Day 150: Electonically Ressurected

Listening: I love the feeling of being slightly lost, to find new spaces, new routes, new areas.... I love the lack of logic. I love the feeling of being slightly lost.

What's my problem? Stability doesn't suit me.

I got an e-mail from a friend of mine the other day that said, "its like youre electronically dead over there. i just checked your blog, which i havent done for awhile and you havent updated for a long time." It's true. It's been a whopping fifty-four days since I composed, even tried to compose a blog. I could tell you that I have been really busy, or that my computer broke, but those would both be lies. I have been spending a lot of my time veging out in front of my computer watching TV shows from back episodes of Joss Whedon's "Dollhouse" to the newest in a long line of shows that I liked that are/will be canceled, "Defying Gravity."

The other truths in the matter are that I have been all over the place since my last entry. I was up in Boston for the hell of it, in Maine for a wedding, hanging out with friends who came to the island to visit me, and a host of other things. Also, for a while I was sharing a day off with one of the interns and we'd hang out. That would curtail my alone time to plink out one of these entries.

Probably one of the biggest reasons that recently popped up over why I haven't posted is because I haven't had a day off in about a week and a half. See, the grill cook walked out on the line halfway through prep. That's right. The grill cook took his ball and went home. Let me explain how all of this went down.

Overall, our kitchen is tight. We all get along. We all get the work done. We all put it all down when it comes to everything from the food, to the cleaning to the staff meals we put up every day. We all did, except for the grill cook. He's the forty-three year old line cook. He doesn't scrub much. He puts in the minimal effort for staff meal, and he calls everyone out on anything he can, but can't accept criticism himself. That's how it all went down.

I didn't hear all of the altercation, as I was on the other side of the pass, but my sous-chef ended up calling him out on the fact that he does a half-assed job and that he doesn't really help much with staff meal, that he is the last one to wrap his shit up, the first one to be finished scrubbing (even if the job isn't done), and the first one to pop beers. His response, which I heard clearly, was, "why are you busting my balls?" to which the sous-chef said, essentially, "It's my job to bust your balls." From there, the grill cook said, "If you're gonna bust my balls, then I'm gonna go home."

Now, Chef could have stopped and diffused the situation at any time. But when he heard the grill cook say, "If you're gonna bust my balls, then I'm gonna go home," he decided to let it play out. The sous-chef then said, "Well, fine then, go home." And he did. He walked straight off the line, leaving his beef cheeks searing in the rondeau, and three quarters of his prep list unfinished.

That day I was supposed to work hot apps, and luckily, my prep list was short. At three o'clock on a Saturday (I'll repeat that, a SATURDAY), I had to switch gears, figure out what was going on with the grill station, and finish the prep.

Usually on the days that I work other people's stations (seeing as I have no home station being a rounds cook), I talk to the cooks the night before to figure out what's happening on the station. How much of what they have, what needs to be prepped, what they want set up for them after they get back from a day off. I like to be cooperative with the guys who own the station. I'm just the guest on their station. It's much harder to walk into a station relatively blind. It's totally doable, but it sucks a whole lot more.

I still rocked it out that night, but in that, I became the new grill cook and for the past two weeks, no one has had a day off except for the interns. I'm the new grill cook, and instead of bouncing between hot apps for two nights, saute for three, and grill for one, I'm on grill for at least four nights a week, and saute for two. In the midst of this crisis/wonderful event, I have committed to staying through Christmas Stroll, and will be leaving with the rest of the hot line sometime around December fifteenth.

Now this is both a blessing and a curse all in one. I really wasn't ready to go job searching in two weeks. Of course, my resume is updated, and I could find work if I wanted to. Was I mentally prepared? Not so much. It means that I'll be getting a number of paychecks more before I leave the island, though, and a potential bonus for staying until the end, but you never know. This also means that I could travel for a while this winter.

By finishing the job in the middle of December, I'm pretty much saying that I don't want to work until the beginning of March. Looking for steady work in the months of December, January and February in the restaurant industry is tough. After the New Year's celebrations, everyone goes on diets and stops going out to eat in order to pay back the credit card debt they incurred over the holidays. February has a flash in the pan know as Valentine's Day (gag me), but that's about it. It's when spring fever hits that people start going out again.

So, I've been looking for things to do. Of course, travel is first and foremost on my mind. I always feel a compulsion to leave the country. With reading so much travel literature lately, including anthologies, travel memoirs, and periodicals, I'm slowly realizing that, as much as I love what I'm reading, there's not a lot of travel lit geared towards me.

What I'm looking for is what I can do right now. I want to know how I can make my way right now. A lot of these long form books are great, but they don't tell me how I can do it now and what it's like to travel right now. The magazines are all geared towards desperate housewives and cubicle jockeys that have wet dreams about a cabana on the sand where an impoverished local will rub you down with coconut oil as you sip a frozen libation. Don't get me wrong. In a lot of ways its the same as it is for food lit. Half of it is food porn or unattainable dishes for the home cooks. It tells you what's out there that you can't have at home (for the most part), but it doesn't teach you how to cook right now. By that I mean to say that it'll tell you how to follow a recipe, but it won't teach you how to cook.

The travel that I want to read about deals with the pitfalls and the trials of traveling off the cuff. I don't want to read about hotels that cost over a hundred US dollars a night. I want to hear about the ones that cost ten, but are still nice. I don't want to hear about all inclusive tours and resorts. I want to hear about how someone got lost going from the train station to the hostel/hotel and the people they met along the way. I want to hear about how exactly someone got from point A to point B and what they did in those locations.

One of my pals thinks I should publish a book. I dunno if I'm up for that yet. It seems like too much of a long, drawn-out process. I think I'd be much better writing for a periodical. What kills me is that there isn't really a venue for the types of stories that I would want to write. Conde Nast Traveler and Travel & Leisure cater to the jet set rich folk. They don't want to hear about sleeping on a bare bamboo floor in the middle of the jungle. They need their four hundred count linens. Outside and Backpacker magazines seems to cater more toward the people who want to just go hiking and camping, along with some other adventure sports. I thought about maybe Esquire, GQ, and Playboy, but they all seem to be a little bit high end to enjoy the type of travel that I would be writing about. The options that I came up with were Budget Travel and National Geographic Adventure, although I may be a bit less family friendly than they would like, and possibly a freelance piece for Maxim magazine.

A couple of my friends also said that I should be looking for places to publish online, as magazines are folding left and right (R.I.P. Gourmet). The problem with that is that there are so many lame ass bastards (myself included) writing bullshit and publishing it for their own self-importance. I suppose that I could try to write for a website like nerve.com, which would be fun, but what's most important is that if I write for someone, it's legit. I don't want to put out meaningless content. I want to bring my travel experiences to people who want to know what I've learned through travel, not get someone wet in the knickers over ANOTHER white sand beach, though I do have some stories that would make one wet in the knickers over white sand beaches.

So, my goal is to get my feelers out there by mid November. I want to see if anyone would be willing to subsidize my travel habit, or at least suggest a little methadone.

Anyhow, it's time to finally finish the posting. Hopefully, I'll have more time to post from now until the time I leave the island. Hopefully, my readership hasn't dropped off completely. But, for now, that's all I have.