Feeling sick today about school.  I can't count the number of times I have had to go to either school or work and have dreaded it for one reason or another, which has led to terrible upset stomach issues that start hours before I get out of bed. 

If it's not that, it's noisy neighbors or hungry cats that pretty much ensure I am awake at 3:30 every motherfucking morning.  This morning it was cats, then stomach.  Today I'm dreading returning to production and having to get into a new swing all over again.  I've got two days to master skills in which I couldn't feel confident until I'd practiced them for a year.  This sort of psychotic pace is just not for me. 

Which I think brings me to my most prescient issue.  

Last week I had this conflict with a fellow student and it went on for two days.  This relatively useless bitch with an attitude problem kept dumping it on me by speaking to me as if I were too stupid to follow normal conversation, and had absolutely no positive encouragement to offer.  Even when she offered criticisms, it was just that.  Only criticism.  No encouragement, no guidance, no leadership.  

I was really pissed after it got worse and worse for two days whilst I continued to try to keep it cool, calm, and professional.  By the end of the second day I was explosive at home.  Carlos was commenting that I was more angry than usual.  I tried to sleep, and did so fitfully until about 4am, when I finally could not sleep anymore and had to get up and try to write a very thoughtful, very professional email to my chef asking for his assistance.  There's a student code of conduct, as well as a "culinarian's code" that we are provided when we enter the program, and this cow was violating it repeatedly, in spite of my attempts to deny my true feelings, which were to grab that twat by the throat and pin her to the wall and explain flatly that I can understand her better if she speaks to me like I am at least her peer, lest I should snap her fat neck.  OF course, even thinking about that makes me feel so ugly and awful that I *know* the choice I must make is to keep it cool as possible, but what the holy hell is a person to do when they go to the authority and the authority says "Hey, you need to grow a thicker skin.  That's industry."  

Well, personally, I told chef exactly what I think about that - it's a lazy answer.  Without missing a beat, he said "Well what do you want me to do about it?"  I was unable to answer him at that time, because the situation had become so fucked (he had by this time sent away the other student and was focusing on me as a problem, offering that I should try meditation or breathing exercises to get my emotions under control) that I had shut down and wasn't listening any longer.  So I went away and cried and yelled a while in someone's office, then returned and finished the day.  He complimented me twice on what a great comeback it was.  *eyeroll*  

Well, today I just feel like screaming at him that I want him to uphold the student code of conduct and culinarian's code, encouraging and if necessary enforcing an environment reflective of those ideals, rather than telling me that I'm somehow the problem, and that I should grow a thicker skin and get used to it because it's industry.

It's really not, after all.  It's not everyone's fate that we'll all have to take a shitty job for <$10 an hour working on a line in a kitchen for a nice restaurant for the next ten years.  That may be the industry HE sees before us, but it certainly isn't what I'm aspiring to.  Caterer, food writer, food psychologist, nutritionist, dietician, food scientist, home ec instructor, church kitchen chef, day care chef, senior home chef.  All of these are possible futures that appeal to me, where I would be largely in charge without having to slave on someone's hot, greasy line and put up with everyone else's bad attitudes.  I'm not sure what I will do.  I know I want to do something where I don't have to cow tow to anyone else's idiocy, and can be my strong, bold, loud, self-de-trop without having to have demeaning conversations which strip me of my dignity and leave me feeling shamed and abused.  I'm capable of making others feel that way, and try very hard not to do that.  I just need the world to return the favor.