cbforever

I wear a kilt now. Kilts are cool.

Fuck NYC summer.

I wear... jeans. At least it's not in the 100s anymore.

Man I HATE NYC summer. There's a reason why all the rich people leave the city right around this time, and don't come back till the fall.

It's one reason I put up with South Florida. My location, tempered by the ocean's influence, is much more temperate even though much farther south.

Of course, it's also part of the reason I eventually want to move to California, or maybe even Hawaii (which would be perfect if I could do astrophysics work there.)

I can't imagine living in NYC in the summertime. That just sounds painful and sweaty and nasty and UGH.

There's this point, around like 93-96ºF and maximum humidity, where no matter what you do (even if it's just sitting in a room in your underwear doing nothing), you will full-body sweat continuously.

That's the part I can't stand

I bet kitchens are wonderful work environments during those conditions... :/

I have two vivid memories of Summers spent in kitchens in the city (all of them have been since I've moved here, but only two were especially awful).

Nothing will ever be worse than the pizza shop. 500º oven door two feet behind me at core height for hours and hours every day. Most of the time that it wasn't, it was because I'd turned around, opened the door, and reached elbow or shoulder deep into it. And doing that so much, 80 hour weeks with four or five days off a month. After a while I was just exhausted all the time, which made me clumsy, and I started getting burned on the oven more, and worse. Not a lot, but even one little slip up every couple days turned into dozens over time. For years I had so many scars that they literally crisscrossed all over my arms, though many of them have disappeared and the rest have faded somewhat now.

Culinary school came close in its misery, though. I had the most challenging part of my curriculum, the section leading up to the midterm (it's make or break time), during a record heat wave. Imagine a room just large enough to contain about 30 people, a burner for every one of them, a gas flat top for every two, and an oven for every four. There's one tiny window that opens out to the street for ventilation, and everyone has their flames cranked basically all the time. Everyone's also working frantically to do their dish of the day better than they did last time (there was a rotating menu of eight items that we made continuously, in a faux-restaurant service/prep kinda way, doing a couple from scrap to finish each day until we'd made them all a million times), and Chef is walking around giving critiques. If it's not perfect, he'll let you know.

I kind of look back on both of those times fondly now, though. They were challenges, and I conquered them.

Challenges indeed. I don't envy you those at all, but as you say, you've emerged from them with some impressive skills and the change to do something really interesting with your career, so it was definitely worthwhile.