People and food

It has been a while! I've been busy, but I don't feel like I've actually done anything. The best thing that has happened is that I finally got Trade for Yoga! It is an awesome program where I clean the yoga studio for 2 hours a week (Tuesday nights) and by doing that, I get unlimited free access to all of their yoga classes. I have been like 8 times already, and I can definitely tell a huge difference in my flexibility. When sitting down, I can now lean over and hook my fingers around my toes, which is definitely something I could never do before. I am wanting to go to a class everyday until I leave for AL so that I can learn as much yoga as possible and hopefully do it on my own in France.

So here are some pictures of things I've done, eaten, and cooked over the past couple of weeks.

This is Kelsey Wild. She is the girlfriend of Derek's old roommate Jason, and she is a really talented musician. We went to see her play at the Subterranean two weeks ago. She was awesome! I had never met her before, so it was nice to meet her and see her play. I want her to come play the opening of my coffee shop in January.

Maria's birthday was this Saturday, so some of the Second City girls went out with her for Mexican food and karaoke. Katie and I were thrilled to have a vegan option on the menu, but kind of appalled at the price, so we split this entree of butternut squash enchiladas and a bowl of fresh guacamole. It was great! There were two more enchiladas, but this is after we had eaten one each.

Maria and the lovely cake that Emily brought from Whole Foods. It was a very tasty cake!

Piercing Music has been rehearsing a lot lately, especially since Erika is learning the bass. We had a rehearsal at a recording studio a few nights ago. After practice, we found a wig and a flute thing.

Erika has been coming over after yoga to hang out, eat with us, and practice music. Moose spites me by choosing her lap over mine.

After about a 3 or 4 week break, I decided on Sunday to actually cook for the week again! It felt great to create food in the kitchen again. We've been eating too much overly-processed foods like soy hot dogs and tofurkey, so I was eager to put some better stuff on the table.

This is an original creation that I dreamed up during a quick nap after work yesterday. It is a shredded beet and carrot salad with dried orange cranberries, almonds, and poppy seeds. It has a citrus dressing made out of olive oil, apple cider vinegar, lemon juice, orange juice, and maple syrup. It is really good!

Vegan cornbread casserole.

This is a "meat"loaf that I hesitate to even use the "meat" part on because it isn't fake meat or anything. It is a loaf formed from quinoa, black beans, carrots, celery, flour, and spices. It tastes amazing. Here is is on a sandwich, although it is also good just by itself with some ketchup.

I work a lot, but I finally asked my manager for fewer hours. She said that I probably can't have fewer hours for the next 3, maybe 4 weeks, but after that, she could drop me to almost no hours for the last 3-4 weeks that I'm here. I can definitely save enough money during my next few active weeks to really be able to slack on the hours at the end. I would like to do ridiculous amounts of yoga at the end of my time in Chicago, the band will be performing a lot, and I am going to start taking artisan barista lessons from a guy I met at a wonderful coffee shop. Depending on how much he charges, I want to get Derek and Erika to have some training from him as well.

My mind is in a constant frenzy dreaming up ideas for my cafe. I have some good ones, I think. I never thought of myself as someone who would open my own shop at age 23, but I also am just now realizing that I cannot and probably should never attempt again to work for a corporation as huge as Starbucks. I really hate it now. My friends that work there are still awesome, and sometimes I love being there with them. But the customers are often rude, demanding, or impatient, and I really hate Starbucks for the amount of "OOOOH LOOK HOW ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY WE ARE LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL" crap that they shove down their customers' throats, only to NOT PROVIDE US WITH A RECYCLING BIN FOR THE 100+ PLASTIC MILK JUGS THAT WE THROW AWAY EVERYDAY. God. And let's be honest, the coffee tastes burned and is very low quality. I am also mad that they took away the tea selection from our partner markouts that we get every week, so now I have to take a pound of coffee beans every week instead of tea. I mean, I'm going to take the beans because they are free, but I would rather have the tea.

At my coffee shop, if a customer comes in and is perpetually rude to me for being in the service industry, I will tell that customer to find another shop and not to come back. At Starbucks, I have to wear a nameless smile and ask the customer to belittle me and make me feel beneath him/her. I know that most people grow up working in places like Starbucks, but I had the fantastic opportunity to work at Eclipse, which will be my model for my cafe. Eclipse wasn't too strict, let us wear our own clothes, had hand-made food, and took pride in each of its employee's ability to create individually (i.e. a salad I made may be composed differently than a salad anyone else made, and that was a-okay as long as the ingredients were all there) instead of freaking out over an extra half-pump of syrup, because all 16000 Starbucks employees have to make drinks EXACTLY alike or it may confuse a customer. I enjoyed working at Eclipse. I would've worked there for a long time if not for the geographical disadvantage. But the bucks has to go. I feel like a STUPID SHEEP. Before my early shifts, I usually wake up at 3:25 in a panic and I feel distraught for the 5 minutes before my alarm goes off. I spend 34 hours a week in a bad mood, brooding over "the man" and how I'm trapped under a conglomerate thumb, and that negativity has spilled over into my daily existence.

I know that other people find it just fine to work for corporations, but I am not someone who should do it. I think about it too much. I internalize the stripping of identity too much. I probably won't ever stop, so I am going to fix the problem by creating my ideal work environment and hand fashioning my own dreams.

So anyway, I'm doing tons of research and I am serious about opening my cafe for New Years on Dec. 31. I am projecting my ideas into the universe and visualizing them via a cut-out collage that I am making. We did that same thing for Derek's storyboard for the Heaven's Hill short animated film, and now Julia (Shannon) Tiller is hard at work animating the film in Canada. Marie and her mom believe firmly in visualizing your dreams to make them into reality, and I am getting on board with that.

Next weekend we are playing a benefit show for Derek's friend Nathan in Bloomington. The benefit is to send some girl to Africa, so that's pretty cool. Then the next weekend, we are playing the opening of my friend Joey's restaurant in Chicago. The weekend after that, I will either go to New York and Philadelphia with Tracer Bullet kind of like we did last year, or I will perform with Lady Parts for the last time. We were already talking about driving to New York again like we did last year, and I was cool with that as long as I got to go, but then Jeph said that we were performing that weekend, but I don't want to take the car option away from Derek like that, but I don't want my car going to NYC without me. So we'll be deciding all of that really soon. Until then, I may not have much to blog about. The Starbucks rant is out of my system for now, so we'll see what turns up later.

65 days until France.