Day 19: Homeless

Listening: It took six whole hours and five long days for all your lies to come undone.

What's my problem? I dread the next five months.

Over the past three weeks since I have re-entered into American society, I have felt the "ZEN!!!" feeling that I got from Asia fade away from me like the tan that is quickly fading from my skin. And like my tan, my "ZEN!!!" was a thick dark coat over the cynic that made deals at the end of last season to ensure that he would have employment, and the worry wort that didn't have enough confidence in his skills to say and believe that he could just drop into Boston and have a job.

I hate being a man of my word sometimes. It means that I feel like I have to do what I say even if my ideals and goals have changed. I have to put what I want on the back burner to appease my honor. I have to swallow it and digest it like the bite of durian that everyone else at the table seems to like, but I no longer want to even have in my mouth.

I wrote that passage about twenty one days ago, two days before I left the mainland of American and marooned myself on this island for the second summer in a row. I would have posted it then, but Sam said that it made me sound like kind of a little bitch that thought that the chef owed me for doing him a favor. Well, it is kind of how it sounded, but I kind of liked the prose.

Before I got here, I thought I would be getting a pay raise regardless of whether I lived above the restaurant or not. When I got here, I found out that I would be getting a pay cut and that I would be working an extra day every two weeks. When I brought it to the attention of Chef, now I'm making exactly what I made last summer, but I'm still working one extra day every two weeks.

Also, in the kitchen, though things have changed, a lot has stayed the same. Two line cooks didn't return to the kitchen, and two new ones have taken their place. And by taken their place, I mean to say that their roles both on the line and in the social order of the kitchen have been filled. We have the older guy who has a lot of experience, who thinks he's too good to scrub and sweep, and when he does so, he does it half-assed, but after years of being in the industry is not simply a line cook, but he's JUST a line cook. And the other is the young talent highly regarded by chef and everyone else in the kitchen, who seems to talk down to me like I'm an infant sometimes. Yeah. I'm back to the bottom of the hot line pecking order.

A little bit about that. I understand being at the bottom of the hot line pecking order. I know I don't have a ton of experience, and I know that I don't know how to do absolutely everything. However, this is my second season in this kitchen and somehow I thought I would have earned a little bit more respect. I guess that I have not.

This makes me think of what I had left in Boston. Before I left, I had at least two people who wanted to hire me without me even saying that I wanted a job. I almost blew off Nantucket just so Paul wouldn't feel bad about poaching me to work at his new joint on the Vineyard. People in Boston want me to work with them. Sometimes in Nantucket, I feel as if people work with me just because Chef hired me, not because they necessarily think that I have something to offer. I feel like I left a whole lot of respect behind in Boston, along with my feeling of home.

Speaking of the word "home," I feel like I am without one. I have been without one for a year. A year ago, I came to this island and dislodged myself from the place that I had lived for the past eight years. I had come to this island to dislodge myself though. My plan was to get myself traveling, to become a bit of a journeyman, to cook and live in other places. One year later, I'm back where my journey started, so I really haven't gone all that far.

During my three months abroad, I never once felt homesick. I wished that my friends could be there with me in Asia, but I never once wished that I had been back in Boston with my friends. I have been here for nineteen days and there isn't a day that goes by that at least for a few seconds I wish I were back in Boston sitting at my coffee table with Linh and Sam, drinking wine, watching "How I Met Your Mother." I want to be relaxed, and here I'm just not that.

As it is right now, it's just me and one other guy living above the restaurant. Over the next two months, two more cooks will move upstairs with us. I'll have to share a room with one of them. It doesn't give me much room to keep to myself. The common room isn't nearly as inviting as it was last year when it was Brit and me at the end of the season and Jo-Jo during part of the season.

I find myself being the clean freak again. Everyone knows that I can explode in my own personal space, but when it comes to common areas, I feel like it needs to be clean all of the time. I think that shoes should come off at the door to reduce the amount of crap that is trekked through the house. I can only imagine how much more of a shit hole the apartment will become once two more guys move in. I think that the whole cleanliness thing is why I like living with women more than men. That, and everyone is jockeying to be the alpha male. I can't stand that bullshit. That's what it really is. It's bullshit.

To make it all more interesting, I can't seem to sleep. I haven't gone to sleep before a quarter past three in the morning since I got here. I have tried. I have laid down to sleep and just couldn't trick myself into sleeping. So, now I don't even try. I stay up and watch TV shows that I missed while I was in Asia. This insomnia had better go away soon, because I'm running out of TV shows to watch. I go to sleep at four and wake up at noon, just in time to go to work. Well, at least I'm not going to the bars and spending money.

It's five months though. Five months. I can do five months. If I can be an accountant for five years, I can be a cook on an island that I don't feel at home on. It will be an exercise in humility. It will be a test of my patience. Maybe it will make me a better person. I have no idea. I'll try to keep up the positive, up-beat attitude that I put on the first day I made it back to the island. Hopefully, I won't drop that front. If I do, who knows what'll happen.

In five months, I'll be back on the mainland. In five months, I'll regain my sense of home and I'll try to pare down my belongings and try to figure out a new way of becoming a journeyman without having to feel like I'm not in an environment where I can thrive. I need to get back to thriving, and it's not going to happen here. I can hone. I can focus on refinement of some of my skills, but I don't think I can thrive. I don't think my happiness lives here on this island. It's a start, though, to realize something like this. Sometimes finding things out is a process of elimination. In five months, Nantucket will be eliminated from where my life will take place.