Vagabond, Part Xa

I almost took down the last post because it didn’t tell the whole story. Allow me to expound. Recently, I was asked to write an essay for a scholarship that was entitled “Learning from Life’s Lessons”, it was to be an optimistic narrative of my determination to overcome a challenge and how my life perspective changed as a result of this challenge. What I wrote was very similar to the post that I almost took down: I went blind, it changed my view of life (fantastic pun, I know), I was able to overcome. Cue fanfare. Now I would like to tell you the whole story. The story they don’t want to hear for scholarship essays or the Dateline heartstrings piece. The human experience.

When I was 15 due to an underlying medical condition and an unfortunate event called an acute hydrops, I was lucky enough to lose my vision -- literally overnight. You might have been asking yourself after reading that sentence how that could happen. Not how the physiology works -- but how someone, with today’s advanced state of medicine can have no idea they would have even the possibility of loosing their vision. The answer relies in the inability of physicians to relay information, and the fact is: it’s a trust issue. Doctors don’t trust you not to “freak out”. So it makes sense that after telling a fifteen year old that he might die from doing pushups, you don’t follow that up with “but not only that, you might randomly go blind too”. Cue freak out.

What caused me to freak out was not being blind, but how people treated me. I want to distinguish here. I am not talking about individuals -- individuals understand and are capable of amazing, empathic response. Groups are horrible. This is the result of sampling error and groupthink getting into bed together and making an ugly child named discrimination. Unfortunately, the actions of this child are not limited to the perception of the blind -- it happens across all spectrums of the disabled or different.

A collection of people will assume that the population of whoever they are thinking of is representative of the sample and by the sample I mean TV. Just as the advent of television essentially wiped out the variation in regional dialect in Italy, it formed our conception of the disabled, normalizing the data to have a symmetric distribution around the mean. However, in this normalization, nuance was lost -- no longer did we see the individual variation in “the blind”, understanding the range that this term encompassed: uncorrected vision of 20/200 to completely black blind. We saw Mary Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie, and nothing else. If I had a dollar for every time someone referred to me as “Stevie Wonder”, I wouldn’t need the money for this scholarship.

Thus, the most frustrating thing about losing my vision was that I didn’t go completely blind -- that would have been something that people could have understood: something they were familiar with from television. Unfortunately, there were colors and shapes that I could see, which constantly would be impetus to the question: “what can you see?”, to which I never had a satisfactory answer. I knew what things were supposed to look like, but I could not find a suiting comparison for what I was seeing. I would try desperately to put people in my position through references to “soft-filters” or paintings of Monet and Degas. But this never really worked. In fact, it worked against me, because admitting that I could anything was tantamount to deception and on several occasions, people accused me of “faking it”.

I was “faking it”. I was faking being sighted because of the stigma associated with being blind. I stopped using my cane, I wore designer sunglasses and I relied on those empathetic individuals I mentioned before to help me navigate through life. Faking it can help you get through the day. Further, if the people you’re faking it with don’t seem to know or care how to get you to a place that you don’t have to fake it, what other choice do you really have?

So I memorized menus, counted steps, smelled the difference between coke and root beer, felt the difference between a dime and a penny and heard how full a water-glass is when pouring by pitch. A lot of people will tell you that when you loose one sense all your other ones get better. Those people haven’t lost a sense, unless you want to count common sense.

When you lose your vision, it is surprising how bad and completely out of context your other senses are. Senses work as a quintet, talking to each other and relying on each other to relay a message. When one sense is missing, you literally have to retune your entire system of navigation to be hypersensitive to what you can pick up. Cue recovery.

When the standard recovery period had passed almost two years of time had lapsed and the images that I was accustomed to had dramatically morphed. Coke had new label, and the faces that I remembered had dramatically changed. I was expected to assimilate these changes and process this information overnight, to catch up on two years of images that I hadn’t seen in fast-forward. I was still trying to figure out how to convince my eyes to track lines of text on a page. You might think: “it’s like riding a bike”, which it is, if you really like falling.

Whereas loosing your vision is like the principal violin walking out of Schubert’s string quintet in C, mid adagio, regaining your vision is like having Axl Rose walk in after the intermission expecting to take over for the principal after the remaining four instruments have finally learned to play together (and cover for the missing instrument).

In summary, I would like to express my heartfelt appreciation for those empathetic individuals that were patient with me as I learned to retune the quintet of senses that I was lucky enough to regain. First, though, I would like you to know the cold, hard reality of the way that people talk about you and act toward you when they think that you can’t sense what’s going on.

To the people outside practice rooms that asked “why is that guy pretending he can’t see, doesn’t he get enough attention”. To the people in the science lab, after I asked for a sip of root-beer who replied “how could you tell -- your faking”. To the people in the hall that would throw pencils in my way. Someday I hope you understand that the population is not always reflective of the sample.

Finally, to women that held hands with me to walk to class. To the man who was man enough to let me hold his arm as I walked around the school so I wouldn’t have to use a cane. To the guy that read me the subtitles in the theater, much to the disdain of the other guests (it was only the introduction to the movie). To the teacher that told the class to “shut the hell up” because I couldn’t make out his voice over everyone talking. Finally, to the doctor that trusted me enough to be straightforward with me about everything and gave me the confidence to deal with the randomness life brings. Thank you.

Vagabond, Part X

One of the things that I loved about her is her ability to use beautiful, poetic words so carefully considered and ingeniously felt that it stopped me midway through conversation. I have always wanted to use words like this --fluently-- but have always considered alternative synonyms, and phrasings until far after the time has passed to actually say something and missed the window of opportunity. Unfortunately, as the perlage faded on the vintage Bollinger blanc de noirs that was our relationship, I realized that another one of the words that she would so carefully fold into what I thought was a well-set meringue was “virtue” a concept that I had not considered because I was too busy enjoying the champagne of beers or carefully incorporating undesirable elements into what I thought was an invincible system (my body). So, the mousse collapsed and the champagne went flat, and like most parties without mousse or champagne, I was left once again asking myself “what am I doing here?”

She wasn’t around for most of this chaos, because I had decided to box pies around the time that she decided I needed to learn what maturity was --independent of her-- and thus we parted. But chaos has the interesting attribute of not being entirely random -- bringing up the same themes regardless of how hard you try and dismiss the error term. One of my themes, I guess, was not seeing what was right in front of my face.

When I was fifteen due to a medical condition called keratoconus and an unfortunate event known as an “acute hydrops”, I lost vision in both eyes literally overnight. The chance of you having this happen, even with the prerequisite medical condition, is less then 0.02%. But that statistic doesn’t tell you anything, you either have it or you don’t.

One of the most frustrating things about losing my vision was that I didn’t go completely blind. I fulfilled all the legal requirements for the state services for the blind, wore the ugly dark glasses, walked with a cane, and even put in an application (which was denied) for a seeing-eye dog. Unfortunately, there were colors and shapes that I could see, which constantly would be impetus to the question: “what can you see?”, to which I never had a satisfactory answer. I knew what things were supposed to look like, but I could not find a suiting comparison for what I was seeing. I would try desperately to put people in my position through references to “soft-filters” or paintings of Monet and Degas. But this never really worked. People want a binomial probability distribution – a yes or no – and the simple fact was that the world is more about confidence intervals.

When the standard recovery period had passed almost two years of time had lapsed and the images that I was accustomed to had dramatically morphed. Coke had come out with a new label, the monkey at the ophthalmologist’s office was now clearly an orangutan --yet still purple-- and the faces around me had changed. I never remembered my father as having grey hair on his face but as I put in the first pair of rigid gas-permeable lenses I could see that a few of his hair follicles had become grey. Another dramatic image that has stuck with me was observing my face for the first time in sharp focus and noticing that not only did I have 5 o’clock shadow (which I had wanted since I was 15) but also that there were crease lines around my mouth and eyes when I smiled.

I would like to say my newfound clarity of vision was paired with a tantamount understanding of interpersonal relationships, but in the intrapersonal sense, I still couldn’t see what was in front of my face. Just because you feel something for someone else -- no matter how strong that feeling -- doesn’t mean that they feel it too. This is incredibly hard to accept because it violates the hope that we have for justice in the universe. Just like the eye chart - two people aren’t always looking at (or for) the same picture. Even if we are looking for the same image -- the realized image might not be there at all.

How do we cope with this fact? We lie to ourselves. This is not the lie that you make when you tell your boss “I’m stuck in traffic”, toothbrush in mouth, rushing to get out of the apartment or, a lie that you tell your table about bin number 37: “I’m sorry miss we are out of that particular champagne, may I recommend the Bollinger”. This is the lie that you tell yourself when you buy that 60” HDTV on a 29.99% interest credit card and pay the $14.75 a month for the next 30 years until you make that lie true. Or the lie that you believe when you sign the student loan documents -- which is to say that’s it’s not really a lie, but it’s not exactly the truth either.

But a relationship, whether it be with a customer, money, or, a lover, cannot survive on lies.

What I've Learned_27

What

I've

Learned**

Kiran "K" Mehra

(Guy,

27,

beautiful Malden, MA)

One thing that I'm still struggling to come to terms with about relationships: even if you are completely right about everything, sometimes you need to give in anyway.

There is a time (before walking into an operating theater) that the researcher needs to be turned off and there needs to be absolutely no room for doubt. You can think about the science later, this is a time for execution.

You will never amount to anything if you choose laundry and weightlifting over knowledge and understanding.

Money can't buy happiness; Money is happiness.

You cannot be a good parent if you put yourself first.

If you are going to be a supply-side economist, as it pertains to your dating-life, you really have to live it.

The best you can expect is that they meet you half way. That's it.

Be prepared. But that is not to say to be prepared for anything -- if you prepare for anything, anything can happen. Prepare yourself for the ideal situation.

There are certain things in this world a man does well to take to extremes.

There are many times in life you are going to be asked to get really good at something that you will never use. Cope.

If you think that you love something, try doing it 7 days a week for a month. Then see how much love you feel.

Everything is a language. Money is a language, and like most languages it is a click - the people that speak it don't want you to know how and true fluency is rarely acquired. Music is the ultimate language because it doesn't require translation.

If you ask someone for something and they say "no", try putting on a tie and asking again. Often times, you will find that the same person that denied you will now acquiesce. Unfortunately, or fortunately, professionalism starts with appearance.

Eventually you are going to have to break someone's heart; If you go through life trying not to break anyone's heart, you're going to break everyone's heart.

Education is a measure of tenacity not of intelligence.

Quality of writing and quality of thought are sometimes mutually exclusive.

In the grand scheme you're not going to matter, so you might as well matter to someone else.

When in doubt, replace all your feelings with work!

There are two types of people: those who help you make excuses and those who help you make it happen.

The beginning of academic understanding is knowing how to solve every problem that has been solved.

Anytime you meet someone that you think you've met someone that has "it" figured out, remember: We never really figure anything out. We just take steps toward what we think is going to go well and hope for the best.

You've gotta know before you hoe.

Don't think that you have all the emotional tools to handle every situation.

You break her heart, I break your neck. That's the contract.

If you are living your life one saute pan at a time, you're not really living.

Denim and white tablecloths don't go together. I don't care if it's dark.

**which is to say that I write these things down each year on my birthday but don't really do much about them throughout the year ;)

The Vagabond, Part IX

One day, we will look back at ourselves in public: wearing our iPods, zoned out to our music, texting our boyfriends (or girlfriends), clipping our nails, flossing our teeth, and laugh. It will be the same laugh as when we look at the butterfly ballot sheets from the 2000 election or the picture of Kloe pointing at a radiograph of her sister’s gluteal muscles. Which is to say that it’s not going to not be a comic laugh but an uncomfortable laugh, a “is this the society we want?” laugh. What we are laughing at, however, is not the butterfly ballot, the x-ray, the “i”product designed by Apple in California (and manufactured in China) or the public manicuring. Those are red herrings. The bird that is the cause of our laughter is the subsequent destruction of shared community and the elevation of self that is occurring around us. But that was not where I was planning to go with this story, that’s just what I think about as I ride the T. Now that had to make you laugh.

“I would never think of calling a woman that”. The thought lingered in my head as I observed what I perceived to be verbal abuse occurring at North Station, waiting for the orange line. The public transit system or “T” in Boston is much more efficient than the “SEPTA” of Philadelphia. In Philly, the train would come whenever the conductor would feel appropriate, within a 15 minute window. Furthermore, the train actually ran on the city streets, minimizing any benefit of taking the public transit to avoid traffic. In Boston, the T comes on time and runs underground. Lost, however, in this efficiency is the conversation and connection that makes us human; those moments that occurred past 45th street line on the 34 train. These moments were absent in Boston, except at the stations, where, apparently, people are looking for a fight.

Part of what makes me Italian is that I am confident in any hypothetical situation. Thus, I started rehearsing the “If you were to say that to my sister, buddy, we would have a situation” speech while mentally sizing up the fight that I was about to instigate. But before I could begin my well-rehearsed soliloquy and start down a path that I haven’t traveled since Capitan Morgan was my first mate, the green line came and took the quarreling duo to Woodland for all I know and effectively out of my life forever. All we have are moments.

As I rode the orange line home, I listened to a conversation that what I assumed to be a couple were having and tried to figure out what language they were speaking and how they felt about each other. I couldn’t understand a single word they were saying but I could feel the emotion in the vowels and consonants they were using and see the communication occurring in the body language they exchanged. The exchange was as passionate as the one that I almost started a fight over.

I mentioned the cloud of apathy that hung over my newfound place of employment, but I didn’t tell you much more. There really wasn’t much to it: the servers spoke Portuguese, the cooks Spanish, the dishwasher French and the management English. I was the guy trying to figure out how to speak everyone’s language. I would say that it helped that I took several languages in school throughout my serrated path of education, but academic and practical understanding of a language are divorced – which is to say that they maintain a relationship, but one of the two has moved to Vermont with her new boyfriend and your golden retriever. What matters most when trying to speak a language is not correct conjugation or syntax but the feeling you evoke in someone who is listening to you. Thus, one of the favorite utterances of someone who is fluent in a “foreign” language: “there isn’t an English translation for that”. There is a translation: you just don’t know how to make them feel how they feel when they hear that phrase in their language as you stumble through it in yours. I would say that this is limited to translation between languages, or even confined to Germanic versus romantic languages. The fact is, the reason that she left you for Vermont and took the golden retriever is not that you’re a workaholic – it’s that although you were both speaking English, you weren’t speaking the same language.

I used to think that the disparity in language was the largest in a restaurant. With the plurality of cultures and the multitude of languages, it would seem nearly impossible to find common ground. Yet, there is a theater to the restaurant that keeps it all together: customer first. I would like to say that the same emphasis is placed in the hospital: patient first, but it doesn’t seem to be so. It seems to be “what type of insurance do you carry?” or “payment due at the time of service” first.

“I want you to evaluate your pain on a scale of one to ten. One being your everyday normal disposition and ten being the worst pain you have ever experienced.”

A few thoughts flashed through my mind. The first was the anchoring and bias inherent in this scale. If “one” was of every day normal disposition, why the hell would I be in the E.R. For the magazines and air-conditioning? If I was in the worst pain that I had ever experienced would I really be able to evaluate that on a quantitative basis? Tantamount to this anchoring error in the scale was the gradient problem. Is the increase in the amount of pain between 1 and 2 the same as between 9 and 10 or does it follow some other trajectory? Everyone is going to interpret this scale completely differently making it completely useless.

Another thought was that pain doesn’t work like that; In fact, nothing you feel works like that. Just like wine cannot be evaluated in terms of points and women cannot be placed on some arbitrary scale of attraction. You either are in pain or you aren’t, you connect with the flavors of a wine or you can’t and you feel it when she walks into the room or you don’t. Once you establish this binary preliminary there are a thousand nuances that can unfold. The quantitative constructions that we have adhered to feelings (assumedly to better understand ourselves) have actually served to distance us from understanding what we are feeling. If you asked anyone that just stubbed their toe what kind of pain they are in they would probably give you a “10”. If you asked that same person to evaluate the pain of stubbing their toe yesterday, they may not automatically give you a “10”. The same holds for someone that has just had penetrating keratoplasty. Trust me, I’ve been through both – and they are both 10’s when evaluated on an instantaneous basis. But to really understand anything you feel, you can’t look at it on only one temporal plane.

The architecture to these experiences of pain are entirely different. You have no warning for the toe, for the keratoplasty your surgeon usually schedules you about 3 months out. The onset of the pain for the toe is sudden; for the keratoplasty, you are under general anesthesia. Finally, whereas the resolution of the pain following stubbing a toe takes a few moments, the keratoplasty can take up to a year before all the sutures are out and the surface of the cornea has finally healed. At each of these stages, it would be perfectly valid to describe the pain you are feeling from either of these experiences as anywhere between one and ten depending on the context in which it was felt. Furthermore, we can’t just average the pain over the duration of the procedure because at each instance, the pain can be resolved either physically, emotionally or in some combination thereof.

I wanted so badly to speak their language. Wanted them to understand what I was going through. I tried to think of a few words that would sum up everything swimming around in my mind: the anchoring and gradient errors in the scale, the inability to quantify something that is felt, the architecture of pain itself and the stages that are inherent. I felt like I was climbing up a ladder and being constantly kicked in the head by a horse and instead of investigating why the horse was kicking me in the head the nurse was asking me if the horse was a Clydesdale and telling me how much she likes the Clydesdales on the Budweiser commercial.

It may well have been true that my life depended on speaking in E.R. language. But when it came down to it, I could only communicate four words:

“uhh, it’s about seven”.

The Vagabond, Part VIII

The problem with life is that there are no musical cadences that indicate the important junctures, no audience laughter, no applause, no “ethnic kiss” sound effects, and no commercial breaks. To defer to a cliché, all we have are moments. But the moments aren’t glaringly obvious or punctuated. The moments come and go and sometimes leave us in a psychopathic spin, postulating what life would have been life if we would have turned left instead of right, arrived for that interview 15 minutes earlier, or stayed the night.

These moments aren’t all tragic, as the previous paragraph would lead you to believe. There are some times that these moments come out of nowhere like a deer crossing in front of your car at night, or a friends funeral notice. We don’t really have to think about swerving to avoid the deer or scrambling to attend the funeral – the reactions are more instinct than intellect. But running through life as a succession of instinctual decisions wouldn’t keep us up at night, make us human, or give writers something to complain about. Thus, intellect must enter the human condition, despite our best efforts.

This instinct-intellect spectrum, however, is not the only continuum along which actionable responses are made. Beyond the consideration of how we think or feel about a situation is the temporal construct of how reactionary or deliberate we are in acting. The end result of all the variables is a quartet of thought, all playing at once, shaping our lives, one moment at a time.

The first duet feels right, but it takes a long time for you to do anything about it. Another duet feels right and you are able to act on it without getting caught up. Sometimes you come to all the right conclusions for all the wrong reasons. Finally, once in awhile, you are able to think about something long enough to make a careful decision. Most of the times, however, the window of opportunity has closed, been painted shut and fogged over and all the calculus in the world won’t allow you through. This is the architecture of a regret. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

A piece of lobster the size of a pin lay on a gleaming silver table. I was at the Four-Seasons Hotel, Philadelphia; farther from home and further in my career than I ever thought knowing how to operate a deep-fryer would ever take me. My sous-chef approached the culprit – another worker who had been opening cans of lobster near my station and reprimanded him plainly, almost without emotion: “I’m trying to teach this guy [me] to not be a scumbag, and here you are making a mess of his station?” The two men stood and blankly stared at each other for what seemed like fifteen minutes. Something I learned early in my career as a cook is that kitchen time and real time have no correlation. You can work for ten hours straight and have it feel like thirty minutes if the conditions are right; you can also stare at a steamer counting down thirty seconds and swear that ten minutes have passed. As I cleaned my knives and packed my tools in preparation to go home for the day, the tension hung in the air like a 2-3 suspension.

I found an apartment in west-Philadelphia because I wanted to stay grounded. I wanted to run into real people on my day off, and not get caught up in the cultural milieu of haute-cuisine as to forget what it is like to not have the money to make your cream of wheat with milk. Thus the recapitulation of my day involved taking the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority Trolley number thirty-four into what can only affectionately be called the ghetto.

If given the opportunity to isolate what Philadelphia culturally contributes to the United States, most people would say the history, or the cheese-steaks. These people are most likely white, and have never been to a barbershop in west Philadelphia or a Delicitassen in New York. Don’t get me wrong, the cheese-steaks are an important part of the “Realadelphia” experience, but there are better sandwiches. Furthermore, “olde city” is nice and historical and one of the most important documents in the history of the world was crafted there but the future generation of America is being crafted not in debates happening on East Huntington Park Avenue, at the House of Representatives but on Osage Avenue, in Barbershops - where no topic is taboo, from Obama to Viagra.

The conversation here is so intense here that you forget to get your haircut. An important part of this experience is that remaining neutral is not an option. If there is a topic on board and the conversation meanders around to you, you are forced to think about what you stand for, voice it in a public forum, probably take a lot of criticism, but perhaps change a few minds. This is a true reemergence of the Greek public space that eventually gave name to the psychological condition, and thus not a place for the agoraphobic. The problem is it’s dying and we’re choosing to pull the plug.

As the passengers got off at each station headed west from center-city, I noticed a negative correlation between the extravagance of technology and the number of stops that passenger would take. First stop was the blackberries – they never really left center-city. The Nintendo DS Lite’s would generally follow, getting off at 40^th street station, near “University City”. 45^th Avenue was the barrier for people that carried cell phones. But, more importantly, 45th is when the passengers started talking again: “where were you during Sunday mass?” “Why didn’t you come to Bobby’s wake?” “Did Darnell get into college?” “Is Jaivon out of jail?” If the barbershop was the main forum for men to engage, discuss and connect, the 34 car, between 45^th ave and 54^th ave was a strong second.

As economies of scale have had their effect on the price of technology we have chosen to give this dialogue up. Yes, I know about (and use) Facebook. I understand the genius of it’s appeal lies in the fact that it simultaneously allows us to be alone and together at the same time – the two strongest urges that we feel. There are tears, however, in the social fabric of facebook. Facebook is devoid of biochemistry, facial expressions, pheromones, subconscious reactions. There is a mediation of exchange that we accept when we communicate through technology that will always make it a distant second to in person interaction.

Thus I began a new chapter of my life, framed by the conversations that would happen between 54^th and 45^th Avenue, and filled with an intense dedication to the art of cuisine that would rival any experience with food that I have had since. I played intensely, giving it pretty much all that I had. But I was playing the wrong duet.

The Vagabond, Part VII

I started line-cooking again after graduation the only way that anyone knows how – on drugs. Well, on some and off others but a better jumble than what I had previously attempted and so I felt like it was a step in the right direction: these were legal drugs, some prescribed and monitored by a licensed physician…others prescribed and monitored by Starbucks Coffee Company. I guess we all have to grow up sometime.

The restaurant industry had changed since I had last been immersed, and like an ex-lover that you reconnect with after years of being apart the change falls neatly into two piles. The first heap is scattered along a continuum. Some changes are as apparent as her new hair-color or length; some are intentionally hidden: piercings allowed to fill in or tattoos that have undergone epidermal laser treatment. Regardless of the changes that fall into this spectrum, we’ll try to reconnect, struggle to find some common ground, hope that there is still at least something shareable. The second grouping is polarized. These changes are complex and intimate – the kind of things that you figure out only if you are really interested in re-meeting someone you thought you already knew – and most people aren’t.

The bleached blonde hair and the perky demeanor that many chefs embraced as a result of the TV Food movement is again, a red herring. It’s easy to point fingers and laugh and get caught up in the drama of reality television because, as realistic as it tries to be, we know it is a production designed to appeal to our emotion. So, it is not the viewers of these shows that are ruining the professional kitchen by invading bars and demanding gastronomy. What is ruining the kitchen is the egoism that is being embraced in the name of the television. The justification “if Gordon Ramsey yells all chefs can”, and “if Rachel Ray gets to weigh in on gay marriage, all chefs poisons on social matters are credible, valid, and worthy of consideration”. Paired with the i-generation and instant gratification that we have become accustomed to, this ego has become a perfect storm. Behind this thunderstorm of ego, however, was a cloud. This cloud was the subtle and complex change that I didn’t really want to see.

My scientist friends abhor when I use scientific laws to explain social phenomenon so here’s a scientific law to explain this social phenomenon. Everyone that has taken high-school physics will finish this sentence before you finish reading. For every action there is an equal, opposite and collinear reaction.

If there is one thing that I have to give the TV Chefs it’s that they must really feel passionate about what they are doing. Most people would say: “you have to love your job”, but as with most things, most people have good intentions but are dead wrong. As I had mentioned, love has a complex formula that I am still trying to understand. Hate, however, I think that I have a pretty good handle on. Thus I can accurately state that I hated my job. But contrary to the feel-good psychology movement of new millennium, hate does have importance. Hate pays for rent and prevents your power, cell phone and internet access from being cut off.

The opposite reaction to the egoistic “TV Food” movement wasn’t a hate for the profession, both hate and love have emotional power that can be focused into a constructive manifestation. Hate is not the opposite of love, they both exist on the same emotional plane – in the same way that you have to care about something to love it, you have to care to hate it, it requires an emotional expenditure. If we are going to rid the world of a problem, hate (or love) is the wrong focus. The real plague that we face is apathy. Apathy is the antithesis of both hate and love and unless we choose to do something about it as educators, as a society, and as individuals, apathy will ultimately be the downfall of America. It was a cloud of apathy that had hit the kitchen, and it hit hard.

What I've Learned_26

What

I've

Learned

Kiran "Chirano" Mehra

(Lead Line Cook,

26,

Medford, MA)

It's easy to weigh in on a decision from which you face no repercussions.

Never get in-between and Italian man and his mother in an argument. No matter what you say, it will not end well for you.

I want what we all want. To look across the void and know that there is someone that understands.

You can trust the government in the same way that you can trust anyone that you understand the motivations of.

Happiness is overrated; like jeans, or reading fiction.

Without debate, without criticism, no republic can survive. It is a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy.

Never allow the truth to get in the way of a good story.

To say you stop loving somebody that you once loved more than anything else in the world, that would be a lie.

Eventually, you have to get into the deep water.

The will to succeed is nothing without the will to prepare.

Wherever I am, I will always be in New York in my heart.

It is always possible to ruin a good story with too much research.

Most of your life, you will be talked to as if you have no comprehension of anything. We have chosen this; Everyone gets a blue ribbon. (re: ISBN # 0-9667071-0-9)

Lots of people talk a big game. When it comes down to it, though, most are completely unwilling to be a wo/man and do the right thing.

CNN is about as well researched as Facebook nowadays. It's a 24 hour news cycle, we don't want them to take the time to do it right.

Fidelity is a choice, not a feeling.

Money can't change people, it only helps them be who they are.

Whenever you are lied to, before you get angry, you need to first ask yourself if you were really entitled to the truth.

Of the most important things that you can understand are: your engines timing, appropriate operating temperature and oil weight. Extrapolate as needed.

I highly suggest that everyone work a double on your birthday, the way that people treat you gives you a good indication of how you are perceived.