Finding a Home for the Holidays

Every year, increasingly as I get older, the holiday season arrives on an emotional roller coaster that doesn't really stop until well after New Year's, with an extension through Valentine's Day. Okay. If I'm truly being honest, I'll probably be moody until the spring thaw. Chalk it up to Seasonal Affective Disorder, family baggage, or just plain hormones, the holiday season never ceases to rev me up to the giddiest highs then without warning plummet me down to the lowest of lows. Is it just me? Am I bipolar? In need of a shrink? Or does everyone else get the same warm, fuzzy heartaches around the holidays?


I hate to sound so curmudgeonly on Thanksgiving. After all, this was one of the best Thanksgivings I've had in years. At least better than last year's, when I was brand new to the city, and spent the whole day working the Thanksgiving banquet at Beacon. In spite of the many trials and tribulations I've been facing in the past year, it suddenly dawned on me yesterday that I have so many things to be thankful for. I generally make a habit of appreciating the many gifts in my life, but you know, sometimes when things are tough it's easy for us to lose sight of how lucky we really are. I may be overworked, underpaid and thoroughly exhasted about ninety-five percent of the time, but the people who matter to me are always there, even when I have so little time to spend with them. And I'm so lucky to find myself in two extremely positive, supportive working environments, where I am embraced and appreciated as an employee. Fight as I may to keep myself emotionally detached from my day jobs, I've found myself in a strange place where my life is composed of nothing but those day jobs...and I'm not entirely miserable. I'm creatively and personally challenged and unfulfilled, yes, but the people I'm working with are largely so generous and accomodating and understanding that I'm finding myself becoming more and more charmed by them and more and more guilty for my own lack of enthusiasm.



On Thanksgiving Eve, I worked my usual Wednesday lunch shift, knowing I would have the night off to cuddle with some tea in bed and watch my usual reality TV shows (currently Top Chef and Stylista.) All week, I'd been hearing about the Tabla tradition of the Thanksgiving family meal, which always occured on the day before Thanksgiving, at 4:15, our usual pm family meal time. Each cook in the restaurant, including the sous chefs, brought in one dish to share with the entire staff, anyone who was working, or who wanted to come in to partake. The managers set the entire upstairs dining room for the staff with festive table decorations and champagne flutes filled with sparkling cider. Ty, the Chef de Cuisine, cooked the turkey to perfection and we all piled into the dining room at 4:15. "It may be the most important meal you have this year" said Eric, one of my favorite bartenders. I was excited because I wasn't sure I'd have another Thanksgiving dinner this year. The food was incredible. There must have been twenty five different dishes, all the classics, and some takes on the classics. Some of my favorites included amazing scalloped sweet potatoes that were sweet and succulent, and sous chef Logan's chile rellano, a Thanksgiving tradition from his family in southern California, which struck a chord in my memory as well. It was over pretty quickly, since we had to clear out in time for the first 5:30 reservations.



As I stumbled out of the restaurant into the early evening darkness, my belly bursting and my heart warmed, I marvelled at how unique this display of community was amongst restaurant people. I mean honestly, and I've worked at all kinds of restaurants, I've never known a restaurant to be so accomodating of its employees. Earlier that week I'd gotten called into the managers' office at the end of my closing dinner shift to sit down with Gretchen and Peter (two of my favorite managers, thank God) and chat about my apparent lack of presence on the floor. "You're pretty brilliant when dealing with your tables. Your guests really respond to you. But you seem to be going through the motions on the floor." I immediately got emotional and had to explain to them that I feel like the exception at a place where almost every single front-of-house employee went to culinary school and plans to have a career in hospitality. Every other place I've ever worked has been a temporary solution for ninety percent of its employees. Even at Morimoto, a restaurant of a similiarly high caliber (maybe higher, if you consider cover count and the exposure of having a celebrity chef) every single server and host has another career, be it modelling, acting, music, makeup artistry, instillation art, teaching yoga, you name it. This doesn't make them bad servers. On the contrary, I think the fact that they have rich lives outside the restaurant contributes to the quality of their service. At Tabla, the service is equally as high, if not higher. It's just a different atmosphere, one where every employee is expected to be better than good; they're expected to be exemplary. I didn't think I had a problem with that expectation. I'll always admit first that I admire the staff's committment to and passion for hospitality. It's totally remarkable, coming from my perspective, which was that everyone who worked in service fucking hated it. I always try to adhere to the highest standards possible in everything that I do...unless I begin to feel that it isn't worth it. When my general manager at Lunetta stopped showing any interest in the well-being of any of my co-workers, I had no desire to try my hardest to do my best. In a dramatic episode that ended my affiliation with Lunetta forever, my GM had a similar conference with me, after which I realized I would never care enough about the restaurant to suck it up and try any harder. There was no point in me staying. I had nothing left to gain, and nothing left to give. But at Tabla, as I sat in the office with tears streaming down my face uncontrollably, I explained to the managers where I was coming from--that I was unhappy in my personal life and trying to save money to help improve my quality of living by funding such things as grad school and an apartment of my own, and also completely creatively unfulfilled, which made everything even harder because I knew that I was supposed to be doing something else with my life something I cared deeply about--and they listened! And they showed great empathy! And I told them sincerely that I wanted to improve my attitude because I respected the way they cared about their jobs and how that translated into how well they did their jobs.


So. I'm thankful for the company I'm in at Tabla. Although my heart still isn't quite in it, and I know it never will be. I'm thankful for the role this job is playing at this juncture in my life.


I waddled to the liquor store last night for a cheap bottle of wine to wash down the amazing family meal when I got home, and as I was on my way, I got a call from my friend Elyse about the details of the Thanksgiving dinner she was hosting the next day. Elated to hear from her, I vowed to be there the next day, flowers and wine in hand, to share the holiday with my estranged college friends and friends from Lunetta (where they all still work.) I went home, DVRd the Macy's parade and fell asleep early in my amazing, snuggly new Victoria's Secret robe that I ordered online while at Morimoto last weekend.


The next day, I awoke at 1:00, and cuddled with a glass of soy egg nog and a Greenmarket blackberry pie for breakfast, and watched the parade commercial-free before dragging my tired lazy ass out of bed and heading to the Upper West Side. It was a divinely perfect morning off.


Our misfit Manhattan Thanksgiving couldn't have been lovelier. As Elyse wrote in her Facebook status, it was a party made up of lesbians, hipsters and gays, with Alee, Elyse and I living somewhere in the middle. When I arrived, Natalya, our manager from Lunetta, and her girlfriend Tammy had slaved all day in the kitchen with masters of the house Adam and Dennis; Elyse, having been banned from her own kitchen, had mostly been drinking all day; our hipster friends Ryan, Thurman and Ulysses, all former Lunetta servers, were lounging around with cheap Mexican beers in hand (the only beer they could get from the very sketchy East Harlem liquor store down the street); Spadoni was her wacky self, emphasized by organic wine from Trader Joe's; and Tammy and Natalya's tiny chihuaua Missy was nervously weaving around everyone's feet. It was so wonderful to see everyone. I spent the remainder of the hor d'oeuvres session catching up, and by the time dinner was properly served (on no-muss no fuss plastic plates), I'd found myself in a yummy wine haze myself. The food was, again incredible. Halfway through, I definitely regretted having eaten so much the day before, as my stomach still seemed to be in recovery, but the more I ate, the more nostalgic I felt: it was a proper, old-fashioned Thanksgiving after all. We all talked about what we were thankful for, as a non-denominational substution for saying grace, and though we're all struggling to find peace of mind, artistic fulfillment, and financial stability, we all found ourselves to be thankful for the struggle and the opportunity to pursure the things that made us happy, supported by each other in the endeavor.


Around 11:00, Spadoni, Ryan, Ulysses and I stumbled onto the 6 train, dying a little from our gluttony, and I started to feel my sleepy contentment give way to melancholy, the same way it always had when I was a kid, on the drive home from whichever relative's home we had visited for Thanksgiving. I remember sitting in the car, my little brothers passed out on either side of me, listening to Christmas music on the radio and feeling sad for no reason, as if having a premonition of my impending adulthood.


I think the reason some of us are prone to holiday depression is because we're mourning our own loss of childhood innocence. The holidays used to be so simple: Thanksgiving meant turkey, Christmas meant presents, and that was that. As adults, there's the terrifying pressure of finding a home for the holidays, when your childhood home no longer exists, or when it's too far away to get to. Home is one of our greatest losses when we grow up, a sense of knowing where you belong, and that there are always people there to take care of you. My childhood was different than many peoples' in that it was jilted, fragmented and constantly chaotic. But the silver lining was always that I had multiple homes, and each one was filled with people who loved me and wanted the best for me. My heart was torn in two, but each piece was always so full. Now, I feel like my heart has been smashed with a hammer, and some of the smaller pieces have been blown away by the wind, never to be found again. They're part of the earth now, and I'll forever be mourning them. The bigger pieces are easier to see and to hang on to--my spread-out, far awar family, my beautiful, caring friends, spread-out as well, New York, Philadelphia, Vista, Toronto...all my various homes that stay with me even as I'm torn from them. It's becoming easy to see how grown-ups put their memories up on pedastals. My memories are starting to feel like pieces of myself that I've lost and can never get back. Even as I make new memories, I can't help mourning the old ones.


I should have felt happy and stuffed and fallen into bed and to sleep instantly upon arriving home. But instead, I entered my empty apartment and felt, for the first time in a long time, lonely. I crave alone time, time to be with my thoughts and try to sort them out, time to decompress from the stimulation of the world outside. My room is my sanctuary, everywhere I go, everywhere I live. I'm usually elated to come home to an empty apartment. But tonight, I wished that Matty wasn't home in Syracuse so we could stay up chatting, or cuddle and watch a movie. I wished my father and stepmother and brother had called me from California to say hi. I wished my friends weren't all working on my birthday next week. I wished I had the strength to put myself out in the world more forcefully, without fear of rejection and ultimate loneliness.


I know these feelings will pass. Ultimately, I've come to realize that the only way I've been able to take any of the risks I've taken in my life, regarding my career and my own personal pursuit of happiness, is through realizing the support of my family and friends. I know I'll always have a place to go for Thanksgiving, now matter where the coming year takes me. I'll wake up tomorrow and I'll realize that and I won't mind working a double at Morimoto. Everything in my life is temporary...except the people who matter.


Damn the holidays. They make me so thankful to be alive, and yet yearn so badly for the things I cannot find.