Notes from Maine - 2020/10/24
Sometimes it feels like the walls are closing in. There are too many things to do and I’m not making progress on anything. Every day, I wake up with the same issues and they worry me as I go to sleep.
Some people love working at restaurants. I can’t imagine anything worse. As a teenager, I worked at a Sizzler for a while. They start you out at the fry station. Before the bulk of the customers arrive, when the other kitchen staff are working on prepping, the fry cook is expected to do any task that the other employees find too demeaning. Bathrooms, floors, climbing on a greasy ladder to change lightbulbs, anything. For a teenager, that’s all fine. I didn’t mind the work. I still had enthusiasm for getting paid, and I understood that I had to put in some effort to get the check. It all made sense.
Then, after I showed some competence in following directions and following through, they moved me up to sides. That’s when the grind really started to get to me. I don’t mind working hard, but restaurant work is so ephemeral. At the end of the shift, when the lights are shut off and everyone goes home, there’s nothing to show for the effort. Tomorrow, you’ll get the same pile of raw ingredients. Potatoes have to be washed, wrapped in foil, and set in the oven. The butter and shredded cheese have to be mixed and then spread on bread, placed on sheets, and frozen. People in back will be butchering big slabs of meat, making more in an hour than you do all day.
Every job in a restaurant is constantly resetting. There’s no way to get ahead. The only break you get is when you go home to sleep, knowing that tomorrow it will all start again. There’s no grand finish line except for death or retirement, so far in the distance that it’s unimaginable.
I write every day, but I need the ebb and flow of work that comes from starting a book, making progress, and eventually finishing it. I have to be able to look at my shelf and see all the titles that are done. Those books never have to be revisited. They’re finished.
I never had a single moment like that when I worked at a restaurant.
To an extent, that’s what I’m feeling right now. Yes, it’s on a bigger scale, but I feel like everything I’m doing at the moment is going to have to be repeated in six weeks or six months. I don’t have a finish line. I’m not sure where this feeling is coming from. Maybe it’s because the news reports suggest that a surge of cases are going to require everyone to be more wary of infection. I’m not sure how to get more careful. I understand the fatigue that drives people to reject all precautions. I haven’t given in to that impulse yet—not for myself, but for the fear that I might accidentally bring harm to someone else. Now that my father isn’t living here anymore, I’m super careful around him. With all the hospitals and facilities that he has had to visit this year, it’s amazing that he has remained virus-free. Then again, Maine has a fairly low infection rate compared to many places (at least so far). The county I live in has 35,000 people, we’ve seen 79 documented cases, and 0 deaths attributed to COVID so far. I think that’s about 1/10th of the US average.
But, in a more direct way, the fact that I’m feeling unproductive could just be coming from my mother. She’s staying with me right now and she loves to keep busy with projects. After about two weeks, she always gets frustrated that she’s not finishing anything. That feeling can be contagious.
I try to remind myself that the deadlines I’m facing right now are self-imposed.
I try to remember that I am accomplishing things, but big projects take effort and time. Everything takes time.
Hopefully, this is the worst of it.
I have a feeling that next spring is going to feel cathartic. If we can struggle through these next few months, everything will be okay.
Everything will be okay.
