For the past two nights at the restaurant there has been this dessert special that I've had quite a romance with. It's a lemon sponge cake (although it's a little bit denser than sponge but the pastry chefs have called it sponge so so should we) with a lemon curt filling, vanilla ice cream, and cherries that have been dehydrated and re-hydrated in a little bit of cherry liquor. As they often do, the pastry chefs try to create some incentive for the servers to sell as many as possible, usually offering a bottle of wine to the person who has the most sales. Sooooo that would be me. I like to think it's because of how I swoon and get all hot and bothered when I describe dessert to my tables and they feel compelled to order it just to calm me the hell down. Anyhow, I'm apparently the first server in the history of Upstairs on the Square to have turned down the bottle of wine, and requested a batch of cookies. And the pastry department complied! So last night there was a little box of still warm cookies, peanut butter, chocolate chip lumps, sesame cookies, snickerdoodles, an lemon thingys waiting for me. I was so happy I even shared with everyone else. Now that's progress.
There's a server named Maggie there whom I like very much- she's going to get her Masters in Linguistics at Emerson starting in the fall, she's very easy going but I get the sense she's pretty morally strict. She's the kind of person who doesn't stress if her food is late or if something goes wrong during service, which I really like about her, but she's pretty quick to say "that's not nice" when someone says something, well, not nice. That kind of bugs me, but overall I think she's pretty great. Anyway, I mention her because for the past two nights she's been preparing for a fast she says she usually does in the spring, beginning with raw foods only and then dwindling down to herb teas with some sort of vitamin infusion. Watching her last night made me crazy in six hundred ways. First of all there I was with my box of cookies happily munching (and sharing, I want points for sharing), and she was eating raw snow peas. We were siting having the equivalent of family meal, though there wasn't really was one because the soiree room chefs don't cook on monday nights so we were all just eating anything we had. In Ketrin's case, a burrito she'd brought, in Maggies snow peas, in my case, cookies. I'd forgotten there was non family meal. Anyway, I was having a really hard time watching her eat these snow peas, and hearing her go on about the fast she was about to begin. Granted the reason she was going on about it was because I was asking her, I tend to get really fascinated by people who can do such things and not have it be a personal disaster, so I wanted to know doesn't she get starving, weak, doesn't she start to crave things she wouldn't ordinarily crave? No, apparently she does alright with it, and it doesn't mess with her head, and she doesn't do it for weight-loss purposes (then why the fuck else would anybody fast??) and she doesn't pinch and pull at her body in the process. The couple of times I've fasted I've discovered that it makes me want to eat anything and everything - other people's leftovers, the yogurt off a discarded lid, a lonely skittle on a bathroom floor- it's all I can think about if the rule is 'no nothing'. I admit, food is often all I can think about, but it's rarely in this panicked way anymore. I found myself getting anxious while talking to her about this; part of it was jealousy, I'm sure, at her self control and cool-headedness around something that is apparently not a huge deal to other people. I also found myself offering her a cookie at every break in conversation. The first two times were accidental - I'd offered them to other people, they usually partook, and I handed them her way as well, but after the first couple of times I began to consciously offer them to her, knowing she'd say no...I think I was teasing. But it didn't seem to bother her at all, and that made me crazy! I went into this maddening, quiet little spiral of angst and self-derision, ruminating on of the strength of her willpower and my hopeless gluttony and lack of self-control, I began to get stuck on this image of her insides like the inside of a straw- white and clean and clear all the way through, imagining mine like some cavernous pipe filled with anything and everything (chocolate pudding cake, fuji and peanut butter lavash, mulch from kate's garden, an old mattress). I was really feeling bad about myself and had to go outside for a little while to put myself back on even keel. This is one of those times when I find it difficult to say 'hey, I guess I'm not like other people when it comes to food, I guess I still have this thing, in whatever shape it's in now'. When I was in LA, I ordered this MASSIVE piece of carrot cake when I was at Coral Tree with Clint, and was delighted to find that I only actually wanted about half of it (though in this case, half of this particular slice amounted to probably a piece and a half of your average slice, but still). It's easy for me to get so excited over progress like that, that I then decide 'hey, I can eat anything, anytime, I can play with my food and its timing and its portions and and and.....' ummmm no. It's not as simple as I just got lucky with the cake, I really do think that's progress, but I don't think it's indicative of being all better. I hadn't wanted to be all better in a while, but hearing her talk about the fast, man that made me wish I could eat like normal people. Or fast like normal people. Or have food just be food just be food.
Went to office hours for Symmetry, gonna have some breakfast, jump in the shower, go prepare the audition piece for Anthony's private group, hit a noon meeting, hang out with Jess, and then go work the dinner shift. And in the meantime, I hafta pee.
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