After a pretty average weekend, I had a great Monday and an even better Tuesday. You can read a little about last night on my new blog, here ... assuming you read Spanish. (You can also use Google translate.) The blog, as the header declares, is an Oberlin course blog for my Communication and Conversation class.
I've been up to so much lately, I don't know where to begin. It snowed over the weekend, fairytale flakes that danced in the air and coated us as we stood laughing. Monday was Peter's birthday (which, together with work and other pesky side effects of having a life, prevented me from blogging), and we walked down to the Arb with a pizza tray to try and sled. Well, the sled idea was a bust. It did make an interesting shield for the ensuing snowball fight, and even a semi-successful catapult. Our gifts to Peter included candy and self-restraint -- we resisted telling the whole co-op it was his birthday, for which he was grateful.
Last night was cake night! I gave him coupons for six more weeks of winter and a cooking tool of his choice. (Suggestions included a garlic press, a scalpel and a garden rake.) Hannah made him a Peter doll from materials from the free box. It was adorable, and also had no legs. Our cake ended up sticking to the bread pans we made it in, but we dug out all the pieces and made mountain cake. It was wonderful. Life was wonderful. I'm going to biology now. More later, maybe.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Monday, February 14, 2011
Impulsive Decisions, now with Three Times the Adventure
Happy Valentine's Day, everyone! In honor of the holiday, I have a confession to make. I acted a little impulsively a few days ago and made a decision I may come to regret. I acted out of panic, but I feel my actions were justified. I hope that you, readers, will agree.
All right, all right, tense yet? I got a job washing pots for Campus Dining Services. The job offers the best pay on campus, although it is less than I earned for sitting on a beach and watching the water. I had my first shift today, and although the work is harder, it is alsoless meaningless more meaningful.
The orientation wasn't much: a friendly coworker grabbed me an apron, showed me the pot sinks, and resumed working. My experience as an OSCAn probably didn't have much bearing on my job performance -- experience doesn't matter a whole lot when it comes to scrubbing grease -- but it did help me feel more at home in the kitchen. (OSCA has taught me WAY more important things than the nuts and bolts of crewing. More on that in another entry.)
The job was also much easier than I had steeled myself for. Most of the time, a once-over with the scrubby pad and thirty seconds in the sanitizer was all the utensil needed. (With a dip in water in between, of course -- our soap and sanitizer neutralize each other, so it's important to rinse.) There were a few difficult pots, but scrubbing a CDS pot to perfection takes maybe a tenth of the work it would take to make a Keep pot look good. That's not to denigrate Keep. Our pots and pans are sanitary and more than clean enough to cook in -- the fact that our stainless-steel equipment is black on the bottom and in most of the corners is simply not relevant. But in CDS, the stainless steel is practically stainless.
Not to mention, the sprayer sprays. I am told that other co-ops also have sprayers strong enough to blast away food instead of giving it a gentle shower, but I haven't seen this wonder for myself. The sinks are also big enough to lay a cookie tray flat. No more sloshing sanitizer up and down! I never mind in Keep, but I would have felt silly playing in the sink in Lord/Saunders.
But no matter how nice the equipment is or how good the chefs' cooking smells, my job is just a job. It pays. That's all I care about. At Keep, my job matters. Every one of the pots I scrub might be the pot a head cook desperately needs to feed us all with scrumptious lentil soup. (In fact, we only have one of each pot, so it's just about guaranteed to be needed.) The stacks and stacks of shining trays can't compare to Keep's blackened ones, on which are served homemade cookies, Friday pizza, and -- once -- caramel. At Lord/Saunders, some disembodied Entity owns the sinks, the stoves, the spoons, the potwashers. At Keep, the potwashers belong to ourselves, and the kitchen belongs to us.
My job is a good one, as jobs go, and I feel incredibly fortunate. I'm working to pay off my loans faster, and at the end of this semester, I'll probably find a better job and never look back. Elsewhere, kids younger than me are doing worse work for less pay and looking forward to a future of more of the same. I am growing in leaps and bounds: learning how to think, how to work, how to be kind. I am loving Oberlin, pot sinks and all, and running into the future on light feet.
Speaking of kindness, and of food, I received lovely Valentine's Day wishes from many of you. Thank you! And thank you, Nana, for the chocolate-dipped pretzels and caramel mix. They're delicious, and as always, a hit.
All right, all right, tense yet? I got a job washing pots for Campus Dining Services. The job offers the best pay on campus, although it is less than I earned for sitting on a beach and watching the water. I had my first shift today, and although the work is harder, it is also
The orientation wasn't much: a friendly coworker grabbed me an apron, showed me the pot sinks, and resumed working. My experience as an OSCAn probably didn't have much bearing on my job performance -- experience doesn't matter a whole lot when it comes to scrubbing grease -- but it did help me feel more at home in the kitchen. (OSCA has taught me WAY more important things than the nuts and bolts of crewing. More on that in another entry.)
The job was also much easier than I had steeled myself for. Most of the time, a once-over with the scrubby pad and thirty seconds in the sanitizer was all the utensil needed. (With a dip in water in between, of course -- our soap and sanitizer neutralize each other, so it's important to rinse.) There were a few difficult pots, but scrubbing a CDS pot to perfection takes maybe a tenth of the work it would take to make a Keep pot look good. That's not to denigrate Keep. Our pots and pans are sanitary and more than clean enough to cook in -- the fact that our stainless-steel equipment is black on the bottom and in most of the corners is simply not relevant. But in CDS, the stainless steel is practically stainless.
Not to mention, the sprayer sprays. I am told that other co-ops also have sprayers strong enough to blast away food instead of giving it a gentle shower, but I haven't seen this wonder for myself. The sinks are also big enough to lay a cookie tray flat. No more sloshing sanitizer up and down! I never mind in Keep, but I would have felt silly playing in the sink in Lord/Saunders.
But no matter how nice the equipment is or how good the chefs' cooking smells, my job is just a job. It pays. That's all I care about. At Keep, my job matters. Every one of the pots I scrub might be the pot a head cook desperately needs to feed us all with scrumptious lentil soup. (In fact, we only have one of each pot, so it's just about guaranteed to be needed.) The stacks and stacks of shining trays can't compare to Keep's blackened ones, on which are served homemade cookies, Friday pizza, and -- once -- caramel. At Lord/Saunders, some disembodied Entity owns the sinks, the stoves, the spoons, the potwashers. At Keep, the potwashers belong to ourselves, and the kitchen belongs to us.
My job is a good one, as jobs go, and I feel incredibly fortunate. I'm working to pay off my loans faster, and at the end of this semester, I'll probably find a better job and never look back. Elsewhere, kids younger than me are doing worse work for less pay and looking forward to a future of more of the same. I am growing in leaps and bounds: learning how to think, how to work, how to be kind. I am loving Oberlin, pot sinks and all, and running into the future on light feet.
Speaking of kindness, and of food, I received lovely Valentine's Day wishes from many of you. Thank you! And thank you, Nana, for the chocolate-dipped pretzels and caramel mix. They're delicious, and as always, a hit.
Monday, February 7, 2011
Convenience
I'm sitting at a Mudd PC to write this, having faced an all-too-difficult dilemma: should I choose to work at a first-foor PC, with a stubborn keyboard but a sublimely ergonomic chair, or a ground-floor Mac, with a responsive keyboard and a boring office chair? I chose the chair, so if I've skipped some letters, blame it on my spine.
Any life which features this dilemma is a very luxurious life.
And in fact, I feel deliciously pampered. Nobody is wearing my socks, for instance, and nobody wants rides anywhere, which is just as well since I haven't got a car. I'm walking everywhere I need to go -- a step down from biking (my chain rusted over) -- but a step up from driving for sure.
Not everything is so convenient. As iDLEC,* for instance, interim looks to me like a vast and stormy sea. Last night, for instance, myself and several other Keepers began dinner crew at eight o'clock because no one had done so at seven. Then I feared and fretted because nobody had signed up to cook lunch today.
At 10 this morning, David volunteered and turned out one of the best stir-fries I've ever tasted -- a rare and dangrous compliment at Keep, where we have stir-fry at least twice a week. That, plus pasta, a rich tomato-veggie sauce, and cucumbers dusted in salt and dill. The lunch was stunning. Almost everyone wanted seconds.
Let me stress, too, that the makeshift dinner crew, unlike othr interim crews, was not made up of people who had planned to spend an hour scrubbing pots and cleaning counters. They were sitting in the lounge, enjoying a lazy evening before the first day of classes. Nobody was exactly thrilled about crewing. But they stepped up to the plate anyway. This is the worst and the best of OSCA. And I would choose community over convenience every time.
I do, of course, miss my family. The feeling is exacerbated by Keep's resemblance to a household in the best and the worst of ways. But that's another post entirely. Ciao for now.
---
*Interim dining and loose ends coordinator -- more on this later, after my first discussion.
Any life which features this dilemma is a very luxurious life.
And in fact, I feel deliciously pampered. Nobody is wearing my socks, for instance, and nobody wants rides anywhere, which is just as well since I haven't got a car. I'm walking everywhere I need to go -- a step down from biking (my chain rusted over) -- but a step up from driving for sure.
Not everything is so convenient. As iDLEC,* for instance, interim looks to me like a vast and stormy sea. Last night, for instance, myself and several other Keepers began dinner crew at eight o'clock because no one had done so at seven. Then I feared and fretted because nobody had signed up to cook lunch today.
At 10 this morning, David volunteered and turned out one of the best stir-fries I've ever tasted -- a rare and dangrous compliment at Keep, where we have stir-fry at least twice a week. That, plus pasta, a rich tomato-veggie sauce, and cucumbers dusted in salt and dill. The lunch was stunning. Almost everyone wanted seconds.
Let me stress, too, that the makeshift dinner crew, unlike othr interim crews, was not made up of people who had planned to spend an hour scrubbing pots and cleaning counters. They were sitting in the lounge, enjoying a lazy evening before the first day of classes. Nobody was exactly thrilled about crewing. But they stepped up to the plate anyway. This is the worst and the best of OSCA. And I would choose community over convenience every time.
I do, of course, miss my family. The feeling is exacerbated by Keep's resemblance to a household in the best and the worst of ways. But that's another post entirely. Ciao for now.
---
*Interim dining and loose ends coordinator -- more on this later, after my first discussion.
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