The year away from school was awkward for me, I had two choices before me and one was to just work dead end jobs the rest of my miserable existence or to take the last year worth of college savings I had into a one year course to try and turn this shit around. I went with the latter and opted for something completely different. I took a one year chef training course. Cooking is something I kinda knew how to do before even going to University and after my grandmother's death I was in the habit of cooking literally every day to feed my grandfather anyways and it was the one constant in my life during those 3 years where I could just forget about how bad I was doing in school for an hour a day. I didn't retreat into cooking like I did with gaming, it was a more constructive and healthy hobby.
I get accepted into the program and once again I find myself back with my grandfather who at this point is being taken care of by my aunt and uncle and their grandchildren because of the progress of his dementia accelerating to the point he can't actually leave his own home without getting lost. By the way when I say grandchildren I mean a toddler and a four year old who are in protective custody because my cousin has a knack for picking coke addict boyfriends to have unprotected sex with and it's not a good look when child protective services checks in only to see the father cutting lines of coke on the dining room table next to a preschooler and a toddler. But now I'm off topic again. I take the program, I do well in my classes and am consistently top of my class in all the written assignments and tests but I'm rather middle of the road in the kitchen itself. I started to get comfortable in the program and once again subconsciously found myself slipping into that zone where I'd be fine spending the rest of my life in this situation even though I only have maybe 2 hours to myself every day and those two hours I wasn't in any position to be recording which is why I took that nearly year-long hiatus in 2014-2015. It wasn't till the final practical exam that I once again had life bitch slap me in the face.
Chef training practical was simple, just create a three course meal and dessert to be graded on with a $25 budget. So I get my ingredients in place to be ordered and everything's on track until I get a phone call the day before my practical. It's my parents, apparently my grandfather on my mother's side had terminal cancer, with multiple tumors in his brain, colon, and kidney. Yeah needless to say that completely destroyed me so thanks for timing that reveal. I went into my practical the next day completely distracted by that, so when the chef who supplied us all with our ingredients cut corners on the stock and gave everyone a flawed stock on purpose to fuck with people I straight up wasn't even thinking of tasting the stock before and was in full autopilot. This oversight combined with a few technical errors under pressure almost cost me my practical exam which would have seen me fail the course. I got a pity 50% on my practical which dropped me from an 85 to a 70 for the class and lowered my gpa to below 4 but I still graduated the program and as it turns out a restaurant in my hometown was looking for a chef from the program to come in and work for them. So I'm set up to actually work in a kitchen and get decent wages right?
Well it's never fucking simple because fuck you I guess. That's just how life is. For context I never actually had a job up to this point, with my social anxiety and desire to avoid being in uncomfortable situations I straight up avoided anything that required interacting with customers directly. I just can't see myself being the face of anything, I've always wanted to be a behind the scenes presence and let the people who have the patience and will to interact with others do that stuff. Turns out this chef job in town they just threw me in cold thinking that I was working in actual restaurant kitchens in college or something and not realizing that it was a 50 person program and the actual restaurant setup in the program had at least 15 students cooking within at all times so there was never a one man scenario back there. I was not prepared for the sheer volume of orders and through this experience I realized I have a massive inability to multitask effectively across orders. It's one thing when you have a minute to sort out order of operations for what you need to complete one order, it's another entirely when you're alone and have a waitress breathing down your neck bringing another order every three minutes and you just don't have time to stop and think you just gotta do it or sink. I sank and after not even a month I was fired. Turns out good grades are not a reflection of your ability to function in society. To this day this still pisses me off even though it's been almost 4 years since I last had a full time job. I actually enjoy cooking and life once again basically told me that I can't be successful at the thing I enjoy. What the fuck do I do then? I tried applying to other restaurants in town but they all turned me down so I can only assume I got blacklisted by my last employer. So yeah there goes the one shot I had at getting a job I could not only tolerate but actually enjoy on some level.
Six months go by, my grandfather passes away of terminal cancer followed a month later by my great grandmother who literally outlived all of her friends in life including her own son before slipping into a deep depression and succumbing to a common cold that she lacked the strength or will to fight off anymore. There's a lot of details in this part that I've mentioned to a couple people before, I think? The gist of it is my social anxiety with public functions kicked in super hard for both of these events to the point I almost couldn't even be a pall bearer for my grandfather's funeral due to stress related nausea, and I outright couldn't even get my suit on for my great grandmother's before dry heaving uncontrollably at which point my parents were just like "yeah no you literally can't do this". More resumes to restaurants and more lack of callbacks, and by summer 2017 my sister is going off to art school for a graphic design degree or something leaving a job opening at my parents church for a custodian. That's how my chef training degree got me a part time custodial job. Literally overqualified for a job that can only pay employees for up to 4 hours of work a week at minimum wage. I barely make anything with this job, basically enough to pay rent to my parents and have almost nothing leftover. I do cater a bit on the side for the same church but they're not very busy so at most I might make like an extra $240 a year on top of that piss poor weekly rate and that cash is basically what I use to buy stuff for myself. Yes effectively I only have about $240 in actual spending money per year at the moment and once that's gone it's gg for me buying anything for the year. This doesn't count the actual government tax returns and stuff I get for being in low income hell, and every day I'm just glad I didn't fall into the student loan scam because I'd have been homeless over 3 years ago if that was the case.
And this is where I remain to this day.
If anyone's even still reading this here's my advice on post-secondary education. Don't bother unless you know what you want to pursue, and even then fund it with your own money or borrow money from your parents, don't do loans unless you want to risk going homeless if shit fails. Even if you know what you want to do, make sure you are as prepared as possible to actually do it. Learning how to do a job in school isn't the same as actually having experience in the workplace and it never will be. No amount of post-secondary education is going to teach you how to cope with workplace pressure because school pressure is very different and you're given a much wider window to get your schoolwork done than you'd ever be given in the workplace.
I'm not arrogant enough to claim my failure is a result of the education system alone. Not at all, I actually am very happy with the stuff I learned and I still use everything I learned in that chef training program daily to cook for my family. The program actually improved my life from where it was before. However, the program does not guarantee you'll be able to hold down a job but it can guarantee you'll get job offers even before graduating officially. Those are two very different things. I'm just not an ambitious person by nature and have always settled for less under the stipulation that I can maintain access to basic utilities and internet. That's literally all I need to remain comfortable.
Sure I get lonely sometimes which is usually when I slip into writing either fiction or talking to myself through a public blog and pretending anyone's reading it this far past the purgatory of my youtube channel. I believe I've already covered a number of the side effects of my loneliness in prior posts, you know between the furry porn and 5+ years of the same pokemon fanfiction that I think I'm officially killing because of how insanely repetitive and unfollowable it became which just makes me all the more glad I never sent it to anyone.
Well I guess I can mention one I never really talked about here which is with the advent of Smash Ultimate I finally got back into Smash after not touching it since literally subspace in brawl back in like 2008? Either way I mained Lucario through most of spirits mode just because he was one of the earlier unlocks I got and I got used to using him. As you can probably guess the little furry bastard force palmed his way into my dreams and I started doing something I hadn't done since college which is sleeping with a pillow beside me just to feel like I wasn't alone. This time though I went a step further and wrapped the pillow in the warm fuzzy blanket I got as a Christmas gift alongside smash ultimate which is like the AR version of my one weird pillow trick as it now feels like I have something warm and fuzzy at my side. Yeah I'm at the point where I pretend to be sleeping beside figments of my imagination for comfort, because I've 0 confidence in anyone existing out there who'd even want anything to do with me let alone be able to satisfy what I want in a partner. Depression and social anxiety coalescing in an unholy union to make me a permanent undesirable in the eyes of modern society which only furthers my escape from reality.
I'm not at rock bottom but I can see it from here.
And that's my answer to "So how are you doing?"
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