things. I read once, years ago, that you could bring the wild berries and mushrooms you had picked to your local pharmacist and they would tell you if they were poisonous or not. I asked my husband if it was true and he said yes, but hardly anyone does it anymore. At least the wine I drink comes from the region stuck to the bottle. If there's one thing the French are fastidious and protective about it's their wine. I didn't even realize that some wineries bought grapes from other regions and transported them across hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to make wine with them until the last time I went to the States. I couldn't believe the woman when she told me that. I asked her if she was really serious. People import grapes from California to make wine on the east coast. I think my heart almost stopped. Grape buying between vineyard and winery happens in France (almost all of Champagne and a lot of Burgundy for instance), but it stays in the region. It would never leave the region. I can't handle it. I don't think the French could handle it. For once, we are of one mind. Anyway, I've been working on a novella/novel outline. I'm planning for a novella-length story, but who knows with me. I am very enamored with the setting of my story When It Last Snowed and I've been toying around with other stories in the same setting to develop the world and the people living inside it. It's a bit reminiscent of Ursula K LeGuin à la Always Coming Home and that makes me wonder if what I'm doing is just a rip off of what she's done? Is that a bad thing? I bow down to the universes she's created, the story cycles she's written. So is it an homage? Does it need to be worthy? I guess the question is: if I continue along this idea, what do I want to do with it? None of these questions need to be answered right now. What I need to do is write the damn stories and stop futzing about. And give myself time to relax. I'm pushing myself, I can already feel it, and I don't want to stress myself out. This is vacation. A time for projects and new habits, but it's also a time to relax and have fun and do nothing. |
| Last night, I was reading on the couch and thinking about the vacation that has officially begun and will last at least a month. I didn't do anything yesterday. I arrived home, had lunch, went grocery shopping, unpacked and napped. Very unproductive, but I wanted to give myself a day of rest. Then, while lying there, I remember something my old professor, Ron Carlson said about writing and vacation. He used to teach for an all-boys boarding school in Connecticut and he said that the moment the boys went home for summer or Christmas vacation the first thing he did, before anything else, was sit down and write. In order to remind him that vacation from his "day job" was in fact a time to work on writing. I'm also reminded of writers like Nora Roberts and James Patterson. Both of whom I don't like, but who are successful and prolific (with help). They treat writing as a true 9-5 job. They get up, they write. For hours. Everyday. Writing is like playing a musical instrument. It takes practice, it takes concentration and dedication. It can't be something you just do when you have time for it. I let yesterday go, because I was tired and needed a day to reset my clock, but today I got up, did the dishes, made coffee and oatmeal and hung out my laundry (dryers are considered unhygienic in France) and sat down to write. I wrote a haiku, not my best but acceptable and then 500 words of a story. Nothing great, but it was to write. The goals was to set the tone of this vacation in which, yes I want to relax and enjoy myself and cook fun foods and drink good wine and spend time with my husband, but I also want to write and study. Later today I will sit down and set out some plans and maybe some goals. At least define what it is I want to work on this vacation now that I have time to fully devote myself to some projects. Maybe some novel planning, some wine study- perhaps work on memorizing a few regions or working on blind tasting, updating my wine producer list. What books I want to read. I have plenty of books on my Kindle that I haven't read, some books I'd like to re-read. Officially I have until the 24th of February. I might end up with more. Maybe less. It depends on what happens with the job interviews. Monday I head to Lyon. Gaël has invited me to a meeting of the Sommelier Association du Rhône-Alps, I'm not sure why. Perhaps to introduce me to other sommeliers in the region to convince me to come work with him. Sneaky bastard. Also, he knows I'm interested in preparing for his competition with him, even if I'm not interested in the competition itself and he'll probably be training with other sommeliers in the association. And Tuesday I have my interview. My head is still whirring with what to do. How to handle negotiations. Above all, I need to define what I DON'T want in a new job. I've defined my criteria for what I want, but I have no definite criteria for what I do not want to work with. What am I willing to compromise? What am I willing to give up? Am I willing to give up the hours I have now, for instance, for control over the wine list? This is something else to think about and add to my list of plans and goals. Something to do rather soon since my job interviews are next week. |
| I spoke to my sister briefly today. Our conversations are all too brief these days. With her being a new mom (and by the wayside, me an aunt) it's been a radical adjustment for me. One I've been struggling to adapt to. It's hard but I understand that life changes, priorities change, etc. And my niece is adorable so... It was a good conversation nevertheless. Her husband happened to be in the room to, and they've both worked for big companies; he in science and research, while my sister is the assistant to the CEO of a massive corporation. She works for the man. And while it's not something I could ever do, it's nice to have someone close who has a "normal" job, because I feel like my sister works in the real world while I'm - God only knows. I've been wondering quite a bit about the behavior I see that goes on at my job. The whispers, the commentary, the mocking. The transparency, or lack thereof, of the management and the general immaturity of my colleagues. I asked them if this was a normal thing in big companies. The response was, yes, it is. This isn't comforting, because my next question was, "so am I crazy for getting upset about it?" My sister assured me that I'm not really crazy, but I was still disturbed. I always assumed that because I work in kind of a strange, transient, and stressful industry, that often scrapped the bottom of the recruitment barrel, that I just always fell on immature and weird co-workers. That if I went to work for a major corporation full of ambitious people, this kind of thing would peter-out because I'd be working with adults and not adult-aged children. Apparently that's a nope. When I was in my early twenties, I came up with the theory that people don't mature mentally much further than the age 13. The adolescents and young adults I saw around me were still acting like they were in junior high school and I always expected that the weird-ass behavior I saw in junior high would end as I got older. I wanted the world to prove me wrong. I wanted the passage of the years to prove me wrong. It hasn't. I still feel as innocent and naive as I did when I was 13 and I feel like everyone around me is just as immature. Only they own homes and have children of their own. So what the hell? Why am I - the one with certifiable mental problems - the one who feels like the adult. Or at least the one who has an idea of what being "an adult" should consist of besides owning a home and having offspring. My sister said that the reason I have the mental problems is because I'm the normal one and I can't handle the world around me. She's probably right. To be ill-adjusted to a deranged world is not breakdown. Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects This has been my motto ever since I read it in university when I was 20. Almost 17 years later, and I still feel this way. I'm ill-adjusted to the world around me. I try to adjust. I try to figure out how to be more like the masses, but I just can't. I don't know how. And as I get older, I get more out of touch with the people around me. I pull even further away from them because I expect us - me included in this - to be more than we are. Though what I expect people - me - to be, I'm not entirely sure. After work today, a bunch of people went out to drink. They didn't go out to have a few drinks together after work, they went out to drink. At least that's my take on it. I wasn't invited. I wouldn't have gone anyway, because the fact is, I don't want to drink with them. I'd rather drink alone. I don't have anything to say to them outside of work and as they were planning their drinkies, I tried to think of what I'd say to them if I invited myself and went along and couldn't think of a thing. In fact, I am too tired, too frustrated, to want to make an effort. What could I talk to them about? The book I'm reading? They don't read. The story I want to write? They don't write. The article I read in the New Yorker recently on Chad and how it changed my views of Obama? Physics? Music? Philosophy? Religion? Why the new Star Wars movie had no story-line to speak of? Only the last one might a chance. Maybe. I fell asleep after an early dinner tonight. I didn't have the energy to do anything, but I'm up now at 9:30pm wondering what I should do with myself. I will read and make tea and maybe clean a bit. While I slept I dreamed about having a new job. |
| Do you ever get the feeling that people are laughing at you behind your back? But I mean really laughing at you. As if they try to goad you into doing certain things just so they can laugh about you afterwards. That's how I feel about my apprentice and the maître d'hôtel right now. When I first started training the apprentice I noticed that the maître d'hôtel (who I've already mentioned I had problems with) was always hanging around listening to me. Fine. Then he started teasing me about how he thinks the apprentice has a thing for me. Seriously? The kid is like 19. I could be his mom. I look young for my age, but I after years of smoking and drinking, I have to face the facts, I'm no longer appealing to 19 year olds. Five years ago I could get away with it. No longer. Then he started making side comments, quips and giving "secret" looks to the apprentice when I was working with him. As if they're sharing some private, but not so private joke, about me. To be perfectly honest, I couldn't care less if they like me or no. I trained myself in wine and service. I work hard to do my job well, and I'd be the last person to say I'm the best sommelier ever - I still have a lot to learn. But I've also been mentored by very good sommeliers in the past, one of whom wants to work with me again. When I put my CV online, restaurants literally fall all over themselves to recruit me. The last time I posted my CV to look for a new job, I had 10 calls in 30 minutes from all over France. No joke. I had to turn off my phone and send everything to voicemail because I couldn't field them all at once. I'll admit that it helps that English is my native language. What does bother me is that a) the maître d'hôtel is undermining my work by laughing at me to the apprentice and b) that the apprentice is wasting my time by not taking me seriously. Yes, I ramble, yes, I can go on and on about uninteresting and tiny little details about the history and ancient traditions of wine-making. Yes, I'm obsessed with old grape varieties and the fact that they used to clarify wine with egg whites. And yes, I forget things, like the top soil construction of Chablis and the 13 authorized grape varieties of Châteauneuf du Pâpe and half of the Cru of Burgundy. But I admit it. I go home and look it up. I've said time and time again that I'm not perfect, that I taught myself this career, and I've said over and over again that it's a career that takes an insane amount of study, concentration, and memorization. Just to know the basics. So noticing that they were sharing some sort of private joke about me I decided that I was done training the apprentice. He can train with the other two sommeliers. I've a foot out the door anyway with two job interviews lined up, both of which I'll have my own apprentice to train privately. Until last night when somehow, I got on the topic of carafing wines. I could tell the apprentice thought it was something easy so I had him fill up an empty bottle with water and carafe "a wine" in front of me. Everything was wrong. And because I was watching him, he was shaking. I pointed out that when he does this for a customer, the customer will be watching him. In fact, when a sommelier does this, the whole restaurant usually watches. It's a show. And the customers will be a lot less forgiving because they will expect him to know what he's doing and not drop wine all over the floor. (Which he did. Which is why I had him start out with just a bottle filled with water.) And then, on his second try I started asking him questions about his life, his background, his favorite wines. Because it's actually hard to concentrate on carafing a wine and hold a conversation at the same time. But I do it all the time. So he learned it wasn't that easy. Yet, they were still laughing. Maybe it wasn't about me. I hope not. Because I don't like wasting my evening teaching someone who doesn't take me seriously when I could have been doing my own work. |
| There are times when I think that I'm starting to get the hang of French. Then I sit down to do something like rewrite my motivation letter and a simple email thanking a potential job-offer for their interest and realize the only thing I really know how to do is swear like a sailor. I can write merde like no one's business. Anyway, I got fed up with work yesterday. There are only so many intrigues, passive-aggressive emails, and "secrets and lies" one can take. I've never felt fully at home here, I never truly connected with my colleagues, and I'm done with bad management. The latest development is that I might, but might not, be kicked out of the mas where I'm housed with my some of my co-workers. Some people would say that there is no use in stressing about things that haven't been decided yet, but the thing is that they've been having this debate since September and it's time to make a decision. Plus, the reason they haven't made this decision, I'm pretty sure, is that they don't want to "be mean" but they don't want us living there either. Gentil n'est pas un métier, we say in French. Nice is not a career. If you're in management you have to be "mean" sometimes. I told them, "look, if you house me, I can stay, if you don't, I understand, but I'm leaving." This isn't an ultimatum that is meant to be mean - I have given those before - it's just the facts. I can't afford to have two apartments in two different parts of Provence. Provence is expensive. And my husband isn't coming to Lorgues because I planned on staying here only until September 2018. So if I have to leave 7 months early, I'll leave 7 months early. It's sad, but it's not the end of the world. And then there's all the whispering. STOP WHISPERING like you're plotting our demise. If you have something important to discuss go into a room and discuss it. Then inform your employees and put it into action. Take some goddamn responsibility for your restaurant. Find personnel. Not interns. Stop planning for future goals when you haven't yet attained the ones you've set out to achieve. One thing at a time. And STOP TALKING ABOUT ME BEHIND MY BACK. I'm weird. Fine. I know this, everyone knows this. I don't live with my husband and I don't want children. I'm dedicated to and serious about my job. I don't fart around at work. I like to read. I know a lot of useless information about wine but I'm not the most smile-y person ever. Get over it. So I rewrote my motivation letter and sent it out to a restaurant near Arles that is looking for a sommelier. The restaurant interests me. They were looking last time I was looking for a job and never got back to me, but I figured this time I have more experience and my motivation letter isn't the mess that it was last time. They wrote me back 10 minutes later asking to come up for an interview. Cool. I'm waiting for confirmation of a date. This restaurant from all outward appearances has everything I'm looking for expect location. It's in a small-ish town rather than a city, but it's got everything else. Interesting wine list. Small restaurant. Good hours. Tasty and reasonably priced menu. Established with one Michelin star. As long as the team seems serious and sane and the salary is good, sign me up. And I still have the restaurant in Lyon. Interview on the 9th. I told my current chef that I was done with this insanity and indecision and am officially now looking for a new job. I didn't really truly want to give up on this job, but seeing this job announcement seems like fate. I always pass up the jobs I'm interested in, the kind of restaurants where I'd like to work in places I'd like to live, because I'm already engaged somewhere else. I need to stop doing that and just go for it. |
| Back to the land of the living. Or non-living, just getting through the workaday. By that I mean night. I spent most of my time off sleeping, eating, cooking, sleeping. I can't seem to get past this cold, flu, virus-of-death-thing, my voice still hasn't entirely returned. I went out on Friday to look for a dress for New Years. In 45 minutes, the time it took me to walk to the shops, pick out and try on three things, I was completely exhausted. Same yesterday, I said hello to my in laws, was awake for about half of Christmas lunch and then had to lean on my husband pretending to be awake for the rest of the meal. Same for today. I helped him load the car, said goodbye. Then slept. My husband says it's because I don't sleep properly at night. I wake up alot, I never sleep deeply. He says the only time he sees me actually ASLEEP is in the afternoon when I take a nap. Usually my naps don't last longer than twenty minutes. Maybe. I don't know. I have to work soon. I wrote a haiku. I re-did my makeup. I made coffee. Not in that order. I shouldn't have allowed myself to fall asleep with makeup on. You can always tell. I read a review someone sent me. I thought about the review. There's so much about story construction I don't agree with and think people need to lighten up and open up to new possibilities. At the same time, it's the classical stuff that gets published and if you're going to change the trend, you need to have a good reason for doing so. Not just because you're too lazy to learn proper construction in the first place. On the other hand, I don't like overthinking for the audience. Though this wouldn't be so much as thinking for the audience as it would be for overthinking all the angles, checking the math so to speak. Which isn't a bad thing. I feel like my brain, which was back on for about a month, has shut off again, and it's taking too long to reboot. Sitting in bed with a movie isn't just all I can manage, it's all I want. But I don't. I'm tired of being a food-hole and weekend lump. I don't have 4 diplomas to sit around and do nothing. |
| Vacation!!! For at least 5 days. I arrived home yesterday at noon and won't go back until Tuesday. Waking up in my own bed with cats and a husband and having coffee at my desk that's situated in another room from where I slept and made my coffee, is just amazing. Why do I keep taking jobs elsewhere? Why do I work? When I don't have to work I remember just how much I actually don't like my job and reinforce my belief that the Mandela Effect has some how done its work on me and I'm living in a parallel universe where my life has gone horribly off course from what it should be. That feeling has gone away a bit since I've started taking a bit more control over my life and making decisions for my future but it's still kind of there. I was thinking about it last night as I was falling asleep. But I've been taking control because even if it is somehow true that I'm living in a parallel universe, I don't know how to get back. Making lemonade out of lemons so to speak is the best I can do. And it's not that I don't like my job. But I hate how my job takes up so much of my time and energy. I'd like my job more if I didn't work at least 12 physically and mentally exhausting hours a day. I'd like my job more if it allowed me to have a life outside of work. I had a telephone interview with the Chef of the restaurant in Lyon yesterday when I came home. It was a rather one sided interview because I started to lose my voice about 15 minutes in and had to keep all my statements simple and short. He asked me what my goals were as a sommelier and for the future and of course, that was the moment that got me thinking about parallel universes because I never have an answer to that question anymore. Goals? Future plans? I used to have all of those things, but since moving to France my future goals consist of being alive in the future. And if I'm lucky still healthy. The husband asks me that all the time. Where do I want to be in 5 years? In 10 years? I have no idea. I don't want to be living day to day just trying to get through the next day at my job, always just trying to keep my head above water. That's what I feel like now. So anyway, the interview was good, but I need to remember that in fact, if I take this job, I'll certainly be working more hours than I'm working now. And that will take away from the time I have to myself to do things like write, read, reflect. All things I've been doing more of lately and want to continue to do because they nourish me in ways that my job cannot. Right now I've been concentrating mainly on the logistics of the job itself, what would change job-wise not just lifestyle wise. I wouldn't just be moving and living somewhere else. I wouldn't just be giving up two months paid vacation (which I was going to be doing come September anyway) I'd be giving up a lot of personal time during the week as well. I don't like that. But I have to consider that it will be a reality in whatever job I take next. I'm quite lucky with my position now that I don't work all that many hours in perspective with other restaurants. But that's partly because we don't have as many customers as we should and sometimes I feel like it's also because I'm the least loved of all my colleagues so they'd rather I wasn't around anyway. It's not as though they are looking to get rid of me, but if you're friends with one of your colleagues and just acquaintances with the other, which one would you rather work with? The good friend or the acquaintance? (Add to this scenario the fact that you lack discipline, work ethic, responsibility, and maturity.) So I get it. And it works in my favor because I don't really want to be around them 14 hours a day anyway. I'd rather be at home working on other things. But that will not be the case when I take another job. Whether I take this job in Lyon or another job in another city later on. In other news: I made a doctor's appointment for this afternoon with my doctor here in Arles. I'm still pretty sick and above all, very tired, no matter how much I sleep. I still don't have much of a voice. Yes, one could make the argument that my body is still healing and get over whatever it had, but last night when I was sitting in the movie theater with the husband, I started to feel like I was having trouble breathing. The way I feel a serious asthma attack might feel. I could breathe, but I couldn't breathe deeply and I felt like I wasn't getting enough oxygen into my lungs. So I'd rather go to a real doctor just to make sure there are no complications, that I just need rest or vitamins or something, rather than stick with the advice of that charlatan I saw in the village on Monday. |
This entry might be too much information. If it is, that's your problem because this is my blog. For the past week I've been sick with a sore throat. I managed to make it until Friday when I lost my voice completely and Justine, the other sommelier on team-sommellerie had to do my service while I just played a support role in the background. By the time I went into work on Saturday, I couldn't do much more than sit in a closet and shiver until Lauraline sent me home. I arrived home and slept until 10pm sunday night. Not all the way through. My throat hurt and was so swollen that at times it was a struggle to breathe, let alone swallow or eat. My nose is so stuffed that I can't see well. I've been alternating meals of soup, tea, and bananas on roughly 3 hour intervals because that's all I could manage. And only one at a time because if I tried to have tea and soup or tea and a banana I started to sweat so much I had to change all the sheets on my bed. In 24 hours I went through 3 sets of pajamas. Finally this morning, I rolled out of bed, managed to find clothes and dragged myself to the doctor. Or rather the scooter just rolled down the hill into the village and I tried not to crash it into anything. I hate going to the doctor in this village because there is only one doctor that takes clients without an appointment and he's absolutely awful. A perfunctory check and then gives you some meds that you could just ask for over the counter. I only went because I knew Lauraline would yell at me for not going. I'm pretty sure that the Porsche I see in the driveway of the clinic is his Porsche and he's taking these patients to pay for said Porsche. Not because he's actually trying to help anyone out. Anyway, at least it gave me an excuse to go to the pharmacy. I handed the prescription over to the pharmacist and added that I would take any other medication or homeopathy she could legally give me because I'm near death. She came back with a box and a worried, but kind expression, asking, "Do you take suppositories?" Do I what? She promised me that if I could manage to get it in twice a day I would be much better off because this little tampon-like thing is the best thing for laryngitis. I blinked a few times, trying to get her and the box into focus and then figured "Well, anal sex is all the rage at the moment, a suppository can't be much worse." Cue the commentary that I've never had anal sex despite a few boyfriends really really wanting to try it, because I'll do anything but I just can't - no. Ew. No. But as I said to her, I'm near death and I've been near death for a week so bring it on. She explained how to put it in, and I went home and put it in. Except then I wondered if I could go to the bathroom? Do I have to wait a certain amount of hours? Or until the minty fresh feeling I have down there (which was oddly refreshing) goes away? As far as I know, this is not medication that's handed out in the States. Maybe people don't talk about it with the candor that I do. So here I am. Out of bed for the first time in two days, still without a voice, barely able to breathe and getting ready to go into work. I haven't been running since Friday (which was a bad idea in retrospect), I can barely see, and as far as I can tell, I can only sit up for an hour at a time before my body just collapses back into bed. The best part is that I've been laying in bed so much that my shoulders and back are starting to hurt, my nerves are being pinched and my hands are going numb. My body doesn't like sitting around doing nothing. My brain either. I tried writing a review last night for my reviewing group but I think I was slightly delirious while writing and it came off half-unintelligible. Of course, this was the weekend my sister and mother remembered I was alive (barely) and tried to call me on skype (when I'd been trying to call them for the past two weeks) and my husband didn't understand the texts I kept sending him that read "I lost my voice and can't talk" and also called me three times. The best response I could manage to the three of them was something like "hAv3 flue ca1nt tAlk9" Because I also couldn't type. The plan now is to shower and attempt to stretch out my muscles which I would normally do with a run but that would be a bad a idea seeing as how I'd probably run myself off a cliff. I also got my period a week early. For the fun of it I think. |
| The return of the apprentice happened Wednesday. He has classes in Bordeaux 4 times a year for three weeks and then he comes to Provence for a while to work with us. While I'm not really in charge, I've kind of taken over his training for a few reasons. The first is that I'm the only one patient enough and with experience teaching. I taught oboe, English, and trained my own team when I was maître d'hotel at Rabanel. The second is that when he told me he only had a total of 24 weeks of classes and that was only on the basics of French wine regions I kind of flipped out. "Il t'apprend rien que tu peux trouver dans un livre alors." (They teach you nothing you can't just read in a book.) It makes me think I didn't miss out by teaching myself wine and sommellerie. I was in full swing then, Wednesday night, rambling on about wine pairings with my phone on the table before us when it vibrated. I flipped open the cover to find a message from Gaël, my former chef sommelier, the guy who trained me, offering me a job. He's going to be preparing for competitions (yes, like in the movie Somm) and needs an assistant to help him run one of the three restaurants he's in charge of in Lyon. This came on at an auspicious time because I'm getting really fed up with the people at work. All the egos and secrets and lies and manipulation and just general crap. I won't say I didn't contribute to it at one time, but now I'm over it. I'm tired of being a child and working with children. People who just think the worst of everyone and are always looking for a reason to blah-blah behind one another's back. I stopped dead in my ramble to the apprentice, slammed my phone's cover shut and stared off into space. A bit too dramatic, but that's me. Later, I sent a message to Gael saying to call me, spoke to him about the job, and tentative plans to travel to Lyon in January to meet the chef and see the restaurant, and visit Gael and his girlfriend (who's a good friend) and probably drink a lot. Lyon isn't far, but since we're close on Christmas and New Years we're in a busy busy period. I have four days off over Christmas, as previously mentioned, but Greg and I have plans and scrambling to buy train tickets to go to Lyon wasn't part of them. So I said I'd come up as soon as I got hotel closes in January. There are plus points and negative points to this job offer. I haven't quite decided what to do and it all depends on the feel of the place when I get there. Above the vibe I get from my colleagues because I'm not working with people I don't like again. It would be nice to work with someone intelligent and serious like Gaël again, plus he wouldn't actually be there most of the time. I'd just be reporting to him every week or so. I'd have some of my own autonomy. At the same time I'm not thrilled with the number of clients per service; 180. I hated it at Rabanel, I can't imagine I'm going to enjoy it there. Anyway, the question is : do I say anything to Laura-line, my current chef? I have decided nothing about this job offer. Absolutely nothing. However, if I accept the job, I'll be doing it in January when the restaurant is closed and not coming back in March when it reopens. Which means I'll basically be sending her a random message during vacation saying something along the lines of " 'Sup? I got another job and I'm not coming back. You're on your own this summer. Ciao." That's pretty ruthless. But I don't want her to think I'm on my way out. (Well I am, but I said September 2018, not next month) I wouldn't have started looking for another post, and I'm not looking for another post, on my own. Plus, she is a friend and a colleague. I know I'd feel really bad if one of my team didn't let me know what was going on and blindsided me during a vacation. She might blow a gasket. She's temperamental like that. But if she starts talking and word gets around the hotel it could be damaging. On top of that I don't want her to think that if I don't leave, I'm no longer motivated and am going to stop doing my job. My thoughts aren't in order. I have no voice. My throat is killing me. Running probably isn't the best thing, but I need to in order to wake up. |
I've stumbled on a haiku idea. I was playing around with an idea this morning (often times in my head I hear "thissmorning" like it's all one word and end up typing this "smorning") and couldn't get the images to coalesce in either a traditional or non-traditional format. Traditional being 5-7-5, non-traditional being more modern, one or two short lines. So I decided to insert one "image" as it were in between the other. And then spaced (formatted is a better word maybe?) the haiku so that the second line starts where the first line ended. I'm not sure if the result is effective or not, or even what purpose it serves yet other than to fit my failings in haiku writing. I wrote two haiku like that, readable here: "Invalid Item"  and I would like to experiment further to see if it actually has any promise. Or if it's just weird.I'm at home with my husband and the cats, but I go back tonight. Unfortunately, husband has to work this afternoon and I spent most of yesterday setting up my new computer. We did have a heated discussion about how long I should stay at my current job. I want to leave in September, but an interesting post nearby where we actually live has opened up. It's not really what I'm looking for, but it would at least allow the husband and I to live together for more than a weekend at a time. I have to think about it. Someone once gave me some advice about the restaurant industry. If you find a team you can work with, and you're learning and can continue to grow / tolerate them, then don't search elsewhere even if the situation isn't perfect. Because you'll never find perfect. I think this is very true, but at the same time, all that the hotel where I work now, wants to do in the future doesn't interest me. Villas and villages and a bakery, a tea-house, and a bunch of other random crap that distracts from the fact that we still haven't attained our original goal of a 2nd Michelin star. And probably won't because we are woefully understaffed and the management is toxic. Also, I'm not sure I'm really interested in luxury hotels and Michelin-starred restaurants anymore. I'd like to work for just a normal fine-dining restaurant in a city. Something with a small staff of like 8 total rather than 75. But, I'm still learning at the hotel, and working through stuff with my therapist. Even if the situation is toxic, I pointed out that it can help me learn how to not get involved with their drama. While I'm dealing with my own shit, it's better to be in an environment that I'm familiar with. The devil you know and all that... I don't want to go back to the hotel tonight. I just keep reminding myself that in less than 10 days I'll be off for X-mas (that's also another perk of this place. The owner is against us working on X-mas and feels we should be spending it with family. It's UNHEARD of in the hospitality business.) And just 8 days after that I'll be on vacation for two months while the hotel is closed for renovations. Two months actually living with my husband. Whatever will we do with each other? |
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I think it's awesome that you're using that negative experience to get creative. It's hard not to just wallow when those things happen. I use a paper journal for most of my actual coping process too, but I do share bits and pieces on WDC as well.
Might try a short story a day instead. Stay safe. 
