What Happened to Us?

It is the knees that remind me.

 

The stiff, cracking ache after nothing more than standing still or whatever middle-age shift of gravity passes for dancing these days. I start walking again and groan with every step I ascend.

 

Man, what happened to us? We used to stay awake until the sky started going gray. A different bar every night of the week. We heard about our favorite band coming and we were there—no questions, no considerations.

 

Now my ears ring with the echo of rhythm guitars off underground bar. Now traffic jams and the degree of difficulty of finding a parking spot downtown add up in my head before we even go. Now we talk about going to a bar after but it’s midnight and we couldn’t possibly. Now a good book in my living room outweighs all the trouble.

 

Now we talk about refinancing and new fences and HELOCs when it used to be all album release dates and where are we going this weekend.

 

Time rarely asks for your permission before it changes you.

It's always been my dream never to have to own my own restaurant

And I’m living the dream, baby!

 

I guess my dream of never having to own my own restaurant started when I was a very young child. I loved to eat (still do!) but I had no idea what things like “point of sale,” “firing times,” or “front of house” meant. I could sense I really didn’t need to know any more about those terms. I was happy the way I was.

 

Once I started cooking for myself, I became a little more worldly. I realized I was satisfied with cooking for myself or for small parties, rather than cooking for mass amounts of demanding strangers, worrying about inventory or daily specials, or dealing with staff turnover. I just wanted to go about my dreamlike existence of not working 80 to 100 hours a week or having my hands completely covered in cuts and calluses.

 

With the rise of the Food Network, I’m even more determined to live my dream of never being burdened by restaurant management. You see people on shows like Restaurant Impossible who were living out their own dreams of owing a restaurant. This caused many of them financial and emotional trouble. Some of these people left high-stress jobs like stock trading for the high-stress job of owning a restaurant. Personally, if I were to do a lateral move in terms of stress, I would dream of moving to an industry in which there was not a 30 percent chance of my new venture failing in the first year.

 

To achieve their dreams, some of these Restaurant Impossible contestants do things like raid their retirement funds, then run the restaurant into the ground and go into $250,000 of debt, then get their parents to put up their houses to bail them out of debt. Well, my dream has always entailed solvency. Also, my Mom also likes living in her house and part of my dream includes not having her mortgage it so I can keep serving small plates in a trendy part of town.

 

The stress of owning a dream restaurant also seems to take a toll on people’s marriages and families. No thanks. I’m fine living with my husband and son in tranquility and not coming home at 2 a.m. smelling like a grease trap.

 

Then you watch Chopped and my God, the things these restaurateurs and chefs go through to achieve their culinary dream. Here’s what they tell the judges:

 

“I had six strokes on the line while making one pasta primavera.”

 

“I burned off all my fingerprints recooking a ribeye someone sent back and the guy still didn’t like it.” 

 

“One night my sous chef had a psychotic break and spiked the risotto with acid and 14 people overdosed.”

 

“I had to sell my house to make payroll for my staff and had to move into the restaurant’s walk-in fridge and then the restaurant failed and I ended up on the street doing tricks with poached eggs for money.”

 

You know what? I’ll pass. I’m already living my dream of working in my field for the same company for the last 20 years, with a well-funded 401k, sitting at a desk all day with the freedom to slack off online occasionally and getting home every night for dinner. I’m basking in looking at the hell restaurateurs go through and saying, “I don’t have to do that.”

We Have to Save Ourselves

How much more of this can America endure? An 11-year-old girl plays dead by smearing her murdered friend’s blood on her face. A man treats himself to an AR-15 for his 18^th birthday and tells a teacher “Goodnight” before using the weapon to shoot her dead. Two little girls have to call 911 repeatedly while the 19 police officers—one for each murdered child—who are supposed to help them wait in the hallway for a janitor to bring them a key to their classroom. The obscenity of all that.

 

Who knows if anybody is coming to save us. I think we have to save ourselves. There’s a saying people invoke in a time of crisis, “Look for the helpers.” Mr. Rogers said that and while he had a lot of wisdom, that saying is still aimed at children. They’re the ones who need to look for helpers; we adults should be the helpers rather than look around for other people to rescue us.

 

Look at how many systems failed to help the schoolchildren in Uvalde and so many others. The police stood outside for crucial minutes while the parents begged them to save their kids. The part-time SWAT team was nowhere to be seen, probably off shooting another macho photo session in the desert. The politicians, particularly Senate Republicans, have consistently failed to do anything to keep kids from being killed. This is why Ted Cruz refuses to see this as a political problem—if he did see it that way, he'd have to acknowledge that as a politician, he has a responsibility to try to solve the problem. Yet he and others are happy to make this political when the gun lobby makes political contributions to them. Most of all, my generation has failed my son’s.

 

While we may not be able to help stem the tide of gun violence on our own, we can push the people who can help to do so. For my part, I’ve been emailing senators asking them to support the common-sense gun laws that have the support of the public. (Senators hear from me a lot on many issues.) They don’t respond to people from out of state, but I’m hoping some staffers will see my email and at least at it to the tally of people who are speaking out. I’m also contacting my state reps. These emails don’t take a ton of time and it’s worth a try.

 

I also still strongly believe in voting. I’ve been voting since immediately after I turned 18—in general elections, primaries, midterms and local elections—and I will never, ever stop. It’s frustrating when politicians don’t seem to be helping but the solution to that is to vote the riff-raff out and vote the competent people in. Look at the impact your vote has: If 80,000 or so people had voted a different way in a few states in 2016, the Supreme Court would be completely different, and they might not be about to overturn Roe v. Wade, or attack the right to marriage equality or contraception. If more people had voted in the 2010 and 2014 midterms, we also might have a very different country today.

 

I think there are a lot of people who refuse to participate in the system and won’t vote and I think that’s misguided. The legislative branch is not a TV show that they’ll cancel if not enough people watch it; politicians will still get elected even if you stay home. And if you stay home, you may just be opening the door to something worse—which you’ll then complain about and refuse to vote some more. I just don’t understand how anyone can look at the last decade in politics and believe the solution is less voting.

I’d also like to do more than vote and email politicians and I’m trying to figure out what that looks like for me. I can get more involved with the party at the state and local level. I thought of running for office but I’m not a leader and would be a terrible fit. I’m much more effective behind the scenes.

 

One thing I do know is if all you have to offer are cynicism and snark, you’re doing as much to solve the problem of gun violence as the people who only offer “thoughts and prayers”—nothing. You’re doing jack shit to solve anything.

 

Even if I don’t see results from the little things I’m doing, I have to try. What we do today may have effects that won’t be apparent for some time but will be real. It looks grim but there’s a flicker of hope. That flicker won’t become a fire if all I’m doing is sitting there looking at what other people are doing and saying “And nothing will change” with a cynical smirk on my face.