I remember not really being able to sleep on the night before culinary school began. After making the decision to go, securing a loan (no small feat), and getting accepted ("oh, your check cleared? Welcome the the FCI!!") there was a good couple of months before I actually started and my head was swimming with ideas on what my life may soon be like. I even remember thinking on March 15th 2009, "I wonder what my life will be like a year from today?"
At this time I was taking a food writing course, so my assumption was that I was going to be writing for some sort of food publication, most probably Gourmet Magazine(R.I.P.) or at the very least running a marginally profitable food blog while working part-time in a restaurant kitchen, more for shits and giggles rather than as an attempt to make a living. No matter what else I was sure the focus of my life would be gallivanting around the globe with a camera around my neck, searching for the next big thing in the food world and writing about it, hopefully for money.
I bet if my "now" self could go back to the "one year ago today" self and explain all the changes and then full circle decisions after multiple waverings and starting down other paths, he would shrug his shoulders and say "sounds like me" and then be really excited about getting a PS3 eventually.
Its funny how my life keeps blaring the same message over and over to me, and how every single time I can manage a way to misinterpret it and turn it into some dumb ass wild goose chase that takes me months, or even years to follow down the path to it's natural conclusion just to eventually end up exactly where I was when I started.
So here I sit, exactly one year later to the day of my "day before I start culinary school and my life changes forever" with, indeed my life changed forever, but my intentions exactly the same. Only again, having wasted an entire year chasing wild geese only to end up where it is I wanted to be all along, sitting in front of a computer writing about it.
Now I will say that this year has been amazing. Educationally and personally I've grown in ways that could only have imagined for and hoped for a year ago.
As far a cooking is concerned, I get that double edged sword of "learning a lot more than I knew/realizing that I have a long way to go before I really know anything" that you can only get by going through the things that I've been through, and continue to go through. Working in the kitchen has been as thrilling and as humbling as I would have guessed it would be, but only more so. I've never felt as slow and inept at anything in my life, while at the same time I've never felt more proud of the things I'm doing and more in a club of "only we know what it's really like" that you get with the other cooks and chefs in a kitchen.
It's great.
And it's horrible.
In other words: it's totally worth it.
Totally worth it if I can stick to my plan and turn it into a writing career that is.
And that's where I, unsurprisingly, am exactly one year later. I've been in the kitchen for a better part of a year now, and hope to always be in one, one way or another, but after making the decision dedicate a year of my life to learning things to make my blog better so I can turn it into a writing career, I somehow managed to never write in it (or write much about anything else for that matter). Now I find myself wanting to write more than I ever wanted to do anything in my life. But because of a series of well intended but misguided decisions I find I don't have the time or the energy to do it.
So with the one year anniversary of my going to culinary school at hand, I'm making you, and myself, a promise. I promise to do whatever it takes to make this a priority. Whatever steps need to be taken, whatever decisions need to be made, I promise to have made them within the very near future and either through a new venue or just polishing up this one, I promise that I'll live up to the expectations that I have for myself and forgo the string of self pitying "poor me I never get to write in my blog" posts that have been the hallmark of this past year, and turn it into the website that I use to launch my career as a professional writer.*
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go be publicly castrated for $10 an hour for the next 12 hours...
See you when the hurting stops,
n*
*I reserve the right to write a similar post in exactly one year, for however many years it takes me to fulfill said promises.
