This post is part of the Totally Unrelated blogathon. 

When Stu first asked me to participate in this blogathon, he hadn’t picked a name yet, but in describing the concept, he used the word “fatigued” – as in, the whole point is to write about what we think about when writing about film has us fatigued. And it’s probably foolish for me to admit this, but not only am I familiar with that fatigue – I actually have a back-up plan to combat it. When the days get really long and/or it starts to feel like I have nothing left to say, a little voice in the back of my head says, “Just get through today, and if it’s still bad, you can always go back to selling cheese.” This seems to do the trick.

A week before the 2003 blackout, I moved to New York to go to grad school with a suitcase, a computer, and less than a thousand dollars to my name. I had never been here for longer than a weekend, and knew no one. I was 23 and had nowhere to live, and absolutely no idea how insane that was. I somehow talked my way into a $600 room in a loft in South Williamsburg with seven roommates. I needed a job immediately, and Dean and Deluca was hiring. I wanted to work at their pasta counter––I’d been making handmade pasta, badly, since before puberty, and wanted to get really good at it—but Dean and Deluca’s pasta counter was just an offshoot of their cheese counter, so if I wanted to do one, I had to do the other.

Over the next couple of years, I sold cheese, I waited tables (extremely poorly—I’m a clutz), and eventually went to work at an artisanal pasta factory. I was getting a full culinary education by day, and toiling in academia at night. I didn’t sleep much, and by the end of it, I was friendless and probably clinically insane. And of course, I romanticize it like crazy.

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