a : frustrated : artist

Where've I Been This Time?

Selected to serve on a jury, in fact.

We're in deliberation and will probably reach a verdict early tomorrow. Once we do, boy do I have a lot to write about the experience.

Stay tuned.

I LOVE MY NEW JOB!

I love being on the move constantly. I love getting complicated concoctions for people. I love diffussing some jerk's attitude with a smile and a wink. I love giving recommendations for drinks and food. At this point, I even love bussing nasty tables. I love anything that's not a stuffy office where people are dishonest to you. In a restaurant setting, the vast majority are going to be totally upfront with what they want. Godz, how I do value that at this point in my life!

Slingin' Hash Late at Night

Last night I worked my first server training shift. I was a little disappointed in myself that I got brain-freeze syndrome as soon as my trainer got triple-sat early in the evening. He was a very experienced and calm fellow and it didn't faze him, but I freaked. By the end of the evening I was feeling more comfortable, although I hadn't taken the step of actually taking anyone's order. I mainly greeted and "flagged," answered a few questions, got extras for people, ran a few plates, and bussed my ass off. I've spent a large portion of today trying my best to familiarize myself with some of the very basics of the menu - some of the stuff I saw Tyler (last night's trainer) get asked multiple times, like what kind of breads the sandwiches can come on and what our salad dressings are. I'm actually much less scared of selling wine and liquor, because if there's anything I know, it's alcohol.

Fat Americans (like me, once ...)

That's a stereotype that's been around forever. But now it's really coming into its own as something more than a stereotype. This Healthday article states, "By 2020, roughly one in five health-care dollars spent on people aged 50 to 69 years old could be for obesity-related medical problems." As someone who spent too many years obese, I know first-hand all the medical problems it will cause. I had everything from sleep apnea to edema to chest pains, at the tender age of 33. And not to mention the fact that the simple act of walking to my office from my car had me so winded and exhausted I could barely focus on work; forget starting a regular exercise regimen.

I really have compassion for obese and morbidly obese people because I was once one of them. I know that not all of them are the way they are because they are lazy, which is the obvious prejudice. I really do believe most of them could and should be able to maintain healthy weights on a reasonably balanced diet. The problem is, in America it's very, very difficult to follow a reasonably balanced diet and live the kind of busy working lifestyle most people have to live to get by. Restaurants mainly serve huge portions of fatty and sugary foods, and portion control in general is out the window. And the problem becomes insolvable in obese people who have been that way for many years, because the stomach tends to lose its elasticity as a person ages. Even if many obese people try as hard as they can to change their eating habits, it's impossible for many of them because of the size of their stomachs. A healthy life for these poor souls means being constantly hungry, and that's really not something many human beings can live with for long. Reader, if you've never been obese, next time you find yourself judging an obese person, try to ask yourself if you could live with being hungry 24/7.

I solved my problem by having gastric bypass surgery, which is of course not for everyone. It worked pretty spectacularly for me. Not only did it make my stomach smaller, it forced me to change my whole way of eating by making my body extremely sensitive to sugary, fatty, carby foods. Actually, I can eat carbs fine, but they fill me up so fast I find it preferable to eat my proteins first.

I don't want to go on about my eating habits. But I did want to comment on how I've changed and turned my life around since September 2001 (when I had the surgery, and hence is a landmark for me in more than the obvious way.) I worked my first training shift last night at my job. As I mentioned a few days ago, the restaurant where I'm working is famous for its decadent desserts - mainly torts, pies and cheesecakes - as well as their elaborate coffees. In order to learn the 60+ desserts this place carries on the menu, my first two training shifts involve standing in front of the pastry cases, explaining what the items are and what's in them to customers, and giving them tickets so that their servers will know what to bring them. It's a tribute to my success story that I was not tempted even in the slightest to sample any of the pastries. In fact, contemplating eating most of them made me slightly queasy. For the vast majority of my life before September 2001, I would have been carting off boxes of samples at the end of the night and scarfing them down at home. Now, not only do I know they will make me ill, my tastes have changed so that I don't even really like heavy, sugary stuff any more.

(Oh, and I'm so tickled to be working at this place, an Atlanta icon that has been around since the late 70's, and I want to say the name, but I know how utterly stupid it is to reveal where you work on the Inter-Web. If you know me reasonably well and you're familiar with Atlanta - and you care - feel free to write me privately and ask me.)

Some closure.

It looks like all the travel was for naught but fun. I won't be getting a job out of state, and we'll be staying in Atlanta.

I have the chance to get a good-paying long-term temporary job doing graphic design. But why bother? I just don't want to do graphic design anymore, unless the job circumstances are something that would advance my career or life a great deal - like an offer as an art director or something. Where my heart is is fine art, and that is what I will be focusing on once we get settled. I have taken a job with part-time hours as a server with a local dessert/coffee/wine bar that has been around since the late 1970's and has a huge, devoted local following. The potential for tips is supposedly very high in this place and I feel fortunate that the GM is going to give me a chance even though I've never worked as a server before. The hours will be mostly night, and I will have the daylight to paint, do housework and all that. It will reduce our circumstances from when I was working my last job, but it will up them from the last three months. The fact that I am getting interest in my art via the Yessy site is extremely encouraging to make this move, too.

We found a killer, huge apartment in the Virginia Highlands/Morningside area which will reduce our monthly rent by nearly $400. We consider ourselves quite lucky in this because "Va-Hi" is normally very, VERY expensive even for rentals. The neighborhood isn't snotty, though - it's just affluently artsy. The apartment has a huge lving room with a wall of north-facing floor-to-ceiling windows and French doors looking out into a large backyard with lots of trees around the perimeter. I am going to put out a lot of flowers and plants on the patio and set up my work space just inside to take advantage of the north light and nice view. It's a circumstance that is vastly superior to the ghetto-concrete atmosphere of our current loft apartment (I love the apartment itself, but I don't love the neighborhood surroundings so much.)

Sorry to bore everyone with all my personal-life rambling; but now that I'm no longer actively looking for work, I can probably start being provocative again. ;) That might not happen until we're totally settled in the new place, though.

We're ba-a-a-a-a-a-a-ack ...

OK, now I can write a proper blog posting! As I said before, I really am grateful for mobile blogging technology. Even though you're limited as to how many characters you can post at once, and typing on a cell phone keypad is unbelievably tedious, it's still a decent way to keep in touch and to pass the time while riding for hours in a car. Geez, today I was dying to get home to see to my kitties. We stopped for a good square meal in the northern metro Atlanta area and then went and rented a DVD; if we hadn't done these things we would have gotten home around 6:30 CT.

Since we had planned to visit Alex's grandparents on the way back, we took our time on the first day of the drive home (Thursday.) Driving through northeastern Wyoming (gorgeous, wild, weird country BTW) we decided to detour off the interstate to see Devil's Tower, a site that has a held a deep fascination for me even before the 1977 release of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." It was really great; being the offseason, there were literally no other tourists in the park while we visited. We were in a hurry but we still drove up to the visitor's center and did the short walk to the summit. I have plenty of pictures which I will post very soon.

Other things happened on the trip that I will no doubt recall as context allows. Foremost in my mind is seeing magnificent wildlife that I never have encountered before. I saw a beautiful lone grey wolf on ranchland just off Badlands National Park in South Dakota; antelope (not a big deal for Westerners, but definitely a big deal for Southerners); various kinds of birds of prey that I could not identify by sight (and since I am used to seeing and being thrilled only by Southeastern red-tailed hawks, that was a big deal); and finally, three bald eagles. We also saw white-tailed deer and some mule deer, different from the deer here in Georgia.

If I were able to spend more time there I would be able to look more closely at the flora and fauna. I am no arborist but I have a decent vocabulary about the local trees. I'd love to be able to compare the trees in Montana with the trees here. One thing I did notice is that Montana has the kind of pine tree that we down here refer to as "scrub" although I'm positive it isn't the exact same kind of tree. First cousins, perhaps.

Visiting Alex's grandparents was another highlight. I only met them once before, very briefly, at our wedding, which isn't a good time to get to know anyone. They were very quiet there, but the afternoon spent in their beautiful north Iowa town got them talking and laughing. More visits are definitely required because they - Mrs. Kunz especially - seem to be treasure troves of history and stories about the family, which is precisely the sort of thing I die for. Next time we visit, it will be for several days and I will bring an audio recorder of some sort. One tiny story Mrs. Kunz spilt is that her great-grandfather - Alex's great-great-great grandfather, I suppose - marched in Sherman's army all the way to the coast. When he got back he stuck his rifle in the ground, and it became part of the fence of the family farm. Of course I had to joke about her great-grandfather burning down my great-great grandparents' homes and towns. Amusing now, but all too real in actuality. It was interesting talking about the Civil War with them. They are my parents' age, and my own grandparents were of the age to be their parents. I want to talk more with them. They are wonderful people.

Miscellaneous ...

Calixto sent a link to this funny, short survey: Yankee or Dixie? This presents us with a well-selected group of regional sayings, and asks us to pick the ones we're most accustomed to using. My result: "87% (Dixie). Did you have any Confederate ancestors?" As it happens, yes - more than a few, actually.

That's a good intro to my next topic: moving. As I indicated on Wednesday, we may move from Atlanta to some point north. Yesterday I had a job interview in Washington, DC, a town that I know pretty well and like. The job looks like a good one; it'd be a 'promotion' for me in terms of actual position and in the size of the company; and Alex is excited about the kinds of opportunities available in DC that may enable him to break free of being a technological grease monkey. The only drawback is that we had hoped to move somewhere where the cost of living is significantly lower than in Atlanta; however, the advantages of life in the nation's capitol would definitely make up for that drawback.

I think the interview went reasonably well as far as my questions and answers are concerned, but I won't know for sure unless they call me back for the final round. I had a raging cold accompanied by a sore throat which made talking painful, and just before the interview I "dumped," a term used by us gastric bypass vets for the condition that ensues when we eat something too sugary or fatty for our systems to endure. I had to attempt to hide the fact that I was physically terribly uncomfortable during the interview. All I can do is hope that they didn't notice, or if they did, that they understood that I was ill.

I flew up there and back all in one day to do this, and it about killed me. Today I'm exhausted, and my feet have blisters. My hands are trembling from lugging my briefcase and portfolio around all day. If I ever do something like that again, I'll do it differently, that's for sure!

I have another interview for a very different kind of position on Monday in Belgrade, Montana, which is just to the west of Bozeman. Alex and I are going to drive out there, starting very early in the morning tomorrow. It's going to be grueling, but I'm looking forward to driving out west. I've never done it before.

I'll try to blog while we're out there, but as always I can't promise anything. It looks good though. Alex has been experimenting with wi-fi, and we're finding that public wireless networks seem to be springing up all over the place. We're going to be staying in a little motel in Bozeman that has its own wireless network set up, so with any luck at all we'll be able to hop on and I'll do some reporting. And I'm going to try this moblogging thing that TypePad offers, as well. Typing messages on my cell phone isn't fun but I want to at least see how it all works!

I'm Back - Again

My main webhost did a massive restructuring of their system, and once again I got locked out of my blog. I'm really tired of dealing with that - so I'm moving to Typepad where hopefully things will stay stable. Their interface is pretty groovy anyway. All the old posts can be accessed now and forever at this url.

I'm still jobless, and for a while there Alex and I were stressin' hard about what the future was going to be like. We've now got it figured out. I'm tired of being a rank-and-file graphic artist, so any position I take within the creative industry is going to be with an excellent company where I can do something I love and has REAL potential for growth. In fact, I have two interviews coming up in the next week for just those sorts of jobs. If I am not offered either position, I will settle back, get a part-time retail job or something to help cover the rent, focus most strongly on developing as a fine artist, and keep a constant eye out for those rare oppotunities. We will move from Atlanta if it is necessary and in fact, I personally would love to move away from Atlanta.

That's enough about that.

My old logs show that a good many people still check this blog, so hopefully I can win back some readers. I enjoy blogging very much; although in the middle of a job search I don't particularly want to go off on any fiery political rants! So don't expect anything more than diary-type entries for a bit, or at most, talk about more general, less controversial stuff. As the election year moves along I certainly will be writing about that - especially as I am finding the whole thing to be exceptionally entertaining!

It's going to take a while to get my template like I want it, and to get my blogroll back up to scratch. So bear with me.