Day 75: I Thought The Universe Would Rather Me Be Wrong

Listening: Sunny days, everybody loves them. Tell me, baby, can you stand the rain? Storms will come. This we know for sure.

What's my problem? I can't find my five dollar NYC umbrella.

It's been a couple of weeks, but I've intended to write in the interim. As you know, I tend to write on my days off, and this past day off, Sam came down to the island to drop off some stuff and to take a bit of vacation from her hectic life in Boston and also to visit some family down on the Cape.

Originally, my day off last week was supposed to be filled with thunderstorms. This kind of weather prediction is nothing new to me. My long-standing hypothesis is that it's always crappy on my days off, much like today, but I'll get back to that later. I always walk around on Wednesdays saying what the weather reports say. "It's going to be crappy tomorrow. It's my day off, of course it'll be." And, a handful of times, it has just so happened that the weather wasn't as crappy as it was supposed to be. For instance one day, it was cloudy until around two and then cleared up and beautiful. Another day, the rain held out until I got back to the house after running errands. So I had this theory. The universe would rather me be wrong than have me have a day off with nice weather. I had this theory in my head for weeks before I actually told anyone about it. But, this past week, I told a few people about it, including Sam, Chef and the kitchen guys (I guess that constitutes around 90% of the people I know on the island). I knew that I shouldn't have, because, today, the weather blows.

I guess it's alright that the weather blows. I didn't wake up until around one in the afternoon, because I was too busy watching the movie "Martian Child" on HBO until four in the morning and was almost lured into watching "Knocked Up" after that. I tooled around on the computer for a while, had some lunch and got sucked into watching "Back to the Future Part III." So my day has been pretty lazy. By the time I left the house it was past five o'clock and, well, it's not like I have anything to do. I still have seven pairs of socks, which means six more days before I have to do laundry. My kitchen is still packed with snacks, which include my favorite spicy ramen thanks to Sam and Linh. My goal today is to get some writing done, as I am doing now, and finish the book that I'm reading, written by one of my favorite college professors.

The coffee house today is more crowded than usual. I guess I can blame the precipitation for that. Unfortunately, there's no one interesting in the crowd to look at. There is one girl in the corner with flaming red hair, freckles abound and a white Mac. But the only interesting is the mass of natural red hair atop her head. I don't think I've ever seen someone with that much red hair. She's writing in a notebook. I wonder if what she's writing is more interesting than what I write.

Back to last "weekend." I have to say it was probably my best day off in recent memory unless you count the three months off in another continent. Sam got in the night before with her bike, a pillow, two crates of ramen, my ramen bowl and spoon, and my package from Vietnam.

After getting all of her gear into the house, I immediately opened my package. The package itself was much smaller than I thought that it would be. I knew everything that would be in there, but after seeing the box, I thought that, for sure, they had left something out and that I would never see it again. After cutting through the tape and cardboard I saw that it was all there. Five chef coats, two shirts, two pairs of pants, two books and a picture. It was like Christmas. I immediately tried everything on again. The chef coats were a bit tighter than I remember them, but they still fit quite nicely. I guess the snug fit could be due to the fact that I lost a lot of... water weight? while I was in Asia. Linh always told me that when she saw the pictures of me in Asia, she thought that I had lost a lot of weight. The truth of the matter was that I weighed pretty much the same as I did when I left, I just converted a lot of my water weight into muscle, I think.

The next day, Sam hung out with me as I ran errands before we headed to the farm and then to the beach. Sam has a thing about the beach. When she's at the beach, she's At. The. Beach. Apparently, she knows a lot of people who get to the beach and are unprepared to stay more than an hour. Luckily, she and I are very similar in our beach styles. I come with a towel, my crazy creek chair, some food, a couple of drinks, my iPod and a few books. I can stay at the beach for hours on end, mostly because my first though when it comes to being at the beach is to nap. Within fifteen minutes of hitting the sand, I'm out like a light with my wrist covering my eyes and my iPod playing softly over the surf. Needless to say, we hung out at the beach for a few hours. I napped as she read, and we ate snacks of a baguette, some smoked salmon and capers, and a garlic ricotta cheese spread.

By the time we left the beach, it was much cooler and the sun was getting ready to set. We might have left earlier, but I wanted to finish reading the chapter that I was in the middle of.

One of the less charming things about the beach is that when I leave, I always feel a little sticky and my glasses are always smudged from the sea spray. So, before we went out for the night, we had to go back to the house for a shower. We actually almost didn't leave the apartment, because while she was showering, I started watching a movie called "Eight Days A Week," which is one of those cheesy teen comedies. Somehow it drew me in, and then when Sam finished cleaning up, it drew her in too. We almost decided to stay in and see just how the protagonist would end up getting the girl and if the kid who was fucking a watermelon would be hauled off to the looney bin.

But, we ended up wandering around town looking for some food. We must have looked at seven different menus. We were going to sit at the bar at the Pearl, but when we walked in, there was no way that we were gonna even edgeways into that bar. So, we went to go see my friend Taylor at Oran Mor.

I had eaten at Oran Mor once last season. It was pretty good, but I felt like that it wasn't worth the money. This time, as Sam and I sat at Taylor's bar, I definitely felt like the food was even better and I felt like I paid a good price for what we got, especially for this island.

We started with oysters on the half shell and a grilled octopus small plate and followed it up with the scallop small plate and the pork belly small plate. Next, the kitchen sent us their foie gras appetizer as a split plate, which was a nice gesture. It seems like a lot of their staff show up at our bar to eat, and we always send them a li'l sump-in sump-in. For an entree, we split the monkfish, and we had their dessert special buttermilk panna cotta for dessert. It was the perfect amount of food and a perfect amount of wine (three glasses for each of us).

All of the food was incredibly well done and was exactly what I was looking for. I had a craving for oysters on the half shell, and the preparation with the brunoise cucumber and celery and the mignonette was fresh and delicious. I only wish that the oysters themselves had been more briney.

We stayed at Oran Mor until Don Cheech, the grill cook at my restaurant, showed up. Apparently it had been a fuck show that night. I'm glad that I wasn't a part of it.

By the time we got home, we were both pretty zonked from the wine and the sun, so we watched a couple of episodes for "How I Met Your Mother" before crashing out for the night.

Sam stuck around for another day even though I had to work. I think she was in serious need of some downtime. People like us who are essentially nomads, sometimes it so hard to keep our shit organized that it becomes a full time job when we're not on the move. Where is our shit? Is it safe? Where are my friends? How are my finances? What do I have money for? Where is my next paycheck coming from? When is that paycheck coming? What do I do if I don't have another paycheck in the near future? Keeping all of those balls in the air can be pretty stressful. I'm not saying that normal people don't have the same concerns. But, when you're living with as small of a footprint as people like Sam and I are living with, things can change at the drop of a dime.

As far as work goes, I have had two successful grill shifts. I know that it's still my weak spot, but I did well the past two shifts on the grill. The only food that I had come back to me were, as chef said, "cooked perfectly" and was "exactly what they asked for." I mean, really, when someone asks for a steak "one minute past medium," you know you're dealing with an asshole who is going to send back any steak set in front of him. He should have said medium well.

Lately, we have had a number of people who don't know what they're talking about when they order their temperatures. People who ask for medium steaks want it medium well. People who ask for medium rare salmon really want it well done. People have just been the biggest assholes lately. It's almost like they're coming in during this bad economy to push people around so they have someone to push around. They're being douchey in order to make themselves feel better about their own douche baggy, crappy, popped collar lives. Maybe if we know that the guest is gonna be a bag-o-douche, I'll just serve their food raw so that when it does get to them the next time they'll be thankful it's been cooked.

Just last night, one party wrote a mean note on the check after they had paid saying that since they didn't get the table that they wanted three times, that it was a third strike and we were out. I mean, really? How spoiled are these people?

Also on the work front, I have been talking to Chef about what I should do after I leave the restaurant at the end of the season. I mentioned to him that I want to make money to take a year off, but that I also want to work somewhere really good. I would totally work at Hungry Mother in Cambridge. Apparently, a lot of their staff have eaten at the restaurant that I work at and really like the food there. Also, a friend of mine knows the chef there. Another place that I mentioned to Chef was La Laiterie in Providence. Chef is pretty good friends with the chef there as well, and they plan on doing a dinner here on the island sometime in October. I just don't know how I would work living in Cambridge and working in Providence. Would I take the train back and forth every day? Would I try to sublet somewhere cheap and keep the bare minimum there while going back to Cambridge every "weekend?"

La Laiterie would be a killer opportunity. I have eaten there and I really dig the farm to table food that they're doing. I love the fact that the chef there uses all of the bits and bobs that most people discard. I mean, how great is it that he has chicken cracklin' on his menu. I mean fuhgeddabout it! So, I don't really know what I should do. I figure I have a few months to figure it all out.

Also, I think Chef wants me around to do the dinner with this other chef, and he wants to set me up with a job with this other chef, so I know that I might not be out of here until the end of October instead of the middle.

Well, that's my life for the most part right now. Hopefully, as the nights get busier and the number of reservations skyrocket in August, I'll continue to rock as I do. I'm hoping for a third consecutive good grill shift this coming Tuesday, but other than that, not much more on the horizon.