BakeryWorld

I'm not sure that three dried apricots, a prune, two crackers with cheese, two cookies, and a half a glass of wine really count as "dinner," but it's going to have to do.

What I would have liked to have done today:
Get up "late" (i.e., some time around 5:30 or 6:00), make a cup of tea, read my email, finish an editing job, leisurely begin the end of the other editing job, practice some yoga (or even go to a class!), get a massage, sit in the sun in the window of a cafe and read "The Mists of Avalon" while sipping some hot tea, and have a lovely dinner somewhere, perhaps with a friend.

What I did instead:

• Pounded 36 pounds of butter into rectangles (3 pounds per rectangle)


• Put the frozen croissants for tonight's bake onto sheet pans and racks so there would be room in the freezer for today's dough


• Cut 144 (or so) pounds of dough into 12-pound chunks, put each chunk on a sheet pan and cover it with plastic, and put each into the aforementioned freezer


• Counted the croissants on hand and tried to figure out a production schedule that takes into account Saturday's market, next week's holiday (no market Wednesday, which is good, but the bakery is closed Wednesday, which means no production happens on that day and no dough for Thursday gets made


• Fixed some Excel spreadsheets for Bossman


• Cleaned the dough sheeter


• Laminated the aforementioned chunks of dough with the aforementioned rectangles of butter (takes about 90 minutes to 2 hours)


• Pulled a stack of sheet pans and put paper on each one, in preparation for the Festival of Plain Croissants


• Took a brief hiatus from that task to help Phil with the sourdough rolls while Woody mixed some dough


• Made eggwash


• Put a second fold in each piece of dough


• Took a 20-minute break (it being nearly 1:00 pm by this time) and tried to reach a friend so we could plan food for Saturday night, failed in that task, but read for 15 minutes while chowing on a chunk of sourdough bread with butter


• Began the Festival, which involved rolling somewhere around 830 plain croissants


• Put the last of tomorrow's croissants on pans


• Made a 150-pound batch of dough for tomorrow and put it in the walk-in


• Punched out, not quite 12 hours after I punched in


• Upon arrival at home, edited for an hour and a half, which enabled me to finish one job

As you can see,* this is not exciting. It's not particularly difficult or interesting, and it probably didn't involve nearly as much variety or skill as, say, Brazen Tart's day on the job. It's grueling, and somewhat boring, and did I mention the low pay? The other thing that's been getting on my last nerve is the lack of paid days off. Now THERE'S a benefit you don't think much about until you don't have it any more. Having spent most of the previous 25 years in academia or OfficeWorld, you get used to sick days, vacation days, personal days, whatever the fuck your company calls them. Here in BakeryWorld, you don't get any of that: you don't work, you don't get paid. Of course, in BakeryWorld you also get the fabulous amusement-park ride of Bossman's Spouse--one day she hates you, the next day she loves you!

So fuck it, I say. As I've noted before, and as my conversation with J reminded me yesterday, I realized 10 years ago that I didn't want to work 80 hours a week.** At the time, I was contemplating trying to get a big-dollar consulting-type job (not that I necessarily would have succeeded in actually getting such a position, but I was thinking about it), and I realized that, while a six-figure salary would be nice, I really didn't want to work that many hours. Turns out, not only do I not want to work those hours for a six-figure salary, I really REALLY don't want to work those hours for an average of $12/hour. I'm planning my escape. It'll probably be as successful as all of my previous plans--let's not forget that, ten years ago, when I made this big conclusion, I was (a) making about what I'll make this year, most likely, and (b) working about half as many hours, plus I got vacations and such. But I'll take a stab at a new plan--probably two or three simultaneously.
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*I have no idea why the typeface changed after the list, but I'm too tired to try to solve it.
**In fact, I happily would have worked 80 hours/week as a professor, but keep in mind that I wouldn't have been doing so much of the same thing every single day.

More Whining, Followed by Cultural Commentary (Which Is Merely Whining of a Different Flavor)

I had dinner with a friend the other night, and as we wandered over to crunchy-granola-land, I was (what a surprise) moaning about how many more croissants I have to make now that the farmers' markets are in full swing, and our orders are up, and so on. He grabbed my hand and pointed out that people are not buying the croissants to torture me--that I'm GOOD at this. It was very sweet of him, and it made me laugh and refocus, both of which were helpful.

But you know what? Some days--most days, lately--it's just not enough, given the compensation I get in return. I'm looking at my calendar for the next three weeks, and it's ugly. The Students are graduating on Friday, then they're either going away for a vacation, starting the internship, or both, and, of course, the week when I have neither of them to help me is the week that Bossman is taking a class. I've already decided I'm not going in that Monday, despite his class, because he didn't pay me for Memorial Day. (The general principle is that you get paid for holidays that fall on days when you're normally scheduled to work, and, of course, I'm theoretically off on Mondays, but the other principle, for me, is that I've gone in on Mondays, most recently at the end of May, when he's out of town. So: don't pay me for Monday holidays because I'm not scheduled to work that day? Fine, but that means I'm not, in fact, going to work on Mondays.) He's offered to pay me my editing/proofreading rate to write the website on Mondays, and I told him I'd put it on the schedule, and I will, but I don't see it happening any time soon.

I'm wearing out, plain and simple. I've been applying for jobs, but except for the film company (they hired someone else), I typically don't get any response at all. I'm thinking more about what I need to do to do the copyediting and proofreading full time. In short: save up money, which I've been doing as best I can; figure out how much I need to have banked to feel comfortable quitting the bakery entirely; and line up some other publishing companies or clients for whom I can freelance. I have little idea how to go about the last thing, though I used to know an editor at a university press and I intend to ask him, and I'll do some research on it tomorrow. (Also on tomorrow's list: edit the last chapter of one of the current manuscripts; schedule a mammogram; pick up sample divorce papers from the clerk of the court's office; find out what happened to the pants I tried to exchange; call a friend who had a heart attack a couple of months ago; do laundry. So, nothing much, really. The original plan included a trip to a bar tomorrow night, where someone is doing a little cafe thing on sex differences, so I could tell him how wrong he is, but I don't know that I feel like dealing with the shlep home afterwards, which easily could take 90 minutes.)

The real question for me in doing the freelance thing full-time is whether I can get enough work. I'm not worried about being able to do the work if I get it--shit, I'm working nearly 80 hours a week now. If I can find enough work for, say, 50 hours a week, I'll end up making substantially more money each week AND working 30 fewer hours. I don't see how that's a bad thing. And I can keep looking for a full-time "regular" job, too, while I'm at it.

I'm a little afraid of being a full-time freelancer, in that it means I'm always going to be hustling for jobs. I also worry somewhat about the lag between doing the work and getting paid. Occasionally there's a snag in getting paid--an invoice not received or not submitted, say--and about 25% of the time (it seems), a job takes longer than the editor originally predicted, typically because an author has lagged somehow. My most lucrative gig, for example, was supposed to be done by the end of December or maybe early January: I didn't get the last bits until April. If I'd needed that $4k to pay immediate bills, it would have been ugly--hence the need to have a "comfortable" amount of money in the bank.

Really, though, I'm blathering on here so I don't write about the sadness that's been overwhelming me of late. I ignore it most of the time, because what's the point in dwelling on it? And I know it's exacerbated by long workweeks like the one I just had and the ones in front of me. And I'm tired of talking about it to friends, who, I'm sure, are tired of hearing it. I'm also tired of feeling like the world's biggest fucking loser, however. And you know, I can rephrase things in my head, such that I didn't make a bad decision (in going to work for the biotech company; in getting involved with, and--what the fuck was I thinking?--marrying Chuck) so much as I made a decision that didn't work out well, but I end up in the same goddamned place, no matter how you phrase it.

Yeah, okay, whatever.

For our movie review tonight, let me say that i watched "The Devil Wore Prada" the other night. I loved Meryl Streep; she was brilliant, as was Stanley Tucci. But parts of the script made me want to smack someone. Specifically:

Why did the assistant woman have to be all proud of herself for getting down to a size 4? Why did that have to be a plot point after the opening scenes where everyone is mocking her for being a size 6? They could have dropped it after that and it would have been fine, but NOOOOOO, she had to be all bragging about it at the end. I'm sorry, people, but most women are not a size 4. And the Devil can go on at length about how the blue of assistant-woman's sweater is, in fact, a product of the fashion industry, albeit a down-market version, but the high-fashion shit she was selling? What is the point? Oh, wait: to reinforce the notion that women are the sex class.

Why was the Entourage-boyfriend guy's ambition okay--remember he got the fancy-ass sous chef job at the end?--but the assistant's ambition not okay? You can make an argument that fashion is not a worthwhile pursuit, but the movie didn't make that argument at all. You can make an argument that ambition is a bad thing for everyone--but, again, the movie didn't make that argument (and, to be fair, assistant-woman DID get a Dream Job in the end, but one that she only got because of the experience with the Devil). You can make an argument that some kinds of ambition are destructive to the people around you, and, ultimately, to yourself, or you can choose not to participate in certain (kinds of) rat races--but the movie didn't make those arguments. What we saw was ambition in a woman being a bad thing, especially when that ambition meant she wasn't around to Take Care of Her Man and Attend His Birthday Party. (No one seemed to mind the ambition when it resulted in expensive gifts for them.)

And I still haven't made up my mind about "The Corrections." I'm still reading it, but the I-don't-believe-that-part bits are piling up in the corner. For one example, the gun artist's stuff? Doesn't seem right to me. I do not claim to be an expert on parental grief, despite my first-hand observations, but that whole section did little except annoy me with what appeared to be efforts to be clever. That, really, is what's piling up in the corner: too many efforts to be clever, such that even the ones that succeed irritate me.

Yes, a Second Post This Week!

Years later than everyone else, I'm finally reading "The Corrections" by that Franzen guy, and I haven't decided what I think about it yet. On one hand, he has some wonderful writing going on there--funny, evocative, lots of detail without that Cormac McCarthy thing going on (I tried, i really did try, to read Cormac, and he put me to sleep)--but I don't know whether he really likes his characters. (Tom Wolfe, for example, hated all of his characters in "Bonfire of the Vanities," which is the last book of his I tried to read, and I eventually wanted to thonk it against the wall because of it.) Yes, they're a little absurd, but aren't we all? So that could be okay. The one thing that's making alarm bells ring just the teensiest bit is the magical way that one of the main characters gets out of the huge mess he's dug for himself. One of the reasons I love Richard Russo's fiction as much as I do is that we get to see his characters--for whom he has much affection, because of, as well as in spite of, their absurdities--muddle through their messes. Sometimes they find a peace of one kind or another, but no magical fixes. So we'll see.

Meanwhile, Bossman's wife has made a liar out of me. I was sure that she was hatin' on me lately, but yesterday she came up to me and made it a point to say how much she appreciates me, for my consistency and reliability and something else (I couldn't quite make out what). I suspect that Bossman had made it clear that I'm humping away, magically producing nearly 4000 of the best croissants in the city, pretty much by myself, and, by the way, helping out Phil and (this past Saturday, because Phil kept bugging me) making pizza. In the face of that, my not doing the customers' orders for Bossman rather pales.

We've got two new people around the bakery these days. One of them worked there years ago, and he's pretty much an okay kid (early 20s, I think, so I think of him as a kid). He's reasonably competent, though he screwed up my croissant dough--in ways that we couldn't figure out how--three days running when he started. He mostly focuses on bread--and he leaves after about 8 hours. Which, okay, whatever, but when the fuck am I going to get some help during the week? Student 2 has been coming in on Saturday with Student 1, and he's going to start full-time after graduation (end of June) and his trip to Paris (early July), and he's meanwhile going to come in on Thursday and Friday after school, as well, which should help with the Thursday Festival of Plain Croissants and the Friday Market-Preparation Clusterfuck.

The other new hand is the 19-year-old son of one of Bossman's best friends (who also owns a bakery), and he is getting on my last nerve. He kind of means well, but he is So Fucking Slow. Seriously; he makes NP (who actually improved over time) look like a fucking genius. And he's just clueless. He's all proud of himself for working an 8-hour day and working at "his" bakery on weekends, but, I hate to tell you, I worked two jobs the summer I was his age, and (a) neither was for a "friend," meaning I had to actually, you know, work, and (b) I needed to earn the money, meaning I had to actually, you know, work. He's basically playing bakery. I, on the other hand, have 11 to 12 hours of work to get done each day, and I don't have the time to deal with him or teach him shit. Because you know what? After 8 hours he punches out, no matter what work remains to be done. (He wants to not get caught in traffic, and go work out, and so on.) I have never met anyone who can stand around as much as he can. And I think the thrill is wearing off, despite the small amount of work he does. That is, when he started a couple of weeks ago, he was all excited, but, let's face it, he doesn't want to work particularly hard, and no one's going to make him work particularly hard at our place, and he's not going to lose his job if he doesn't work hard, so he just lollygags, and chats, and leans, and plays bakery.

Oy.

I wish Brazen Tart would come work for us instead of suffering the craziness at the restaurant (and the hotel). She'd get so much done, in no time at all, that she'd make the rest of us look like slackers. And my opinion about the craziness, since she asked? The restaurant chef is insane, and why do you need that insanity in your life? Leave, already. Or, alternatively, have what my old boss called a come-to-jesus talk with her and tell her you really don't have time or patience for that shit. (Brazen Tart is MUCH nicer and more diplomatic than I am, so it would come out sounding much better.)

Muscle and Machine

I love this time of year: the sun seems to be up forever (and it mostly is, given that it starts getting light before 5 am and doesn't get dark dark until 9) and it's warm without that underlying knife-edge of cold that seeps in in April and sometimes May and definitely October, but it's also not unrelentingly hot. I'd say the weeks around the summer solstice are my favorite time of the year.

I still spend most of my time working these days, though--after more than 55 hours at the bakery, I spent four or five hours yesterday and another nine or so hours today slogging through the manuscript. (I'm seeing proofreading marks in my head.) I also watched three auto races in less than 24 hours (the Indy car race Saturday night, the Formula 1 race at noon on Sunday, and the Champ Car race at 3 on Sunday), which was interesting as well. I'm getting to know a little bit more about the courses and drivers and such, and I've realized that what I like about it, in addition to the raw speed of the whole thing, is the interesting intersection between human and equipment.

With handball, for example, there's not a lot of equipment: eye guards, gloves, gym shoes, shorts, t-shirt. The rules even specify acceptable versions of much of that, meaning one simply isn't going to get an advantage from the equipment. Presumably steroids would help with the body, but even there, if you don't get to the ball, you can't hit it. Fitness certainly helps, especially at the top level, but I've also seen people who could stand to drop a few pounds--or someone who was pregnant with twins--play spectacular games. In short, it's a game that's more about the human than the equipment, and the human doesn't have to be some finely chiseled specimen to play and win.

Football often seems to me to be the worst combination of human and equipment. The players wear a bunch of protective equipment, and, over the last decade or two, have begun to add physical poundage such that you essentially have multiple collections of 300-plus pounds of flesh hurtling at each other. And, as George Will once noted, the game itself can be described as violence punctuated by committee meetings.

In baseball, it's obvious--from the home run shenanigans of recent years, in particular--that players can modify their bodies with steroids in ways that affect the game. Nevertheless, it is possible to play well and to succeed without steroids, and it's possible to be both normal-sized and good (something that's not possible in basketball or football).

With racing, though, the machines obviously make a big difference--though more in some series than others, in that, in some series, all the drivers drive cars with the same specs. What you get is an interesting nexus of driver, vehicle (teams with more money have better equipment and better crews), and engineering, all at very high speeds. You can have the best driver in the world, and if the car sucks, s/he isn't going to win. Conversely, faster/better cars need good drivers at the wheel.

Anyway.

I've been diligently applying for jobs and such, and trying not to panic. The "don't panic" injunction works some days better than others. But hey, my anniversary is coming up, which means we'll have one less piece of paper to file when we file for the divorce (working on that, too). (In this state, if you've been married less than two years, you have to file an additional form of some kind.) Next week's project involves going to the Clerk of the Court's office and getting the papers to file. And editing, of course.

Random Notes

Let's see . . . since I last showed up in this space, I've gone to the Indy 500 (in short: really, really fast), worked somewhere around 115 hours at the bakery, stayed up one night--until 7:30 am--drinking wine and talking to a friend (just this past Saturday, which meant not nearly as much editing got done Sunday as I would have liked), and had a job interview (at a film production company that's looking for an administrative assistant). Yesterday I even managed to clean the bathroom (which had turned into a godawful pit) and do the laundry. I'm still not as caught up on my proofreading as I'd like to be; I have a batch due next Wednesday, and I've only scratched the surface.

May I also add that this particular manuscript is written hideously. The copyeditor apparently isn't as much of a martinet as I am, in that s/he allowed to stand some truly heinous writing. The writer and copyeditor also aren't so good about keeping subjects singular or plural (e.g.: The patient has to decide what is best for them.), and apparently don't know that the past tense of "lead" is "led." It's kind of a train wreck, but since it's already gone to the composition people and I'm supposed to be only proofreading it, I hesitate to do any more than correct egregious errors. But have I mentioned that the writing sucks AND blows? It makes me wonder, too: I worry about my own copyediting, which I mostly do electronically--which, I'd argue, is much harder to make neat and much harder to format, but substantially easier in other ways. Because I tend to get things in batches--and, therefore, often have to send things back in batches--I don't always realize in, say, Chapter 2, that I'm going to want to format or write something differently when I get to it again in Chapter 5, and, by the way, Chapter 2 is already gone back, so tough luck. It's not clear to me how many passes a given manuscript gets, so that could be less relevant than I think it is, but it still worries me.

I have long said that chocolate and raspberries are two of my three favorite things. I think I might have to make the list longer, though, to add ginger and honey. Thus, the bar of Green & Black's chocolate with ginger in it is transcendent, and if were a less prudent person, I'd eat the whole damned thing right this minute and run out and get another one.

I saw Chuck briefly yesterday, so he could borrow my tent for a scout camping trip with his son. Chuck looked like shit, and when I asked if he was okay, he said no, but that it I didn't have to be concerned about it any more, and he didn't want to talk about it with me. Whatever. He really did look haggard. I know I'm supposed to be working on the divorce papers, but I simply don't have the time right now. When I'm not making croissants, I'm editing, sleeping, or, occasionally, recreating a little, and all of those things need to take precedence. The last batch of the current crop is due June 25th, so I'll be able to get to the divorce paperwork on June 26th, maybe--our anniversary. Eh; whatever. I'll make the time for the divorce crap, and soon. It breaks my heart, still, but not because I want to reconcile. Maybe I'll have a new job soon, and thus have more time for stuff.

I'm neither particularly hopeful nor excited about the film production company job--it's pretty simple, and involves things like answering phones, tracking packages, ordering lunch (the company buys lunch every day), running the dishwasher, making coffee, etc. I have no idea what I'd say if they actually offered it to me. On one hand, I'd perhaps go out of my mind with boredom--it's a very small company, and I do not see how they would fill up my days, even when they're in production. On the other hand, if they offered me a little more than I'm making at the bakery, for, say, 10 to 15 fewer hours per week of work, it'd be mighty tempting, just to get the hell out of the bakery. On the other hand, if I can manage to hold out a little while, I could add $10k to $15k to what the film people are likely to offer, were they to offer to me. Or maybe not. I suck at this.