sudden realization

today i realized it was only week 5 in the semester. WEEK 5 OUT OF 16. i am wayy to tired for my own good. sometimes i wish i had a job, but then i remember how tired i am just after class. every week: english, contemporary ethnic america, culinary principles 2 lecture, culinary principles 2 lab, english, horticultural science, contemporary ethnic america, principles of baking 1 lab, principles of baking 1 lecture, in that order.

this morning was a big ball of nothing. my first class is usually scheduled to begin at 9:35, so after dealing with all the morning traffic and whatnot, i came to class, and lo and behold, class is cancelled. my next class didn't start until 1pm. i wish i didn't have to wake up at 6:30 for that class :(

after a long, but calming, day at the gardens, i finally got home around 6:45. now that i think of it, nevermind that "big ball of nothing" comment. it turns out it's way more calming at school than it is at home. i spent the morning getting some homework done and flipping through fashion magazines in the library, and the afternoon was spent planting more veggies in the garden. sigh. i had to come home to screaming little boys running around the house, and now that i've mulled it over i think it's worth driving over there sometimes, just because it's so much more quiet. i think the only thing i don't really appreciate this semester is having to pay for gas so often and having to dig up worms for hort (ewww).

also, the lack of eating. you would think a culinary arts major would at least try to make time to eat, but today i didn't eat anything until i got home around 7, and most of my week is basically like that.

now to prepare for baking class tomorrow. this tends to be one of the classes that i enjoy coming to school for :)

principals of baking 1: my new favorite class

and here are my reasons why (in no particular order):

1. every day i have the lab i feel like a kid in a candy store :) by the end of the class it is always a free-for-all grab for whatever we baked, and i always end up taking home a big bag of something. today it was biscuits and scones! :p

2. i like baking, obviously...

3. keeping myself busy in classes like this help me forget about the stupid annoying things that happened earlier in the day, and believe me, there was plenty to forget about.

4. even though the lab always ends around rush hour, being able to take home stuff totally compensates for it. example: today it took me an hour and twenty minutes to get home, but it was totally awesome because i was basically just chillin' in the car, munchin' on some jalepeno cheddar biscuits, and blastin' the music (let's just forget that i wasted a lot of gas, because i do that every day anyway).

5. people just seem to be a lot easier to talk to here!! :)


baking aside, i'm also starting to like my horticulture class. yesterday was gardening day, and we all started our garden plots for the semester. even though right now i'm just praying that the plants will actually grow and then somehow manage to stay alive, it was still pretty cool getting down and diirrty yesterday in the cool weather just digging and whatnot. except for worms. eww. hopefully i'll do a lot better in the actual class though; the first quiz we had i got a 4 out of 10!!! WHYYY?!!! anyway, here's hopin' for a plentiful harvest by the end of the semester :)

i can't

i can't take subtle hints. it takes me forever just to figure these things out, and when i think i've got it right i still feel a little hesitant about it.

i rarely ever have dreams, but when i do there is always one thing that they have in common; i can never seem to find what i need. i can't find my shoes. i can't find the key. i can't find my room. i can't find the exit on the gate. something is always missing.

i can't find my way.

sometimes in these dreams i actually have the courage to ask for help. it's to no avail, of course. i still can't seem to get a hold of what's going on around me.

sometimes it's true in real life as well.

i hate having so much time available that i force myself to lay down and think about these things. i look at the ceiling, listen to the ticking clock on the wall, watch the light coming in from the window change positions as cars drive by. i can't seem to think about anything else. the laptop i use makes a whirring noise as i type, and the thoughts in my head seem to make a kind of whirring as well, and no amount of deep breathing will help it slow down.

i can't daydream like i used to.

it took me and hour and a half to drive home today

which actually wasn't the longest it's ever taken me to get home. i made sure to blast the music to keep me awake, a hard feat when i only had a few hours of sleep and hadn't eaten anything today. i found myself daydreaming a lot while i was driving, and for a second when i snapped out of it i thought i missed my exit. i looked around and none of my surroundings seemed familiar, but then i realized i didn't recognize any of it because usually i'd be speeding by all those trees and hills. sigh. another long day.

sometimes it feels like i play a different person every time i go to a new class. today i was the chill, sleepy elaine, just waiting till i could get home. yesterday during the lab i was the busy bee elaine, just trying to finish in time. so many other personalities to keep track of. today someone described me as "old soul." what the hell was that supposed to mean? not to say that it was a bad thing; now that i think about it it sounds pretty cool. but what is it? and which personality is my real one? i thought back to what i was like before all this. all last semester i was the shy quiet elaine; if i didn't have a designated seat i stayed in the corner, i had no friends, but i breezed through everything, albeit alone. this semester i have to work a great deal harder: two kitchen labs, classes that actually require me to think, and actually having to study for quizzes. what i am glad about is that i have some kind of friends this semester, even if a lot of them are just acquaintences, and that i have classes with people who are around my age rather than decades older. then i thought back to what i was like before college; i would joke around with my friends and could laugh as loud as i wanted, knowing i definitely would not be the loudest. i was comfortable with the friends i held on to for years and years. why do different surroundings always bring such an enormous turnaround in my personality? i can feel it rush through my head, and i need a lot more time to think about this.

i can't wait till friday :)

rantalicious: a couple of days ago i scratched my face and now i have a hugeass scar/scab right on top of my nose!!! hopefully it heals soon and goes away... it's kinda painful and it's not really something that i can just cover up with makeup :(

p.s. sorry about the whole identity crisis thing, but it was all i could think of today. hopefully it'll satiate your appetite for a look inside my head...

for a second i wanted to be a vegetarian.

actually, more like 45 minutes, or an hour, or however long the chef's demonstration took last night. he tore away at the huge section of cow carcass laying on the counter as he so gently described how male cows are castrated so that they can grow even bigger than nature would allow them. this section alone weighed about 90 pounds he said, and i thought about my friends that were close to the same weight. no wonder why i didn't see the vegan guy anywhere around that day. an entire semester on the cutting, fabricating, and manipulation of animals, and who could blame him for being absent?
as the chef described different parts of the cow, all i could think of is how i would achieve vegetarianism (is that a word?). at first people would think i was crazy, but i would convince them that i wasn't with the horrifying facts about meat. i can't even describe how i felt as he literally sawed through bones that were at least 2 inches in diameter. i never understood what a bone duster was for until then. i tried to tell myself this was just like anatomy class in high school, but i realized that even being in front of those cadavers did not make me as uneasy as this hunk of cow did. "this is where the cows head would be if he had one... MOOOO!!!" i held a sad expression on my face as the chef pretended there were some imaginary cow head attached to the carcass.

some time during the semester we will be working with veal. i have never eaten veal before, not because of choice, but just because the opportunity never presented itself to me. during the lecture the chef only said two or three sentences about veal, but just the idea of it and i started to get sad. a baby cow kept in captivity just for the sake of a tender steak?

what the hell was wrong with me? this is my job, or at least, it will be. i began to think about the dilemma i had before i decided to go into this industry. did i really want a job based entirely on gluttony? one of the seven deadly sins? when we began to cook though, it all came together. nothing seemed as bad as it did before, and even though this piece of meat was once a living being, it seems as if it does more as food than it would just grazing in the grass lazily. i continued to make my beef stew, enough to serve 5 or 6 people. now that we were rid of the carcass i could easily convince myself of the greatness that is meat.

no, i would not be vegetarian... meat tastes too good. for now, though, i'll probably still stay away from veal...

i need a butcher's scimitar.

class FINALLY started again last week. yep, that's right. i need to go out and get more materials, more books, more knives, more everything, and yet i'm having a hard time just leaving the house right now.

i've decided to start up this blog again, mainly because of grac3anat0my (hehehe) but also because i hate that i keep starting these things just to abandon them a few months later. i need to have more commitment, dammit!! okay okay. so there won't be as many entries about food i've made at home, mainly because i'll be actually going to school 5 days a week this semester (i need the credits!), but for sure there will be a lot of entries on my life. like this one!

ranting time!!!

children. right now there are 3 boys living with us, two of them age 8 and one of them age 12. as i'm typing this, they are screaming and playing around in the bathtub. um, excuse me? yeah. i'm not cleaning that up. they'll only stop fooling around in the tub when their parents come along. that's another thing: they are entirely too dependent on their parents. yes, i understand that they are still children, but every time their parents leave them here, all of a sudden they start running around and screaming because they say they're scared of ghosts. that's right. ghosts. joshua, if there were ghosts here, i'm sure they would have just the same chance of haunting you if you were running around as they would if you were just sitting quietly. is it too much to ask for? now, i can understand how it can be a world of difference if the children were my own, but that's just not the case, and it's beside the point. my point is, i am not cleaning that bathtub.

Get a Job (not you, silly, me)

i realize that it has been over a month since i last updated here, and now that the weather is a lot colder and i'm stuck inside the house, why not update now? school is still trudging along, as usual, same old same old. i find myself going to the library more often to borrow books to read in my spare time, which i seem to have a lot of nowadays.

something different, you ask? well, today i applied for a couple jobs at brea mall. i just feel this is worth mentioning because i've never had a "real" job before (you know, the kind that requires a resume). my first intention for going to the mall today was to go to the supposed "job fair" that the woman at puente hills' See's Candy told me about a week earlier. so i go to the mall, and lo and behold, no job fair. damn you, lying old wench!!! *ahem* anyway, it turns out that this "fair" is just a couple days that See's decided they wanted to take applications, and by the time i got there, they had already hired all the people they needed.

by this time, i figure, screw See's Candy, imma find a job somewhere better. which i did. hahahahaa. Godiva Chocolates. i filled out my application as quickly as humanly possible, stuck in my resume (because i figure that an entire empty page for "previous emplyoyment" looked bad but if i showed off all the stuff i did in school then maybe it'll leverage things out) and introduced myself to the manager, who turns out to be one of the nicest ladies i've ever met (take that, See's!!).

i also applied at Charlotte Russe, which i think is pretty sensible, mainly because i love clothes and i shop there all the time (well, i look around mostly, but you get the point). anywho, both of these places don't start interviewing until november, but i'm still totally looking forward to having a job. extra money for the holidays doesn't hurt either. :)

also, since i like to consider this a "food" blog (teehee) i wanted to talk about this cake. the ginormous cake that Orange Coast College had for their 60th anniversary, which was actually last month. it was 1000 lbs-- i heard someone say 3000, but who knows how they weigh this thing-- and you probably can't grasp the size of it through the crappy cellphone pics, but that was all i had at the time, and i HAD to take a picture of it to show someone.

look at that monster. you should make sure to note the really gigantic bottom layer, which was too big to capture in it's entirety with my cellphone. also, a pic of those random girls to compare for size. haha
a picture of the gigantic slices they were handing out. this was after i took a few bites of course, and then realized i should take a picture of it. you can't really tell the size from this picture, but lemme just tell you-- it was so big that i could only eat half (that's half a slice) and eventually had to get rid of the rest somehow because my stomach was starting to hurt... one of the most shameful moments of my life.