After the Pride

What happens when it's 4 AM and you just had a most harrowing experience in the front...?

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I don't feel proud of myself.

The concept of pride had always seemed intangible to me. It wasn't something predefined, it wasn't a neat bundle of emotions one felt after completing or achieving something. To me, it had always been something that went along with a general sense of well-being. If I was doing well, keeping busy, doing the things I wanted to do, and treating people well, then I felt good. I felt proud of myself. I'd stand tall, look customers in the eye, shrug off their attempts to bully me and remain unflinching. I'd smile, do my job and perform admirably. I used wellness and stability as a shield. So long as that bulwark stood firm I could face anything.

But people aren't rocks. They are disappointingly human; fallible and subject to fluctuations. There have been plenty of lows and highs this year, and I've managed to pull myself out of the proverbial ditch a few times. But as culinary school looms on the horizon, it becomes necessary to look inward. The time has come to be judge, jury and potential executioner of myself. And when people give themselves an honest look-over, they aren't always happy with what they find.

I haven't cooked in almost a month. Haven't even stepped in to the kitchen. It's something I didn't want to admit as the days off began to accumulate. My friends were too polite or too busy with their own busyness to question, "Hey, you been on chat an awful lot... no lunch service today?" This is something I have a tendency to do. It happened all the time at school. I cut a few classes, fall behind and can't muster up the courage to face the professor... I'd go weeks missing class that way. And then I would reach desperation, grow some fucking balls, face the class and make a grind to pull it out in the end. It always ended up costing me more time; I'd have to pull more all-nighters and more extra credit. I'm woe to admit that I've emotionally manipulated a few professors in my time. I always took the gamble that a professor's empathy would overcome their rigidity on academic honor. I always took the gamble that they didn't want to fail a student on their attendance policy, that that was more of a scare tactic than anything else. I was always right.

So my Northwestern failures were happening all over again. One day I drove to the restaurant, parked my car and stared at the kitchen's back door. The workers bees were beginning to buzz; refreshing sauces, sweeping, stocking take-out containers. I could hear the clang of cast iron woks on carbon-scored burners, the rattle of a dishwasher hose through the screen door. Their grind had begun for the X-th day, with X being an almost unforgivably large number. Every year, every week, six days a week, twelve hours a day for practically nothing. I had both a great deal of respect and more than a little pity for our employees. They truly were salt of the earth, carved from stone kinds of people. I suppose something about the crucible of immigration really makes you a fighter. Something about having a family gives you motivation. And I wanted to call myself a fighter too. A bulldog, someone who if lacking talent at least never gave up.

But that day, I did not want to fight.

I didn't have it. Not anymore. I didn't and don't want to fight anymore. What's the point of working that hard? To raise a family that you barely know, maybe doesn't even really like you? What merit is there in that kind of life? Why show up here everyday, give it your all and have customers treat you like garbage for their $9.95? Why keep doing this when there seems to be a complete shortage of any helpful results?

Maybe that was a different kind of pride. Not the self-confidence one used to face the challenges of the world, but the eggshell one cast around their insecurities. When inevitably broken, claws lashed out to the defend one's yellow, runny insides.

I was and remain plenty yellow.

I can't do it anymore. I can't hear another customer call me on the phone with a take-out order and hum along as they decide what to eat for 15 minutes while three other lines blare with urgency. I can't have another customer get mad at me because their table isn't ready ten minutes before their reservation, talk shit about my mom's restaurant within earshot. I can't hear these terrible Long Island accents anymore. It's that pitch, that cadence, that diction, that snobbish drawl that haunted me in high school, that weakens my soul now. To me it has the effect of screwing in a light bulb; cheap metal parts connecting to one another. It makes my teeth grind and leaves this palpable chalkiness in my mouth.

Even though Superman is a broken superhero concept, the analogy of Kryptonite remains relevant. That fucking accent is my weakness. The way they say "sauce" as "suawse," that stupid Valley Girl meets Brooklyn-Italian equals Long Island pronunciation are like hollow point bullets to my soul. Is that melodramatic? I don't know. I had a buddy who worked at Home Depot and told me every piece of lumber he scanned made him want to commit seppuku with the plastic scan gun in front of every customer, spilling his bloody entrails over pressure-treated chestnut planks, which would remain untarnished by such a display I might add. I guess we just have to realize when we've given up.

It's just such an absurd lack of empathy that it doesn't make sense to me. It's trite at this point as every girly magazine-reading, Cosmo-praising, vapid hoe has read by now that the best way to figure out if your man is "ohmygosh, a keeper!" is how he treats the wait staff. It's always in the dating advice section lost among the 37 different ways to please your man (read: sucking dick), how to let him pay for dinner while remaining your own woman, and some treatise from a failed gender studies major about the changing dynamics of feminism in the modern world. Yes, just continue to lose count of how much dick you've taken, you're a sexy, independent woman, you're not bound by archaic ideas of sexuality, you're making a difference, believe in yourself.

But it is true. How you treat service industry people is very indicative of the kind of person you are. In my opinion, it should be mandatory that every teenager work retail, or stand behind the counter of a McDonald's, or host at a busy restaurant for a year. I promise you, after a year of that harrowing bullshit, having your emotional fortitude tested every night, you will never, ever be a dick to someone again. You will have fucking empathy for your fellow humans. At least the ones who suffered as you did. If you come through all of that still acting like an asshole, then perhaps you enact Darwinian justice on yourself and remove yourself from the gene pool.

It's immature and unrealistic of me to expect better from humanity than a lack of empathy and a total immersion in ignorance, with unwillingness to expand one's mind piled on top.

I won't get in to it anymore. I always rant angrily and I'm tired of it. Tired of hearing myself say it, not caring what you think has gone wrong with my wiring. Inside of me, deep within my cold, improperly cooked, runny yolk I knew this going in. A restaurant was about dealing with people, and people were at best volatile, and at worst venomous. I just didn't expect to handle it so poorly.

It just doesn't seem worth it anymore.

That pride returns; why do these people deserve my heart and soul? Why do they deserve the product of my sweat and tears? Because they're giving me ten bucks? A sum so insignificant to them, these undeservedly rich second-generation inherited wealth motherfuckers. Ten bucks hasn't meant anything to them their whole lives. But I have to care about every fucking dollar that comes in this place, and treat it as if it were our last? Is that what this all is for? Must I sacrifice my pride and beg, and compromise my integrity for ten dollars?

If the answer is yes, then I'm not sure what I'm going to do now.

My life has been a highlight reel of failures. What makes it worse, in my opinion, is that I always had the potential for success, but I squandered it. I was given a lot of gifts, given a lot of opportunity but didn't have the wherewithal or awareness to seize it.

People had a lot of faith in my ability to play cello. They told me I had a nice professional career ahead of me. I threw it away, I didn't want it, practicing was too hard and I didn't enjoy it. Now the fingers are soft and clumsy, unable to produce what they once did. It's gone and not just to rust.

People had zero faith in my ability to play sports. I have no athletic background, a sports resume more Kobayashi than Ichiro, and nearly a decade's worth of cold-smoked lungs. Though I had the motivation for a time, I never could prove them wrong. I never had the talent and now my ultimate history will be forever colored with mediocrity.

People had little faith in my academic prowess and they were right. I have a quarter-of-a-million dollar degree, but it'd be more useful as a contraceptive than a diploma, so flimsy is the substance that backs it.

People thought I was crazy to want to learn how to cook. I deemed it to be a natural human skill though, and something I couldn't possibly fuck up too bad. But after a year in a Chinese kitchen, all I've proven is that I can still only kind of cook Italian food. A pork fucking fried rice eludes me.

And here we are, finally at a crossroads of sorts. What was once, I believed, to be a harmonious juncture of what talents I had and my life's motivation wrapped in to one. What was once, I believed, to be the evolutionary niche carved out for me in modern society. What was once, I believed, to be something I really enjoyed and deemed worthy of a life's passion and work.

Well, you destroyed that. I thank you. Now I need to spend the next few month's putting it back together. If I can do so at all. But it was your thankless attitude, not just your ignorance of the restaurant industry but your lack of any desire to show empathy for it, your hollow, depressing lives that seek to drag mine down with it, and your nasty remarks that finally did me in.

I'm immature, I realize. I shouldn't let it hurt me, they're not trying to hurt you either. It's a false sense of entitlement that comes with their generation. There is still hope. It gets better. You're a rough-hewn product, Eric... misshapen rock at best. You're not sturdy yet, but you should plant your feet right now because the tide's coming in.

But I don't want to. I used to want to. I miss wanting to. But if for all my efforts this is my reward then I say "No thank you, not right now."