employablog

(First, a disclaimer. I am not really a vegetarian. I eat fish and fish-like products. I eat dairy (we do, after all, come from the state that annually carves its beauty queens into 90lb blocks of butter). And if someone’s Mom offers me a homemade bowl of corn chowder, I’m not going to make a stink because it happened to have been made with chicken stock. In a pinch, I’ll even pick around the overzealous bacon bits in my side veggies, beans or salad.)

“I know this great place you won’t find in any tour guide,” the client told us as he wheeled the rental SUV across one of Dallas’ many eight lane roads. “They have the best barbecue in Texas.”

There might be worse times to mention that you are a vegetarian, but if so I haven’t found them yet. My coworker on the trip gave me a look, as if to say “It could be worse - you could be a gay Arabic observant Jew and a vegetarian in Dallas.” Point taken, even if he didn’t actually say or think that.

So yes, it could be worse. But these kinds of situations are coming up more and more often, and always there is a small sense of dread when someone, noticing for the first time that I never order the chicken, asks if I am a vegetarian.

I really have no good answer for this. “No,” I start to explain, “I eat fish, but…” There is nowhere good the conversation can go from here. No one in an office wants to hear about your eating habits, any more than you want to talk about them. Yet, an explanation is owed.

Vegetarianism, like politics, is something best not mentioned in the workplace. It’s like dropping a bomb except instead of exploding it just makes people feel awkward, you know, like ‘What is a bomb doing in our conference room? That doesn’t belong here.’ But when it comes up there isn’t much I can do except smile and explain and try to look nonchalant as I munch on my veggie burrito.

There was a period of more than several days after I moved into my apartment and—notably—several days after I began comfortable white-collar employment, in which I slept under some towels. Depending on the temperature outside, the number of towels ranged from one to as many as I could find, which was always four. Because that’s how many towels I own.

I was excited when my comforter arrived in the mail, prinicipally because I would no longer have to check the weather with trepidation each night to decide how many towels to put on the bed. But also, the addition of a down comforter would allow the display of my duvet cover, which I had chosen to match the walls and the furniture and my young-single-guy-in-the-city attitude.

When the big day came, I celebrated by cleaning up the remaining signs that two weeks earlier my life had been completely encapsulated in some suitcases. I straightened, dusted, put away some embarassing knick-knacks, took out some marginally cooler knick-knacks and hung up a big mirror above my dresser. Finally, my room was completely unpacked.

That night I was startled awake by an enormous sound of crashing glass. My fists clenched and for a terrifying second I realized that I was alone in this apartment. I was no longer surrounded by a girlfriend and roommates and friends and security guards and other college students up all night to watch the O.C. or study for a midterm, and now it was ‘fight or flight’ time and I didn’t feel capable of either and I was in my boxers in bed and WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT NOISE.

In the next second I saw the broken glass from the knick-knack my mirror had knocked over as it crashed to the ground. Heart racing, I pulled the comforter up to my chin and the terror subsidied. Sort of.

Employee One:
Flying with my entire life crammed into two 49.5 lb suitcases wasn’t what had me nervous. I had been doing that for four years.

Employee Too:
I had just grabbed life by the fat of its belly and given it a twist.

Bound on a Northwest flight to La Guardia Airport, I was moving to New York City with no job, not much money, and plenty of hope. As far as Maslow’s pyramid was concerned, I was not very high up. I had a job interview in two days: give a presentation on a non-academic subject to prove that I have the personal skills, blah blah etc. to teach the MCATs for Kaplan.

I was Willy Lomaning myself.

Employee One:
Flying is an experience that changes steadily with age, from adolescent novelty (”Mom, look how high we are!!”) to teenage indignity (”Mom, I can’t believe you’re wearing THAT to the airport”) to collegiate indifference (”Mom, my flight’s delayed four hours. I’m going to watch some Family Guys. See you at midnight”). I imagine flying will become an annoyance as our responsibilities increase, and I am pretty sure it will become a nightmare with the addition of any young dependents.

Employee Too:
I went over my outline, pulled out a steno pad and figured my presentation: How to Make a Grilled Cheese Sandwich.

“I see a grilled cheese sandwich as a template for human expression,” I’d start out. I had little diagrams of how to apply olive oil, an inventive way of slicing cheese, proper sandwich assembly, the whole works.

Employee One:
On my flight back to Boston from what are likely to be my last twelve days of summer vacation ever, I was trying but failing to recapture some of that indifference. ‘No big deal’ I lied to myself. ‘Back to Boston again.’

This time was different than all the trips back during school. This time I was returning to move into an apartment with a person I didn’t know and to start a job I didn’t know how to do, and I was returning to an almost certain breakup with a college girlfriend of three years.

Employee Too:
One-hundred grand on four years of pseudo-ivy league schooling and here I am on a flight to start life anew in New York City with some sketches of sandwiches, a hair-brained scheme and a goofy smile that is keeping me from losing it all together.

Employee One:
It wasn’t supposed to be this dramatic; in fact I had chosen to stay in Boston largely to avoid such drama. Nonetheless, this is how it began. I started full-time employment five days later.