Terrible, Beautiful Sparks in Space

If you are scared of something, do it anyway. If you feel anxious, you must do things that make you scared. Get out of your comfort zone. Tell your fears they are wrong. Act as though you are not afraid. Ignore, ignore, ignore, silence, silence, silence.

It hurt me-- it is a horrible psychological weight to carry for a child to be certain that she will suffer unbearably over and over and that she will never deserve sympathy or compassion for it-- but it is also fundamentally incurious and disconnected.

If your body expresses something that is inconvenient or hard to understand, just silence and ignore it, because the things the body wants are wrong and the things the body communicates are false.

Look, I got to thinking about this when reading scientific articles about nutrition.

So much research is conducted about why people eat foods that are Wrong and Bad. But the research is conducted around an already-known truth, like a tree that has grown around a metal fence: people eat wrong and bad food because people like pleasure and avoid discomfort, and "bad" foods are pleasurable whereas healthy foods are not.

I feel a hole big enough for the wind to howl through: the joyful table, the raw ecstasy of staining my fingers with raspberries in the thicket, the peaceful bubbling of soup on the stove, salsa canned from vegetables in our garden. Stir-fried wild mushrooms, pawpaws messily devoured in the woods, the fragrance of soil and green and growing things. Curry powder. Smoked paprika. Ginger. Allspice. Garlic and onions hitting a hot pan. Nourishment. Connection. Caretaking. Safety. Pleasure. Pleasure.

Why does nobody ask, What is the goodness of food? What makes food good? Why does nobody say, Let's explore and study that goodness. Let's understand it deeply. Let's investigate the pleasure we feel, the condition of satisfaction of the things our bodies crave and need, the sense of belonging and interconnectedness that is present when good food is shared among friends. What does it mean to be nourished? To be satisfied? To feel peacefulness and comfort in the act of eating?

Comfort must be one of the least understood things in the world. No one is curious about the secrets it may hold.

Why was I burdened with the obligation to get over my fear and never encouraged to explore what would it mean to feel safe?

The goal of the therapy and medications was clear, to get my fear to a manageable enough level that I could "function" "normally." Safety was not part of it, the feeling or the reality.

The physiological functions and maladaptive thought patterns of fear were exhaustively discussed and explained to me. They only talked to me about the fear. How to ignore it. How to dominate it. How to force the physiological process of it to stop. How to manage it. How to understand and confound its patterns.

No one talked to me about safety. How it unfolded in the body. What it felt like. How to recognize when I was feeling it.

It was an attitude of profound incuriosity. I was never prompted or encouraged to ask, and no one else in the world seemed to ask: What does it mean for a person to feel safe? What does it feel like when I am safe? What things create that condition of safety? What are my safety needs? How is safety felt in my body? What can my body tell me about what I need to feel safe?

It is this flat, dull insistence that forcing oneself into what causes pain and discomfort automatically orients one in the direction of growth, whereas comfort and pleasure provide no information or guidance.

Wim T Schippers "Peanut Butter Platform" / museum visitors

In 2011, an iteration of this 1969 floor-bound installation was damaged on several occasions while on view at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.

The work itself is true to its name: 1,100 liters of creamy peanut butter spread over a 14x4m expanse on the ground. Unfortunately, this iteration of the piece was installed without guardrails, which led to four separate visitors accidentally stepping onto the artwork.

When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He'd spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.

He'd seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn't consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to "better" or "more important" things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he'd trained me.

But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.

That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.

The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this... and it wasn't just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said

"When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?"

we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight

Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.

Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:

and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever

"This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.

If you don't have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it's done every single time? You can't do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you'll do 160 loads.

[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]

160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you'll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.

And it means you're going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.

For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i'm ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress."

The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he'd spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out... The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.

It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career

Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn't stay any later than he had to.

But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn't really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.

In my younger years I worked at a medical office that managed both mental health and addiction recovery. The company had purchased an empty lot down the road from the building we rented to build a better facility with larger capacity. The CEO worked for months with the architect, and just as they were finalizing everything they happened to let me - who was the receptionist at that time - take a gander at the blueprints. It took all of three seconds for two major issues to jump out at me.

“The receptionist can’t see the waiting room from her desk with this layout.” I said. “It’s around the corner and blocked by a wall.”

“Is that important?” They asked.

“Do you want me to be able to keep track of the patients who are waiting?” I asked.

“Isn’t that what the sign-in sheet is for?” They asked me.

“Not everyone who comes here is signing in for an appointment, some are coming to check in, some people are here for the group therapy and need to be directed to the other side of the building, some people are painfully shy and if I don’t appear warm and inviting they won’t approach.” I explain.

“How often does that even happen?” They asked.

“Every day.” I explain.

“Bullshit.” They said.

“I’m not joking at all. Also, where is the chart room?” I asked.

“Oh, over here.” They said, pointing to a tiny closet on the far side of the building from the receptionist and check out desks. It was tucked neatly beside the CEO’s office. To get there the secretaries would have to go through two sets of security doors and it would be a five minute walk each way.

“Why isn’t it next to the front office, since that’s where the people who use it are?” I asked.

“We had concerns about people just going into the chart room to goof off and not do their work. It takes them away from their desks too much. You should only go in the chart room twice a day - once in the morning to pull the charts for the day, and once in the evening to put way the charts. It would remain locked and the CEO would have the key and let you in to supervise.” They said.

“We pull charts the day before so everything is ready to go and we can alert staff if a patient with additional needs is coming in. We have to go in the chart room every time a patient calls in that’s having a problem with their meds or is in crisis or otherwise has a question for the nurse. We have to go in there every time someone cancels and we are able to fit a waitlisted patient in. We go in there 20 - 30 times a day for legitimate reasons. The only reason any of us has ever gone in there to take a minute was when we got news that a patient had died and we were crying. And even then, we filed charts as we sobbed because no one in this office has free time.”

They stared at me.

“Sit with me for an hour and see what happens up here.” I said.

They took the blueprints away from me before I could keep looking at them, but they took me up on sitting with me. They didn’t last an hour. They changed the blueprints to fix both things I’d pointed out.

Unfortunately, they didn’t let me keep looking at it and they never asked the janitor what he thought, so no one caught the final fatal flaw in the design.

There were no closets in the entire building. Nowhere to put our supplies. And I’m not talking just a place for stationary and pens. I mean no janitorial closet. Nowhere to put paper towels and toilet paper or cleaning products. Nowhere to put holiday decorations or anything at all. They completely forgot about storage of any kind and immediately started eyeballing my hard-won chart room for it.