Goodbye to All That

Brooklyn rooftop, circa My Youth

So yesterday I had a full blown meltdown. I began the day joking with my co-worker that our job was a bit like low-grade torture and ended it collapsed on the ground in tears, weeping into my phone to my mom and dad that I wish I was dead so I didn't have to wake up so fucking early and scrape mold off a goddamned wooden board and what the hell am I even doing this for I don't know anymore. 

Just, you know, for context. The breadth of my emotions is far-reaching, you see.


As you might have gleaned from the last couple of posts, the last few weeks have been both emotionally and physically demanding. Basically my entire time at Lazy Lady was fraught, weighted with meaning and resonance, and because I never really knew where I stood or how or whether I was progressing, I found myself assuming the worst about myself, never really feeling like I was on steady ground or had mastered much of anything. I knew that beginning at Twig would involve a learning curve, but the exhaustion of feeling out of my depths and generally terrible at everything just got to be a little too much yesterday. 

Where Laini was an awe-inspiring mentor who never stopped being this romantic sign post for me, Michael is less a spirit guide and more a soft spoken, culturally astute army sergeant. In addition to that, he's an insightful and articulate teacher. He asks and expects a LOT but is also totally dedicated to investing IN ME, making sure I know and learn, explaining everything about the process and keeping me involved every step of the way. Just yesterday he casually mentioned that he'd be willing to pay for myself and my colleague to enroll in an online HACCP course, which of course behooves his business but is also just, like, so nice of him. 

When he asks me to please scrub the unventilated brine room floor with peracetic acid to rid it of calcium residue and it feels like I'm being very gently punished for some unspeakable crime I forgot I committed, I have to remind myself that a) if it wasn't me doing it it would be him and he's probably done it himself dozens if not hundreds of times and b) he is paying me a livable wage, feeding me sometimes twice a day, sending me home with all the eggs I can eat, welcoming me into his home, entrusting me with his animals and his very valuable products and generally giving me the kind of cheese education I always wanted, albeit about a year later than I planned. On the one hand, I am so exhausted from this past year that I regret not having gone to him first, when I was fresher and riding the wave of novelty and excitement. But on the other, perhaps the workload would have scared me off without having had Lazy Lady as a foundation. I guess better late than never? 

All of it just started to seem like too much -- too long to have gone without feeling like I'm 'getting it' or doing a good job, too long to go without seeing the fruits of my labor materialize, or even like I know what in the fuck I'm doing. Is that just me being an entitled shit? My body is ravaged, I feel like I've aged a decade in the past 14 months from the strain and stress of it all, and to what end? The more I see what it really takes to run a dairy the more I am doubting my ability to legit do it. Granted, I think I've managed to work for two exceedingly hardcore people  (I say that with love), but I could be wrong ... cheese work is hard work no matter who you are, and if you do it well and according to all the protocols, it's downright grueling.  I am certain that my former life was too coddled and stagnant, but a girl needs her downtime to get loose and, like, moisturize her elbows or whatever dowagers do to combat the ever-encroaching havoc of time's murderous march.

Today was a 4 am start, which is, to use a word my boo Adrian who has a small child introduced me to, zombifying. Once I got over the bizareness of being up and awake and drinking coffee in the middle of the night, things were actually ok ... until I hit a fucking wall around 10am in the midst of a cheesemake and wondered just how in the fuck Michael has been able to function AT ALL on this sort of a schedule for the last like eight years, with a family and a semblance of a life to boot. And yeah, what aBOUT a family? How am I gonna trick some dude into giving me a baby when I spend all my time eroding my cuteness with mold and chemical inhalation and zero sleep, caked in shit and smelling of buck musk? I AM GOING TO DIE ALONE, AND PLEASE LET IT BE NOW.

Is essentially what I was wailing into the phone last night, so obviously my parents aren't concerned AT ALL. This is all coming at a fortuitous time, because I am driving down to New York this weekend to get my shit out of my old place and formally removing myself from the lease on the apartment I inhabited for almost 12 years. ie puncturing a damned hole in the one remaining life raft I had back to that swampy quagmire that is My Old City Life. Mostly I've been dreading this for logistical reasons. But only today as I was driving home from work at 4 pm (yes that's twelve hours look at you doing math!) and going over all the shit I had to do did it dawn on me what this ACTUALLY MEANS. It means FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK that chapter of my life is really truly over, the carefree waithood (thank you BBC) that characterized at least the last five years of my life in New York is done and dusted. Even if I do go back, I can't really GO BACK. Not that I'd want to. It's just a thing I haven't really made my peace with yet despite having over a year to do it. It was pushed back to some dusty corner of my brain to make room for things like spatial logistics and math and cold weather survival.

It's been hard to identify the little nuggets of joy that my life and my job afford in the misty haze of anxiety and depression I've been wandering through. But today was better. Michael had us taste through several batches of cheese and we talked about their different components, analyzed how they were ripening, and he threw around words like "friable" and "syneresis" and I just nerded the fuck out, basking in his articulations. Then I got to nuzzle up on some goat friends, which I haven't had much time to do thus far. I still don't have any super tight bros like I did at LLF (miss you Placey, miss you Spicy One), but I'm working on it. I sought out the girls that I know are destined for the slaughterhouse because I wanted to give them as much love and attention as I could whilst they're still kicking and/or am an emotional masochist. Michael's approach to culling seems a bit more extreme than Laini's, and it's a reality of cheesemaking I abhor. It's still a really hard thing to look an animal in the eye and pet it and know that you are eventually going to make the decision to kill it. I suppose it's the same with pets but somehow this feels different, because you aren't just letting nature take its course, you're manipulating and exploiting it. It's a good lesson in mortality. But that's for another blob post perhaps.

The moral of this fucking insanity is that I lived to fight another day on a goat farm, and I even made some cheese (kinda, I'm still banned from stirring the vat what with my forearm ruined with ringworm welts) and brined some cheese and moved some cheese and successfully moved a hormonal buck back into his pen after he tried to make a jail break. Who the goddamn knows if this is a fight worth fighting or where it will lead. But I know now it won't be back to the city I've loved for all of my adult(ish) life. I've got to face facts and turn in my Official New Yorker duds, and start to inhabit my new role as Tourist. I'll be complaining about the noise, dirt and prices in no time flat.

New York, it's been real.