Everything, apparently (according to my father.)

Once again I find myself wading out into the murky waters of the unknown; to go to Italy for a master degree, or to not?

The application, completed. The transcripts, secured.

My bank account, and overall financial future, not so much.

I got engaged two weeks ago, and have enjoyed celebratory drinks and meals, but looming is the uncertainty about our next chapter together. Will I continue a life strapped into a career that doesn’t inspire me but provides the comfort and stability of a warm home and lifestyle creep?

Since the age of 15, I’ve never not had a job. I waited tables throughout high school, college (even paid my way through senior year on a server salary), and beyond. Since Covid, I’ve enjoyed the perks of the 9-5 office job; fantastic health insurance and a steady drip of income every few weeks.

My partner, though, has taken the less-trodden path. Trudging upwards at a startup has not been without it’s pitfalls as the flexibility and upside potential is not without cost.

Which brings me to today – another year has gone by and another application tab is still open on my desktop, along with Fidelity, Vanguard, Chase, Bank of America and American Express. How many Reddit articles can I write, anonymously asking strangers advice about what they would do in our “net worth and cash flow profile” situation. Is the financial risk of a life of beauty, adventure, and unknown worth the plunge? Will my values hold up when our bank accounts start to retreat?

Only time will tell..

Written on Sept. 2023 on a train somewhere between Naples and Rome.

The graduate school application on my desktop computer is closed, but the imagined experience of attending the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Bra, Italy is alive and breathing fire in my stomach, taunting me. I’ve attempted to complete the application since 2019, freshly plucked from undergraduate life, each year an excuse bubbling up and keeping me from clicking “submit”.

Transcripts collected, recommendations secured, pages and pages of thoughtfulness strewn out, my innermost dreams plucked from my consciousness and formed into sentences and paragraphs explaining why a year of studying anthropology through the lens of sustainable food systems is the logical next step in my journey. 

Excitement looms, disappointment settles, and anxiousness bubbles up. What about my “safe” career in private equity? What about our two kitties? My home and mortgage in Chicago? The love of my life, although willing and eager to join me for a year in the Piemontese hills, is amidst a career just taking flight?

Fear reigns, seemingly overtaking my agency. What if I actually followed my dreams? Would I be doomed to a life of catching up monetarily and emotionally? 

I peer out the window at the Italian landscape and feel the varied sensations within, the Frecciarossa piercing through the countryside like a hot knife through butter. 

Yet, what if this is the best decision I could ever make in my life? What if anxiety transmutes into… excitement?

A journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step – and I know that my life journey will not be spent in a cubicle selling private equity to pension plans. My life will be rich in ‘benessere’ through an industriousness and adventurous approach; challenging, full of learning, trying and failing, and testing my limits. Most of all, it will be MY journey.

Outside the fear of judgments of others and obstacles that lie ahead comes true freedom. 

I turn 27 in just over a week. What will this next year look like? Preparing for the next step in my journey: marriage to my life partner, attending the University I’ve been eager to jump into for 5 years, and experiencing dreams becoming reality. 

Lean into the fear.

Teetering on the edge of reality and the dream world, the artist balances like a tightrope walker on a high wire. Despite bills to pay, rents to be collected, and responsibilities to be tended to, the artist persists outside of the framework as the world churns about.

I used to travel, alone, on a one-way ticket, endlessly wandering. As soon as I boarded a plane to a far-off land, the reality of the world at home would vanish. For months on end, I’d enter and live in a dream-like state on the edge of an alternate dreamscape, still grounded in the notion that the transitory world I was experiencing was indeed temporary. To lose oneself in this state may be existentially threatening, for the real world provides the security and stability needed for a long and fruitful life. The dream world, however, is a realm of reckless abandonment.

Certain “geniuses” of our era somehow have found a way to merge the dream state with reality, living in a state of constant creative tension. For the rest of us, we must strive to find our own balance, between the real and unreal, always striving to keep our footing, aware of the risks and rewards.

A temporary fix, for me, into this dream world while firmly planted in reality is through music, a present meal, or a present moment in time.

Restaurants/Bars as of late that have evoked a “dreamscape”:

• El Rincon de Fabio on Argyle in Uptown
• Kumiko in West Loop

Music that has taken me there recently:

• Lifafa
• Johan Papaconstantino
• Liberato

Keep trying to take yourself there.

Back at home in Uptown, Chicago.

It’s been about a year. This time last year, I was about to purchase a two-flat in Logan Square. Things were all set to close; I rented out my condo in Uptown and prepped to move, but the deal fell through literally at the last minute, leaving Sam (the boyfriend), me, and our two cats with nowhere to live in the coming month.

Nothing like a quick pivot to shake up 2022. Sam and I immediately started searching for an apartment in River North. The thought of renting a high-rise in the clubbiest neighborhood in Chicago didn’t sit right with me, but I was sold by the view of our soon-to-be apartment as soon as the agent opened the door. “Can we move in next week?”

During the early part of the ’22 year, time flew by in a whirlwind. I got appendicitis (ouch!), and a few weeks after recovering from that, I started a new job at a restaurant – Gilt Bar – in addition to my full-time gig at the VC firm.

The job at Gilt Bar was my way of trying to recreate the pre-COVID delight that I enjoyed waiting tables at the northern-burb rustic Italian restaurant, Campagnola. Looking back, I really still consider January – March of 2020 the “Golden Age” in my life thus far. At that time, waiting tables during the weekends, writing and traveling as much as possible during the weekdays, and generally keeping myself active and busy only with things that interested me seemed too good to be true. I literally had that exact thought the final week before lockdown as I walked into work to prep tables for dinner service at 5 PM, “this is too good to be true and simply cannot last”. Like clockwork, COVID locked everyone down and I fell ill. Sometimes intuition has a mysterious way of foreshadowing what is around the corner.

When I walked in for the interview at Gilt Bar in early 2022 and the manager asked me why I wanted to be there given my corporate day job, I explained how table service is like theater, and it’s my job to give guests the best show possible for the evening. I meant it. Wining and dining is something that’d been a constant source of joy since childhood when I kept guests at my parent’s inn quenched and satiated with bottomless coffee and house-made breakfast delicacies.

The period of time at Gilt Bar proved to challenge me emotionally, physically, and psychologically. Long days servicing investors at the VC firm melded into last-minute “on-call” shifts at Gilt Bar, earmarked by the dreaded “$5 Happy Hour” food and drink specials until 5:30, shortage of small plates, and annoying coffee service that would take 10 minutes out of my floor time already stretched thin by an over-assignment of tables. This was not the leisurely, clockwork-like dance of Campagnola, but a fast-paced, high-stress sprint every evening to serve as many guests as possible while keeping my cool. It helped that I’d walk out with upwards of $600/shift – more than a day at work in finance. The 12:30-1 AM clock out, however, (when the shift of night workers would come in to prep donuts for Donut Vault and blast music of all sorts in the basement), was taking a toll on me. How long could this last?

Almost three months into my time at Gilt Bar, my relationship on the rocks, my physical health deteriorating, and my sanity barely keeping it together, I get a call from a recruiter proposing a new role that would eventually become my new day job. It seemed like manifestation: I needed a solid excuse to quit Gilt Bar since my conscience kept me there despite the miserable long nights, but I was getting used to the extra income. This new opportunity seemed to engulf both my day job and my side hustle.

On the same day I accepted the job position at the new firm, I drafted my resignation letter at the firm, literally copied the letter, word for word, and swapped out my previous employer with “Gilt Bar”. An extremely heavy weight evaporated off of me.

That brings us to now – kinda. I’m in the same position as June of 2022, however, Sam and I have decided that instead of inflating our lifestyles with our new jobs, we would scale back, move back to Uptown, and dream a little.

Now, instead of a $200 dinner at Gilt Bar, we get a $50 dinner at Demera. Instead of an $8 latte at Edie’s, we grab a $3 coffee at First Sip Cafe. Instead of $18 orange chicken at Panda Express, $13 Bún bò Huế at any one of the many Vietnamese places on Argyle. Music has come back into our lives again thanks to Green Mill and Aragon Ballroom, and the lakeshore, right outside our doorstep, provides us with an endless supply of trails, trees, and ponderous views through which to contemplate the next steps in our journey.

Since the pandemic ravaged our lives, never have I been more excited for what lies ahead. It feels as if I’ve passed through the 7 stages of grief throughout the last 3 years, and now a reawakening begins, ushered in by the smell of Phở and sounds of Jazz right outside our doorstep.

There’s something different about the air here. 

In the atmosphere there hangs a thickness of sewage. Tourists flock like pigeons; unwanted in space but a seemingly permanent fixture.

Barcelona isn’t the place in my imagination, but what’s happened to this imagination anyways? It’s been in hibernation for three years, slightly reawakened by the smell of Spanish Jamon and gambas. 

Maybe my pre-frontal cortex has run its course of development. Four years ago, the hazy Barcelona air would’ve been distinct, but enchanting. Tourists a nuisance, but romantic.

Today, as I leave the city and ponder what it means to get older and how I’ve reemerged from the pandemic a changed person experiencing the same European dream but from a new psychological, emotional, and socioeconomic standpoint, I feel like I’m slowly coming to peace with my new internal landscape.

Pessoa still resides with me wherever I wander and speaks truths that resonate profoundly:

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd – The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

I muse.

What if I went to the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Bra, Italy like what was planned throughout this Il Caffe journey? A Fulbright research project was never fulfilled.

What if I had continued my musical training and traversed Europe, leaving a string of notes and rhythms behind me along the way? A voice left unsung.

Along these lines, a thousand different realities of my path live out somewhere in an alternate space and time. Dual lives exist simultaneously somewhere else in the labyrinth but live with me now only in my daydreams and nightmares.

Saudade looms. Dreams that never came to fruition due to the unnatural selection of my own future; an accelerated trajectory into adulthood and the 8-5 life, spurred by the pandemic that condensed 3 years of growth into 3 months. Self-inflicted manipulation of my own development into the path that I told myself I’d never take. 

With the newfound 6-figure job and Private Equity title comes a desensitization towards my own internal compass. I am avoiding the self-realized lessons that have been transcribed in these virtual pages throughout the years; trudging forward against my own will. A robot, living a life not even resembling a lucid dream.

Multiple identities will duel internally – which one will win?

DISCLAIMER – White Woman Lamenting Below. Proceed with Caution.

$18 Million Dollars.

$18 Million Dollars.

$18 Million Dollars.

The amount my team has raised this year for the Fund. Who have I become?

Homeowner X2 (upcoming), Cat Owner #2 (newfound joys), and a life with concerns related to the accumulation of wealth and comfort in opposition to self-imposed financial decimation and self-declared freedom from the “typical path” in pursuit of all things beauty via sound and taste.

Where’s the appreciation for Good Food? Now there’s anxiety when the check comes, even though I can afford luxurious delicacies more than ever.

What happened to the dream?

Was the dream even real? COVID cut the fantasies short and led me to a life of “building” instead of “growing”.

Unnatural selection of my future.

Let gratitude be the antidote to dissatisfaction?

The metallic, crinkly Pop-Tart wrapper stuck to my fingers as I ripped open the package. Crumbs fell onto my gown. I quickly scoffed half a tart down, hoping the doctor wouldn’t come into the room to witness this embarrassing ordeal.

The artificial, cardboard texture of the Pop-Tart is faint consolation for the gravity of this ER visit. Not that I’m dying, but the culmination of five months of suffering and an uptick in post-COVID complications led me and my Zoom doctor to believe it was a prudent choice to present to the emergency room.

I never eat Pop Tarts, but who am I lately, anyways?

An Ayla without a restaurant life, without a musical community, and creating a new vision of a future with the changing tides on a weekly basis.

I ponder the current circumstances while munching on the Pop-Tart, eyes fixated on the hospital clock in front of me.

7:36, just about dinnertime.

Pop tart for dinner? The idea, to me, seems horrific enough to warrant a trip to a mental institution, let alone the ER.

I throw the other half away. Hunger suddenly evades me.

The doc comes in. Typical post-COVID diagnosis: long-term complications that haunt its victims for months to come. The coronavirus is a bitch of a virus, leaving long-lasting physical and mental scars that keep its victims wondering if good health will ever return. Are the chest pain, inability to take a fulfilling breath, and concussion-like mental fog going to become the new normal for the next 6-12 months?

There are no answers.

V shape, U shape, L shape; OH MY!

We are quarantined and probably going a little stir-crazy, so let’s allow our minds to wander a bit.

What will the future look like? Economists, public health experts and analysts from across industries are working around the clock to parse together models for the next few months. When and how will we be able to open up the economy again? What industries will need continued stimulus? How can we keep our airlines, supply chains, and love lives intact? What entrepreneurial and investment opportunities are begging to be taken advantage of while markets and sentiments are low?

Will we need to go to the office anymore? Will companies “go lean” and cut out unnecessary roles, office space, and streamline efficiencies?

What kind of a future will we live in?

All this future talk reminds me of a class I took during my second quarter at Northwestern University co-taught by the president, Morton Schapiro, and Professor Gary Saul Morson.

This was no ordinary class; our professors actually wrote a book based from it:

Click here to view/purchase

“Will the future be one of economic expansion, greater tolerance, liberating inventions, and longer, happier lives? Or do we face economic stagnation, declining quality of life, and a techno­logically enhanced totalitarianism worse than any yet seen? The Fabulous Future? America and the World in 2040 draws its inspi­ration from a more optimistic time, and tome, The Fabulous Fu­ture: America in 1980, in which Fortune magazine celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary by publishing the predictions of thought leaders of its time.

In the present volume, the world’s leading specialists from di­verse fields project developments in their areas of expertise, from religion and the media to the environment and nanotechnology. Will we be happier, and what exactly does happiness have to do with our economic future? Where is higher education heading and how should it develop? And what is the future of prediction itself? These exciting essays provoke sharper questions, reflect unexpectedly on one another, and testify to our present anxieties about the surprising world to come.”

This book is the perfect read during your quarantine.

The Essays:

Massimo’s spirit and philosophy of food can help us all get through COVID-19 times a little more satisfied.

Take a look:

Acclaimed Italian chef Massimo Bottura is cooking up a storm in his private kitchen for the entire world to see via Instagram.

Not only is he the creative force and energy master behind Osteria Francescana, he is also the leader of the non-profit Food for the Soul, which empowers communities to support sustainable food practices and advocates for ethical and healthy food systems through building culture.

In addition, he was featured on the insanely popular Netflix food series Chefs Table as the headliner of Season 1 Episode 1. If you haven’t seen this show, please please add it to your quarantine binge list:

Why am I glorifying a World’s Best chef at a time when some people are struggling to put a single, humble meal on their table?

Massimo’s fandom and success is because there is something deeply profound from his sharing of adventure and happiness through food with the world.

In a time where America is spending many more hours in their home kitchens than usual, the collective national spirit is being cultivated over sentiments shared in our kitchens and at our dining tables.

Trends are emerging from the stresses of these times:

Comfort food consumption is at an all time high, for better or worse for our waist lines, and we are indulging more than ever in nostalgia and experimentation.

Home made bread is everywhere to stamp out the gluten-free geeks and sourdough starter communities popping up all over.

A new social media app, Tik Tok, sparked a trend for a 3-ingredient DIY Korean artisan coffee recipe:

We can’t fill special food moments at the coffee shop or bakery because of quarantine. Therefore, we are broadening our horizons in our own kitchens.

Personally, I haven’t cooked homemade mac and cheese since I was a kid. Normally throwing that much cheese and butter into a pan and coating some carb-y noodles with the decadent sauce would go against my general health guidelines.

Yet, there’s nothing more comforting than returning to happy childhood times through mac right now.

Similarly, “Quarantine Kitchen” is reintroducing us to the joy of cooking great food from the comforts of our home without the frills of the Michelin chef’s usual high end accoutrements.

The pure joy that radiates from these videos while the Bottura family hangs out inspires the same joy in us while we cope with the stresses of the current situation.

Additionally, a favorite part of many of Massimo’s videos is the first 10-15 seconds, when he reminds us of the most simple, yet imperative, event before every meal:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Massimo Bottura (@massimobottura) on Mar 15, 2020 at 10:10am PDT

Wash your hands!

This fitting, but also seemingly out of place, order reminds us that things that we normally should do, we are now actually doing. It shouldn’t take a pandemic or celebrity to get us to practice good hygiene or appreciate our meals, but the best time to start is now.

Overall, I think “Kitchen Quarantine” inspires us to take pleasures in our mealtimes even in the hardest of times.

True happiness can be found in good bread, new coffee, and togetherness.

_________________________________________________________________________

More Italian food inspiration is to come with Pellegrino Artusi’s “Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well” (La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene)

__________________________________________________________________________

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs held a webinar this afternoon to discuss how COVID-19 will affect our global supply chains. Speakers Sanjeev Krishnan at Seed2Grow Ventures and Sara Menker, founder and CEO of Grow Intelligence, offered some great insights into current global food security topics.

Whether the COVID-19 crisis will tamper with markets in a structural or cyclical way has yet to be deciphered. COVID-19’s impact on our global food supply chain will be disruptive and offer opportunities for innovations that will drive more sustainable technologies and a better future of food.

Here are the main takeaways:

Disruptions:

• Shipping and labor are seeing the largest disruptions as the byproduct of COVID-19.
• Logistical bottlenecks in the food supply chain have cause shocks to the entire system.
• Commodity crops traded globally through shipping networks are seeing inventory draw downs.
• The effects of the ongoing oil price war and impacted currencies will have serious implications for global trade balance.

Innovations:

• The food and ag innovation sector will be extremely resilient to these times.
• The denominator effect is unfolding. When public markets go down, people loose wealth and liquidity becomes more important. Investors are shying away from risky investments and moving towards illiquid assets.
• Concurrently, the Fed is acting with unprecedented scale and volume to offset the shock on the markets. We will see funds dry up if the current markets continue. If this is a structural problem, it will take a while to rebound, if cyclical, recovery will be relatively quick.
• Indoor agriculture and decentralized protein sources from cell-based meat and plant based protein will continue to trend upwards as the journey between supply and demand becomes more compressed.

Closed borders and protecting trade:

• Decentralized production models will emerge from this crisis. Who will bear the burden of cost as the highly efficient globalized supply chain readjusts to the current landscape?
• Products coming out of hard-hit countries will see slowing velocity. Extra virgin olive oil is an example of how markets have been impacted from the point of view of one of the hardest hit countries, Italy.

Information matters:

• The ag industry has been built on poor quality data and the way information has been collected is localized and fragmented.
• This crisis could reveal where the choke points are in our food system, and information will become a catalyst for redesigning our supply chains.

Food insecure places will be hit the hardest:

• Pain will be felt in regions that are net importers from other countries. We could see hyper inflation driven by food in those areas, which could lead to significant social and political unrest.

In Closing:

In America, more consumers will start to question where their food comes from when they start seeing empty shelves or higher costs in the supermarket. Consumer demand will shift as a result.

Americans should understand that the people on the front lines of the food supply chain are taking risks to make sure we are all fed.

What’s consoling us right now?

The wind has been knocked out of us in so many ways.

Alongside the rest of the global communities entangled in this web unfortunate events, we are lost in a forest of unknowns and the coronavirus is a wildfire; it’ll keep consuming as long as there is fuel to burn. It’ll take our economies, social mobilities and freedoms away, if only temporarily.

I’ve navigated my way towards a better mental and emotional place with traditional carbonara as my guide…

I was supposed to be in Italy, if you all remember. If you’ve followed this blog from the beginning, you have read as my path has unfolded throughout mia vita in Italia, weeks in London, and explorations of Korea.

I’ve been on a perpetual journey of seeking to share global philosophies of food rooted across cultures and practices. From Slow Food University in Pollenzo to the Buddhist temples in Bukhansan National Park in Korea, food pathways tell a story, and Il Caffè is here to share them.

COVID has changed it all. Yet, it’s not all at a loss.

Now, it’s time to stay and dig a little deeper.

Chicago’s Board Game Cafe definitely has new restaurant syndrome.

Slide into the comfy new seats and serve up a deck of cards with only a few slight chunks of dinner crusted on the side.

The concept reminds me of the 50’s, Betty Who themed drive-in in my hometown, where the board games inside would leave a residue that sticks to your fingers as you dipped your coated french-fries into the Heinz ketchup.

Although Chicago’s Board Game Cafe elevates any ideas you may have about this type of experience, its front of house needs a shuffle.

The interior design transports you to another world thanks to impeccable design and lighting. Twinkling lights, trees, and an indoor town square huddled around the bar make it feel quaint.

The energy from the staff isn’t the relaxed, confident air of a well-seasoned team, but rather hesitancy, like a freshman walking into a room full of upperclassman. Servers in training, board game teachers, and runners crisscross the stage, and we feel like the test subjects for a live-action restaurant prototype. With the restaurant having opened just last week, we understandably are.

The food menu is solid.

Offerings span continents, styles, and flavor profiles. The back of house is composed of some of the big guys in the industry: Aaron McKay of Schwa, NoMi, & Le Lan and Evan Behmer of Mercat a la Planxa and North Pond have created and executed a geographically expansive menu spanning offerings from Vietnam to Mexico to Spain.

We order bread, popcorn, and fries off the snack list. The server kept coming back, as if forgetting that we had ordered our small plates. When our fries arrive, we put in an order for two large plates, remind him of our bread and popcorn, and we deny another request to order more 10$ draft beers. Our mains arrive.

We figure our server is new and we pardon the mistake, moving on with our evening.

Each dish is well composed and executed. The flavors are balanced and the ingredients are handled correctly and plated beautifully.

The cutlery is heavy and well-crafted.

We finish our board game and when I return to the table from the restroom my friends have gathered the check and are ready to depart. We all decide to head to Margie’s Candy right next door for their famous banana split.

As we pay, the server puts down three spoons and lets us know that a colleague of mine has two desserts ready to send out.

They’re amazing.

The sweetness of the dessert fades when we head next door & realize we were charged for the two items that never arrived at our table.

It’s okay, the desserts were on the house, and the server will realize at the end of the shift and learn a lesson.

______________________________________________________________________________

Overall, I hope the FOH learns quickly and gives the experience to match the BOH talent. There’s a lot at stake with this risky business model, and execution and timing between the board game teachers and waitstaff needs to be flawless.

I’m hoping this concept sticks around.

Fusion is all over, and it’s here to stay. We can point to globalization this and industrialization that, but I tend to think people are just more open than ever to broadening their cultural horizons, and food is an easy entry-point.

The exotic is morphing into a comfortable familiarity with “foreign”. We are living in an environment where Korean kimchi can have just as much personal meaning as the gnocchi their nonna used to make.

Novelty is wearing off and fusion is the new frontier.

This idea brings me back to a pre-post-grad time when I would’ve scoffed at far-flung culinary culture mashups…

It was the summer of 2018, and I found myself alone in the city of London for three weeks. This is what happens when you buy a one-way ticket to Europe and the cheapest way back home is actually to stay put for awhile. Worse things have happened.

Typical for my solo-traveling adventures, I wasn’t alone for long. A domino effect of events landed me in a salsa dancing bar with an Italian girl I briefly met in the Swiss Alps and her programmer-buddy roommates. After a few rounds of margaritas, “on the rocks” as I confusedly explained to the British bartender, we headed to the dance floor to test our steps with some strangers.

I LOVE dancing. It’s free, fluid, and each partner teaches you a little more about yourself. At one point, I become irritated at how rigid the men are… and with one partner I finally exhale with a giggle and smile:

“just swing me!”

A week later, he and I are wandering the streets of London looking for a bite to eat. Apparently my enthusiasm intrigued him, and he wasn’t the worst dancer after all.

After lazily sauntering around Shoreditch for awhile, we stumbled across the holy grail of hilarious food culture combos.

I could not stop my laughter. Shoreditch is jam-packed with some of the best restaurants in the city, so this corner shop screams “we are trying to capitalize on all the possible trendy food concepts”.

Vegan? Yes. Asian? Check. Italian? YES.

My friend and I opted to skip what we considered to be the most extra food mash-up of all time and head for Neapolitan.

For both of us, Neapolitan pizza is our favorite. Simple and delicious, consistent and comfortable.

Authentic Neapolitan pizza is sacred: the dough MUST be made with Italian type 0 or 00 wheat flour, it MUST be topped with San Marzano tomato, only one of two types of mozzarella, and finished with olive oil and basil. Ingredients need to be fresh, and the pizza is made by hand.

Over these pizzas, we enjoyed pure contentment.

Yet, I’ve always wondered what it would’ve been like to eat at that Korean/Italian fusion place in London. My travel-induced spontaneous nature reflected by the “just swing me!” attitude was halted by suspicion and discomfort at the idea that Korean and Italian could possibly be successful on the same palate.

A year and a half later, I receive a text from him with a picture of the vegan korean/italian fusion restaurant that we thought was so off-the-wall.

It’s still around, and is even more popular than ever.

So back at home in Chicago, the current culinary environment recalls my experience in London.

Today, restaurants like Momotoro Italia and Passerotto are surprisingly blending East and West seamlessly.

Bib Gourmand, James Beard, and all the prominent foodie outlets are highlighting the “new frontier” of international food on the relevant culinary stage: Rooh in the West Loop, Galit in Lincoln Park, and Tzuco in River North to name a few. Michelin guide has sprinkled stars across Chicago’s Omakase offerings, and the big guys in the scene like Next restaurant feature cuisines spanning Mexico City to Tokyo.

There are well-executed international offerings across neighborhoods, and now industry is begging for pop-ups, collaborations, and fusions of talent, ideas, and tastes to continue to challenge the market.

Luckily for Chicago’s industry, more and more people are willing to venture out to experience miso bean puree with romanesco, to drink Japanese whiskey with Italian amaro, and to delight in the combination of hamachi crudo with calabrian chili, garlic and parsley.

So next time you have the option to challenge your assumptions and eat something that doesn’t make sense… let loose, broaden your horizons, and

Just swing it!

Neighborhood spots provide some of the most hearty experiences. I’m biased, though, having earned a living in a quaint one in Evanston.

Albany Park’s Bokeh, nevertheless on the outskirts of the typical trodden path, proves to be a contender in a sophisticated Chicago bar scene.

It’s namesake, derived from the Japanese word “blur”, is a common phenomenon in photographic technique.

We scooch up close to the bar and scan the menu. My eyes graze the signature cocktail list: “crop factor”, “lens flare”, and “aperture” immediately reveal a theme.

Bokeh, in a photographic sense.

“The owner is a photographer”, the bartender engages.

I decide to order the drink that makes the most sense from the options: The Bokeh.

Bokeh, in cocktail preparation.

Fernet, simple, lemon & lime, and egg white. A Fernet “sour”: the egg white blurs the harshness of the citrus against Fernet’s unequivocally identifiable taste.

We make friendly conversation with our host and the single gentleman next to us, who offers us a free round. We hesitantly oblige to split one, accepting his half drunken gesture, considering the female bartender has been referring to him by name all night and keeping polite conversation.

Every bar has their regular..

Overall, the pleasant, sophisticated atmosphere on a Tuesday evening matched with  friendly conversation and a thought-provoking menu leaves us satisfied.

At the tail end of the CTA Brown line, places like Bokeh beg us to venture farther with our palates and our social scene.

When I’m Happy, Everything is Art.

When I’m content, the world is a technicolor dream and all things are possible.

My girlish naivete takes me by the hand and guides me towards my dreams.

The simplest of things evoke the greatest wonder, bring forth in my imagination the choosiest of sensations.

Sweet tastes sweeter, sour tastes exhilaratingly pungent and satisfying.

The air is tangible, the ground evaporates.

My mind, awake yet absent, encompasses the inspirations of generations before and after me.

–

Ideas become reality.

–

Over a soft-ripened wheel of bark-wrapped Jasper Hill Harbison, my mother and I engaged in a heated discussion about existence, reality, and “God”….

I treated her to some thoughts about Maslow’s Heirarchy, and, in turn, she delighted me in anecdotes about scripture from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and some other plainly-named fellow.

In between us was the ruins from dinner: a half-eaten round of soft cheese, laced with sweetness from the lazy spoon that transferred cranberry jam and cheesy delight to crunchy baguette goodness. The creamy, silky smooth and nutty flavor of the Harbison, accompanied by bubbly effervescence of Prosecco D.O.C, left us able to converse on such subject matter without getting angry and storming off from the table.

My argument? The meal we just had was/is/will continue to be my form of communion. Pure joy: glutinous indulgence that forgives any wrong-doings from the previous day with each bite.

Her argument? Picture: “Jezus Christ, Suuuper-star!” Traditional, right-leaning, constitution praising, “Great-Again” values baked into prophecy of Godliness.

I love her, and what I love just as much about this evening….

Harbison.

The world is on the tip of my tongue. I can taste it.

While being pulled indulgently towards the experiential hedonistic pleasure of a fine tasting menu, I simultaneously feel the need to question chefs about best practices in the elite culinary scene. I seek to dissect the umbrella topic of how they understand their art in a high end industry that holds a slice of the fate of our society through food.

Top chefs today are food activists. Massimo Bottura, Ferran Adria, Jose Andres, all understanding the implications of where our food comes from, but not necessarily expressing through their work.

I challenge to find a fine chef turned food activist, not explicitly for political pull, but for humanity.

I challenge to find restaurants that have something to say, not only for the sake of art and expression through cuisine, but for society.

To find the spaces that allow the food and experience to speak for itself.

Let the hunt begin.

Turned down a job with a World’s 50 Best, three Michelin Star reputation..

“Do you want to continue?”, the manager asked after the initial meeting. Without hesitation, I agreed. We prepped for the working interview, termed “stage” in the industry, by doing drills consisting of repeating the performative moves associated with proper table side service: body positioning in the dining room, plate placement as varied throughout each of the nine courses (a short menu, considering the next menu will consist of over 20), and the rules regarding who is served first at the table and how. Most importantly, we discussed the proper timing as a team of runners, captains, and somms would dance around the dining room servicing two turns of ~50 guests, each spending two hours and between $300-500 a head for their experience.

Service begins and the back of house swirls with a high-stress show of controlled chaos. Ten tweezer holding, extremely skilled chefs stand at attention at their respective stations, ready for action. At the head of this operation is the expediter, who oversees that all dietary restrictions and further accommodations be met. Chef calls the tickets, occasionally terming them soigné to designate tables of importance- typically high spenders or food industry insiders that may be reviewing the restaurant. The kitchen, always responding with, “yes, chef!”, begin course one. A team preps seven small plates filled with bite-sized delicacies to be rolled table side on a cart and presented to the first seating of guests.. 

The sensation in the back of house is curated by the reputation and expectations of the head chefs; that all courses must leave the kitchen perfectly executed and represent the military precision that reflect well on the restaurant brand.

I look around the room during the stage and can’t help but want to know more about the stories of the people around me. This level of fine-dining training attracts a certain kind of person, both willing to accept abuse and work to the bone for little pay in the pursuit of perfection. The hardness, poise, and high levels of scrutiny bring forth in my imagination visions of what combat training would entail. Like military training, everyone accepts abuse as part of the process and hardens themselves to work tirelessly for a greater purpose. When stakes are as high as the bill at the end of dinner and the namesake of a chef seeking to maintain the elevated status of one of the World’s 50 Best, this sense of comradeship runs the current of energy propelling the staff through the evening…

I hated every second of it.

Why?

The energy created through pursuit of perfection (in this particular restaurant!!) left the experience devoid of humanity. While certainly elevated, the experience, cold.

The aesthetic appeal of the restaurant, sterile. The table side service, mechanical. The whole operation, a machine of precision.

I never thought I’d say no to the World’s 50 Best. I was never more happy to return home to Evanston that evening.

Consciously allowing a bit of well earned hedonism after landing a full time internship while also working a part time weekend gig…

Why not direct this loosening of my pocketbook towards experiential pleasure instead of a new car? The ROI in both cases is not attractive, but at least I won’t have to pay monthly insurance for a fun night out.

Anyway, my dreams have come true. I officially work a 9-5 on Michigan Ave, and my desk overlooks Lake Michigan in the background and the saturation of art and culture of Grant Park and the Institute in the foreground. Part of my excitement for this new chapter, as you may have guessed, comes from the evening opportunities just steps away.

Two friends from Madison drove down Thursday night to celebrate a birthday and potential move. We began at The Purple Pig, a restaurant that I had always heard of, but assumed it to be such a Michigan Ave tourist trap that I never considered stepping inside.

We were packed like sardines into this tiny spot, with waiters and waitresses politely bumping into us as they hurry past to get orders from tables. The atmosphere, like a Spanish, tapas-style bar, is nonchalant in an upscale casual way.  Fittingly, we order a bottle of a Priorat blend, which is accompanied by olives.

To follow, an inventively delicious meal:

To finish, glasses of Sauternes and Passionfruit ice cream. At this point, we want to continue the evening, and the acclaimed bar The Avairy comes up.

We dash out of the restaurant and towards the West Loop.

Upon arrival, we check in with the host, who informs us of an hour and a half wait time. I give my name, which immediately comes up in the computer. I ask, “why is my name in the computer, I haven’t dined with you before”. Quickly, I remember that just a month before, I staged at the Alinea Group restaurant, Next. I mention this to the host, and he welcomes me back and asks casually asks why I didn’t take the job….

We leave the restaurant and head across the street, but before we reach the Hoxton, a text appears saying that there’s availability at the even more exclusive speakeasy bar just down the stairs from The Aviary, called The Office.

The space is a speakeasy-influenced cocktail bar with small plate offerings. Decidedly, we each begin with one of their classic cocktails. Sunflower seed-infused Manhattans put us in an impulsive state of delirium, which ends in an order of the “truffle explosion”. As we sip and get friendly with the bartenders, we try to guess if the man across the bar is Pete Buttigieg..

All in all, The Office is underwhelming if you don’t buy into the Alinea Group cult following.  Although the cocktails are impressive and well-executed, at $20 a pop I’d rather go somewhere with real Chicago character.

To quench the thirst for said character, we head north to Uptown.

Ahhhhhh… The Green Mill. Chicago’s O.G. speakeasy- frequented by Al Capone and other conspiring cats during the prohibition era- that still lights up Broadway all hours of the day.

Thursday nights are especially fun; a live swing big band electrifies the room, and people of all backgrounds grace the dance floor with a hop and a step.

The three of us finish with one more round of cocktails: 9$ sazeracs in this cash-only, dimly lit, kinda grungy establishment…

…a nice night-cap to the evening.

It’s the last night at 860 Hinman, Apt 711.

It’s more sweet than bitter, though.

The light fixture buzzes, the dirty ceiling fan swirls around as usual.

My palate, quelled from the sparkling rose enjoyed after a Sunday evening shift just downstairs at Campagnola restaurant, also lingers with the taste of lemon tart, both sour and sweetly divine.

One spider, solitarily dangling from its web, rests in the corner of my room. I gaze: a welcomed roommate.

This apartment has been home for the past three years. Within it, passion, lust, anxiety, depression, dance-marathons, and many nights typing away at a keyboard have been passed.

Dreams, awakened. Heart, broken.

Most of all, this space has been both the solitude that has allowed creative endeavors to be cultured, and the space that has poisoned me with the notion of “i-can-go-it-alone”.

The home to return to following solo jaunts around the world, always awaiting me with a familiar smell and comfort. The walls that absorb the sound of my singing, endless hours of rehearsing for an audience that doesn’t exist; not knowing what I’m singing for, but singing anyways..

Tomorrow marks the beginning of a new passage.

Although the feeling of stagnation looms, the cocoon that I will enshroud myself in for the next few months will produce a much clearer path. A nest needing to be built, first and foremost.

Fish don’t even know they’re in water, How do I?

I was in my mother’s coastal Maine cabin- decorated with fine art plucked from the B&B inn from my childhood- lounging on the sofa, slightly overheated from the influenza bug I caught during a food-based research trip to Seoul, Korea. Without much else to do but ride out the illness, I cracked open Best American Food Writing, 2018, and scanned the Forward…

Ruth Reichl begins with a beautifully succinct introduction outlining both the current state and future of food writing in America. First, she defends the discipline itself by elaborating the importance of the subject matter in society against pushback from academics. She finishes the introduction,

“I hope that no university will ever again sneer at a food-focused thesis.” -Ruth Reichl

My blood was boiling.

Just a few months earlier, I was sitting in the office of a tenured professor of Italian literature at Northwestern University, being yelled at for my positionality in regards to a proposed research project in Korea as a continuation of last summer’s research into the company Eataly as a global intermediary for Italian food culture and small producers.

-“..food studies is a shallow discipline through which to view a culture!” she implored. I sat back quietly and let her words wash over me. I was stunned. Firstly, that a professor would deny a student’s academic interest in subject material, and secondly, that one would classify gastronomy in society at large as “shallow”.

At that time, I proposed to continue my Eataly project in Korea. I had also recently applied for a Fulbright to attend the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Bra, Italy, where project had begun the previous summer. During that research, I learned that as a company with ties to the Slow Food Movement grew beyond it’s Italian roots, Eataly stood at the precipice of implications at the intersection of Italian nationalism and globalization, and Eataly’s global expansion led me to want to study the network in another cultural context. I chose Seoul as the next destination based on some interview data and connections that I had made during the summer.

Yet, I needed a tenured professor to be an advisor to secure $1500 of funding from the Undergraduate Research Office at Northwestern. I had a working project, interview subjects, but had no real advisor to bounce ideas off of. In addition to the project itself, I also needed the independent research class that would be bourne out of the project in order to graduate with an Italian minor (transfer student drawbacks). I thought this project would be a perfect fit for my academic path towards a career. I sought out this professor in the Italian department, but was disappointed by the lack of interest.

Her lack of support for the material and insults in relation to my positionality as an American seeking to study Italian food as a seemingly “low brow” and academically shallow pursuit left me angry and helpless, yet with more grit than ever to prove the validity of this discpline in academia and beyond.

This experience led to my not recieving funding for the Seoul segment of the project. Yet, my grit prevailed. Two weeks after the meeting with this professor, I won $2000 in a voice competition in Chicago. The next day, I bought my ticket to Seoul and confirmed my interview logistics.

I was going to Korea, and I had visions of a future filled with Fulbright winnings and success as a researcher, catalyst for small producers to enter into larger markets, and potential future business owner. I was a going to be a global researcher in the US, Asia, and Europe!! I had visions that my research and future successes would prove this professor wrong.

What I didn’t know during my influenza-sparked binge reading of Best American Food Writing, 2018 is that life doesn’t always play out as planned.

Four months later, events would shift. I was a semi-finalist for the Fulbright to attend the University of Gastronomic Sciences with a food-focused proposed project, but lost to a woman interested in providing access for immigrants in the food start-up scene. Although my project was validated through the US Fulbright committee, my ego faltered when I didn’t win.

I was disheartened given my path: I had recently dropped the Italian minor and didn’t have the opportunity to access more funding for the project as a soon-to-be graduate. Right before my final quarter at Northwestern, I decided to enroll in a graduate-level globalization seminar in the anthro department. I continued to engulf my self in the subject matter, but lost my steam as my life in the music school became more demanding…

Now, I sit in a La Colombe coffeeshop in Lincoln Park, Chicago, pondering the next steps in my career and life. My passions for the intersection of food, research and globalization sparks within me a desire to re-apply for the Fulbright. I want more than anything to have the opporutnity to attend the University of Gastronomic Sciences and become a member of the world of those with enough curiosity, passion, and grit to ignore the voices that say food studies is shallow.

Until then, this blog will become a mini market research platform where I will research various topics in food and society.

With the words of M.F.K Fischer, “First we eat, then we do everything else.”  

Cheers.

Finally crawling my way out of the dark hole that is the first-month-after-graduating, seemingly endless cycles of resume churning madness.

Back to something a little more lighthearted… What about the oatmeal crawl?

My good friend Yana and I have been eating our way through Chicago’s breakfast joints, picking apart each restaurant’s representation of experience through their innovations on a classic, mostly forgotten about dish.

First stop? Why not hit the ground running with Stephanie Izard’s Little Goat Diner. This celebrity chef- most known for her James Beard awards, Top Chef fan favorite status and slew of restaurants associated with goats, the West Loop, and Boka Group- has a high bar to maintain with her take on oatmeal. The results?

Think: GOAT-Meal

Inedible oat-mush with essence of goat. Oat crumble, blueberries, creme-fraische. Thick paste that one would expect to be savory, but instead tastes like soured goat milk mixed in with good old-fashioned oatmeal and left to cook for too long.

This oatmeal screams, “Celebrity Chef needing to stay relevant innovates a simple dish, but comes out completely inedible”.

1/5.

Next stop! Little Puerto Rico, where we get a history lesson, a Jibarito, and some damn good coconut oatmeal.

Nellie’s Puerto Rican Cafe on West Division is famous for their ‘avena de coco’ made with creamy coconut milk and topped with cinnamon. Yana and I struck up a conversation with the server, asking “why coconut?” He explained to us that the coconut is a comfort food integrated into many aspects of Puerto Rican cuisine and life, typically bringing forth feelings of comfort, nostalgia, and love from generational passing of family dishes in their homeland. Although not native to Puerto Rico, the cultivation of coconut has grown rapidly over the past few centuries, and the enjoyment of the ‘avena de coco’ at Nellie’s gives a glimpse into a multilayered experience of place and story through food.

4/5 oatmeal experience.

Oh, and the plaintain sandwich, “Jibarito”, is killer.

One week later, Yana and I found ourselves eating at one of my favorite Chicago diners, Cafe Marie Jeanne in Humboldt Park. This French dinette features high quality, well excecuted comfort food ranging from Monte Cristos to poutine, and delicasies like calf brains to steelhead roe toast. At Cafe Marie Jeanne, you can enjoy caviar alongside cheddar grits and not feel pretentous for ordering it or embarassed that you had to Google a few items on the menu.

The oatmeal is the best yet.

Nutty, crunchy, hearty, all good things that oatmeal should be (in my opinion). Slightly sweetened, garnished with maple roasted pecans, I was in heaven. Quality and execution, 5/5.

Also, spruce up your breakfast sandwich by getting a cheddar and habanero biscuit and topping it with bloodsausage or (if you feel like splurging), caviar.

Cafe Marie Jeanne never disappoints.

Next up? Dove’s Luncheonette off of the Damen stop in Wicker Park.

I always find it fun to hop into a breakfast place that also doubles as a Mezcal Bar. Mezcalita with your oatmeal, anyone? Oatmeal features sliced pears, crisped oat topping and dried prunes with a delicate drizzle of maple syrup to finish. The slightly creamy texture of the oats is perfectly complimented by the crunch of the topping. The colorful plateware and mini-doily is a nice touch.

Although I was disappointed that there seemed to be no “why” to the dish, no Mexican flair or storyline to the ingredients, the oatmeal was quality. What’s quality without a good story, though?

3/5

This brings us to today. Did I mention that I’ve been in a funk since graduation? What better emergence from the depths than a trip to Manny’s Deli in the southwest loop? Although recently renovated, the space still holds the charm of a Jewish New York style deli with edible comforts to match. Grab a lunch tray, saunter past the Matzo balls, challah french toast, and bagel and lox towards the cafeteria-style case with pies and fresh sliced fruit towards a destiny of satisfaction. This place has character.

I don’t even care that the oatmeal is sticky, made with water, and bland. I don’t care that the raisins and brown sugar come in plastic cups on the side. I don’t care that the bagel and lox is a DIY project. Look around! The place has soul, history, and a clientele to match.

5/5 oatmeal experience. 2/5 oatmeal.

MORE TO COME! I’m promising you this, but mostly myself.

Oatmeal.

The much overlooked blank canvas of a breakfast dish that, when done well, speaks loads to the quality of a breakfast experience.

If anyone knows me well they know that my favorite go-to breakfast is oatmeal.

Because of this, I’ve set out on a mission to extend my oatmeal fantasies beyond my own kitchen into the restaurant scene in Chicago. Throughout the next few months I will chronicle the top oatmeal experiences in the city using the Michelin rubric as a guide.

As a reminder:

Michelin Inspector’s 5 Restaurant Rating Criteria:
1. Quality of products
2. Mastery of flavour and cooking techniques
3. The personality of the chef represented in the dining experience
4. Value for money
5. Consistency between inspectors’ visits

The restaurants that pay the most attention and produce the best version of a seemingly boring, uninteresting dish will be given the utmost honor.

Call me the oatmeal inspector.

More food adventures!

I grabbed a seat at the bar of much-acclaimed Via Carota and struck up a conversation with the friendly bartender and a single woman on her lunch break next to me.  I learned the story of the restaurant mashup that Jody Williams and Rita Sodi established just a few years prior, the details of their newly-opened cafe next door, and the french bistro Buvette down the street. The woman next to me, a 18 year veteran of the NYC real-estate scene, continued to talk to me about the various restaurant groups in NYC, James-Beard stamps of approval, and why Via Carota and Buvette are such special places.

So… I just had to go to Buvette.

The next day I found myself again sitting at the bar. I notice that a kitchen “line” is right in front of me. Three waiters, all chit-chatting in Spanish, swirl around one another in the tight space between the bar counter and shelves. One person is on egg and waffle duty, the other is concocting various salads of the nicoise variety and dressing the dishes coming from the hot area just a few inches away. I am amazed by how they can produce basically all of the items on the menu in such a small space. Adjacent to me is the station where waitstaff pick up coffee drinks and food and deposit various mise-en-place from an unknown origin (maybe a back stock cooler hidden in the basement?). While enjoying my rillettes de saumon and tarte tatin, a thought occurs to me:

The best spot to sit in a restaurant is at the bar. It’s even better when traveling alone.

Why?

On four separate dining occasions on this trip, I have struck up conversations at or experienced an “inside look” into a restaurant through bar dining. Maybe this opinion is because I have worked in the industry since childhood and have a certain restaurant perception having worked for over seven years at eight restaurants, but I argue that the birds-eye-view one gets over the theatrics occurring simultaneously across different scenes by different actors in the restaurant is truly unbeatable.

Furthermore, it also dawned on me that the theatrical experience of each restaurant that I dined at this week is particularly special because of the actors and agents involved. Having walked over forty miles through the streets of NYC this week, I noticed the sheer volume of restaurants that, while spanning quality and clientele, all garner their “pull” of customers from somewhere. Why is Via Carota full of guests with a wait while Fairfax just a few steps away in Greenwich Villiage has an empty bar?

Actors and Agents.

My various bar conversations typically revolve around the “who” of the restaurant and the industry in general. Given that the “what”, the food, is at an indisputable quality, what’s left is the origin story of the people who brought the pieces together and the actors that make it happen. Bar staff are the actors in the plot  and the founders and their stories are the agents that fill bar seats.

A sign of a worthwhile restaurant is one where you can sit at the bar and chat with whomever is there about the ins-and-outs of the who, what, and why of the meal and the restaurant.

Next time you have a free afternoon, pick a restaurant and park yourself at the bar. Enjoy.

Oh and everyone needs to try Joe’s classic slice at some point in their life.

Back to Chicago!

I hope walking 10 miles a day is combating all of the food adventures in Manhattan this week…

As a native Midwesterner, my idea of the New York food scene has been formed by the media that has traversed the nation: from the buzz of Eleven Madison Park to Le Bernadin, Momofuku and Milk Bar to Frenchette.

To solidify my perception of the restaurant scene here, I’m eating my way through Manhattan.

First stop: Bagel and Lox from Russ and Daughters. The wait? Worth it.

Next, dessert at Milk Bar: Cereal milk soft serve with corn flake garnish.

Next, lunch at Frenchette: a bit of “field wine”, duck, egg, chocolate mousse to finish the meal.

Dinner at Momofuku: pork buns, NYC IPA, black sesame soft serve.

From the experiences so far..

Who decides what is relevant in the food scene? Yes, each of these meals were excellent, dynamic, and well executed… but I am SURE there are many dining experiences as relevant as these places that haven’t received the marketing buzz and hype that drives someone as unconnected to the inseams of the NYC restaurant scene as a girl from Evanston, IL.

Tomorrow: Via Carota for some tagliatelle and Lucali for famous pizza.

Raindrops patter on the awning and construction workers dig into soil just beyond as bustling bikers wheel through the dampened streets. My cup, three quarters full of drip coffee of unknown origin to me, slightly creamed, adds its own moisture to the already thick air.

Things aren’t so clear anymore. I observe the world around me as if I were in a foreign land, picking out objects without judgement and free from my previous perception of them. Yet, I now realize my eyesight has diminished. Objects in space seem slightly blurred.

The past month has shifted my world and my eyesight now seems to be a metaphor for how noticing has revealed clarity through blur. The story that I’ve told myself about my world, the contents in it, and where I am going has broken down. My newfound clarity regarding the lack of control I have regarding the events around me and my reaction to them envelops my sense of self, blurring my identity.

We all have a story we tell ourselves about world around us. I’ve always been romantic about opportunities on the horizon but now I sense a newfound excitement of the ephemeral. Like when traveling, I have both a narrative around where I am and why I’m there alongside a complete detachment from it.

If this is a story of ego, it’s also a story of attachment, non-attachment. The epic beauty of having an idea, an opportunity, or person in your life- even if it’s yourself- that comforts you through narrative. Breaking down that narrative is the fun part. What’s left is your true self. Embrace the blur.

There are probably ten open google docs with a few words to a couple paragraphs typed down. Inspiration, contemplation, stagnation, deletion. Cycles and cycles of enlightenment, tidbits of my one, small existence yearning to be released through word. Ultimately, unfulfilled: a jarring poetic stop-and-go that holds the same sentiment as reading Pessoa’s Book Of Disquiet, or the labyrinth in Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths. Chunks of insight, pulses of deeply, spiritually communicative and evocative prose, left for the ether..

Dreams and reality are blurred. One is never quite sure which carries a closer glimpse of existential liberation and enlightenment.

“I’ve never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries – embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not.” Borges, Garden of Forking Paths

Pessoa’s dream existence is a poetic response -rather, another dimension- to Borge’s labyrinth. What does this mean for us, for art?..

“I am not sure that I exist actually, I am all the writers that I have read.” — Jorge Luis Borges

..we all have an intuition of the labyrinth. It’s the artist’s calling to make sense of it. Music, poetry, an experiential meal, signifying everything and nothing at all. All of us, together, as an osmosis of thought; story lines being constructed in the mid brain.

“To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

The poetic irony from Pessoa to Borges becomes clear: the story is never finished. A labyrinth forever, even dreaming. Let’s make art about it.

Jean Langer Photography. https://www.jeanlanger.com/

Hoosier Mama, a leek and sausage biscuit and black light roast coffee later, I’m feeling much better about my last place voice competition stance last night. I was the first one to sing and gave my most heartfelt and technically sufficient performance so far in my singing career.. but it landed me last place out of the 5 singers competing for $5000 worth of prize money.

I woke up in a fuzz this morning, having slept for over twelve hours. My eyes gazed at the congratulatory flowers on my desk, reminding me of my successes earlier this week. A mix of emotions rose me out of bed. I lugged myself out of my apartment, hobbled to the closest coffee shop, feeling the left-over pain from the Chicago Marathon in my feet exacerbated from standing in 4 inch heels all night along the way. There, I buried my mind in my biology homework. A slide read:

“measuring the integrity of sound processing at basic levels of the auditory system opens a window on human communication and the imprint of a life spent in sound”

OK, so everyone in that competition room heard something different last night depending on their life spent in sound. For me, I heard my best performance to date, felt the emotion of the content and what it means to me, which might have been out of context for the rest of the singers or judges in the room. Maybe, being the youngest person in the room, my sound was less impressive, or maybe I just need my “life spent in sound” to be curated in a different way through more experience.

In the 12 hours since the competition, I’ve been thinking about how these feelings are manifesting themselves, and how, as I make a career switch, the notion of subjectivity will carry through from a life spent in sound to a life spent in taste.

I pull up an article about Michelin Guide inspectors out of curiosity. The criteria that inspectors base their award decisions are the following:

Michelin Inspector’s 5 Restaurant Rating Criteria:
1. Quality of products
2. Mastery of flavor and cooking techniques
3. The personality of the chef represented in the dining experience
4. Value for money
5. Consistency between inspectors’ visits

The subjectivity that frustrated the hell out of me in the results for the show last night and that has slowly been pushing me towards a world of gastronomy will remain. Maybe that’s why I’m attracted to it all: the ephemeral, subjective, experiential nature of an opera performance, a dining experience. The peaks and the valleys are thrilling, and the discussion of why is more important than the final results, whether a Michelin Star or a Grammy.

Connecting this back to my Biological Foundations of Sound and Music class: experience changes the afferent (ear to brain) processing capability of the neurological auditory pathway.

This is all going to take time. Back to the bottom of the totem pole.

A bottle of 2014 Nebbiolo d’Alba sits on my kitchen cart alongside an empty to-go container that housed a date cake with whipped mascarpone from the Italian restaurant I work at in Evanston, IL. The electricity from a connected night with two lovely friends hangs in the air of my studio apartment as music blares from my Bose speaker, throwing the light of my candlelight back and forth.

Today, during a vocal coaching in between a Bach cantata and a Verdi aria, I received an email from the United States Fulbright Association revealing that I’m a semi-finalist for a Fulbright to attend the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. I burst out into tears in front of my vocal coach, who has had an important impact on my musical journey from rural Wisconsin to a top-ten University. The world seems to be working in my favor in ways that are beyond explanation.

Earlier in the day today, I was the focus of an interview by a writer at the Northwestern student publication North by Northwestern. I spent forty minutes explaining my summer research, and as I became more comfortable with the interview, I felt the passion and excitement bubbling underneath my words that transported me back to my summer of planned spontaneity. I began to remember the feeling from the streets of Rome to the mountains of Switzerland and stringing through all of the major Italian cities I set foot in; an invisible force leading me from one fulfilling evening and lesson learned to another.

This blog has followed my journey from a Portland Half Marathon before my summer research until now, and I have never felt more secure in my path than I do sitting in my bed on the 7th floor of my Main St. apartment than this very moment. The taste of Nebbiolo, a grape strongly associated with Piemonte, where the University of Gastronomic Sciences resides, speaks to my palate and tells me that the next email I’ll receive from the Fulbright committee will bless me; whether a welcome into the financial freedom of $30,000 towards my master education or the opportunity to learn how to figure it out on my own without the financial support of the US Government… I am thankful.

I am thankful.

Cheers, with a glass of Nebbiolo, to a year of connecting my story to others’ in this beautiful, complicated world.

Dreaming

So, Ti.. Do. So, Ti.. Do. So, Ti.. Do. So, Ti.. Do. So, Ti.. Do. 

Philip Glass’s repetitive whirling of tones circles my apartment, my flickering candlelight moving with the sound pressure waves vibrating through it and through me. Never have I heard the piece like I have today. For some reason, the revelation of the vocal line repeating the pitches on solfege never stood out in this way. Things music school does to your brain….

*********

In music school, the principal foundations of musical theory are set freshman year when we learn musical counterpoint.

In most of this music, the melody dances around the tonal centerpiece in different patterns and according to different rules and returns to do. As history moved along, people started changing the rules, breaking the rules, and reinventing new soundscapes.

I won’t go into details, but essentially, music is obsessed with “do”. I use solfege everyday in class, but I haven’t thought about it in a new context until now.

Recently, I listened to a Tim Ferris podcast about Essentialism. The guest, Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, maintains that in a world of noise, information overload, and choice anxiety, revealing your individual essential goals, pursuits, and dreams is a powerful path to success. I’d agree with Ferris that learning about yourself is the first and foremost tool to develop your sense of identity, path… essentialism.

Philip Glass’s sound waves revealed something to me today. Essentialism is about finding your “Do”. What do you return back to?

Glass: Dance IX

Just returned to reality from two days of meditation and mindfulness at the Geumsunsa Temple in Bukhansan National Park just north of the Seoul city center.

A train and two busses later from my hip hostel in Hongdae neighborhood, I arrived at the base of a mountain, famished. I bopped into a steamy restaurant and the waitress pointed to the wall with a menu in Korean. I assumed she asked me what I wanted so I pointed at something that was 15000 won, with a twinge of excitement at the unknown. She brought out the typical side dishes of kimchi and other pickled vegetables, and soon arrived with a steaming bowl of broth with tripe. I happily finished it.

I hiked partway up the mountain and through the arches of the temple, the sound of a trickling stream and the clearing of the crisp air from the less-than-clean air in Seoul bringing a sense of calm. Upon arriving, I was handed traditional garb and shown to my small room that I shared with a lovely girl from Finland..

Through these meditative hours, I learned that the path to mindfulness is always there. The path to a better you is always being laid.

I prostrate in recognition that all relations are a mirror reflecting myself.

I have led a very lucky and fortunate life. Every solo travel that I’ve taken, from Mexico City to Lisbon, London to Canada, has taught me the importance of acknowledging how unimportant, small and insignificant we all really are. Yet, the collective impact we have on one another is increasingly broad as globalization means we can easily hop on a plane and see the nooks and crannies of this world. With this opportunity comes a great responsibility to spread light, joy, and prove that we are all one.

I believe that everyone has an autonomous ability to attract what they want in the world, and the Buddhist principals that I learned about in this stay will become a guide for my life moving forward. Here are some of my favorites:

“I prostrate wishing to find the beauty hidden in my mind”

“I prostrate being mindful of my unknown potential”

“I prostrate wishing to embrace the life with pure passion”

“I prostrate wishing to embrace life with a humble mind”

“I prostrate trusting that a full life comes out of myself”

“I prostrate in repentance about having seen I and others as separate”

“I prostrate in recognition that the mind is the root of all things”

“I prostrate in recognition that I am the one who decides all things”

“I prostrate in recognition that the one who is different from me is not wrong”

“I prostrate in gratitude to the poverty that I experienced”

“I prostrate in awe that I dream as freely as possible”

“I prostrate in recognition that barriers are barriers as long as I keep them”

“I prostrate in recognition that I am free as much as I give up”

“I prostrate wishing not to miss the question, ‘who am I’?”

If you want to know who you are, carefully study yourself inside and out. Study whom you spend time with, what you enjoy doing, what kind of influence you bring onto others, and what your priorities in life are. This will lead you to discover your true-self. – Beopjeong Seunim (1932-2010, a Korean monk respected for his lifetime practice of non-possession)

Yesterday, I met with an employee of the Cultural Corps of Korean Buddhism over tea at the Temple Food Center in Seoul. She attended the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Bra, Italy, where I hope to do my Master degree next fall. The conversation revolved around intersections of food values between the Italian-born food ideology Slow Food, and the centuries-old Buddhist approach to eating named Temple Food. We discussed the global popularization of the Temple Food ideology thanks to Chef’s Table, and how the celebrity of Jeong Kwan has brought with it blessings as well as hurdles.

What I took away from this conversation and the ones I’ve had with other travelers on this trip revolves around building a world-wide community through a common passion. In this case, it’s food.

Slow Food and Temple Food were born in distant cultures, in different centuries, but carry the same vision of spiritual, social, and physical fulfilment through food.

I believe collective consciousness can be revealed when people share presence through food, no matter where they are from.

More to come!..

I want to feel most alive. I dream of far-away places , but these pictures in my mind are only vessels for emotion.

In less than two weeks, I board a plane, alone, for Seoul. All of the emotion, lack of emotion, and tumbling of events that led to the decision to go there don’t matter anymore. I’ve quit my idea of the “why” of this trip, and am going with a new goal:

I want to experience emotion.

Love: to fall into it, out of it.

Fear: to feel uncomfortable, and then face it, trudge through it.

Hunger: to want something, more than anything.

Bliss: the feeling at the summit.

I will tap into my 18-year-old vagabond frame of mind and experience this adventure in a way I’ve never experienced before. I need this.

Do you?

About five years ago, my boyfriend at the time told me a quote from Jim Rohn:

You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

At the time I was 16 years old, and I was hanging out with some people who were not allowing me to pursue my best self. My boyfriend saw them as stifling my potential and he was right. I made the challenging move to change my environment, and therefore my future.

I’ve made this same move in a few very big ways throughout my life.

The day after I turned 18, I boarded a plane with a one-way ticket from Madison, Wisconsin to Seattle, Washington. Unfortunately, I grew up in a toxic family, and as soon as I knew I could physically escape the grips of my psychologically and emotionally abusive relationship with a family member, I took the opportunity. I decided to not apply for University, and I spent time in Seattle and Canada escaping a person who negatively impacted my life in a big way.

Since then, I’ve attended UW Madison, transferred to Northwestern, and took every chance I could to travel somewhere new, usually alone, to take time to collect and reevaluate who I am, and who I surround myself with.

Now, I realize who a person becomes is more than who they surround themselves with; it’s what they surround themselves with.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about consumption. I’ve also been thinking a lot about who I am, where I want to be, and how to change my pattern of consumption to get there. If you can change the 5 people you spend most of your time with, you can change the things that take up the most space in your mind through changing what you decide to consume.

What social media platforms you consume regularly? What types of podcasts and Netflix shows do you watch? What news media do you watch or read?

What food do you consume?

We have the autonomy to decide what we consume consciously.

We have the autonomy to decide who we become, consciously.

Back to the daily, the routine. Back to the studio apartment, the commute to and from work.

After returning home a few weeks ago, I immediately unboxed my books, journals, and favorite magazines. I didn’t bring my most prized journal with me this summer because of lack of space in my pack, and when I took it out from the darkness, I flipped through it along with journals of years past, tossed it aside, and forgot about it.

This morning, I decided to bring it with me to my daily coffeeshop working session, and opened it to the most recent page, reading the usually cheesy quote at the top:

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving. – Lao Tzu

It sinks in: every time I come back from a trip abroad, it takes weeks, if not months, to settle into my idea of what it takes to get on the path in pursuit of my goals: A marathon, recital, book, Fulbright proposal, new job, relationship. When I’m on the road, though, these things evaporate, and I can focus fully on finding what I really want outside of the confines of my normal, day-to-day routine.

I challenge you, Lao Tzu:

A good life has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.

Less goals, more purpose. Less arriving, more enjoying.

“It’s just the way things are,” she said.

America. Land of the free, but also land of the tasteless peaches and the realities of the costs of being a human.

Sitting anxiously in the clinic room, waiting for the MD to knock. She enters, doesn’t make eye contact, introduces herself and sits down at the computer. I’m immediately turned off by her coldness, her lack of care in communication. Oh, boy.

After the official business she asks me what my summer has entailed and I explain to her briefly the contents of my summer travels and research. Her intrigue heightens and we begin a lighthearted conversation about food, community and life here in Evanston. She then reveals to me that I need to see an outpatient surgeon to discuss a minor operation. My heart drops, my palms become sweaty, my heart rate increases, and my mind buzzes as I realize this means possibly $1000 of out-of-pocket costs. I think, “welcome home to America”.

I ask her what my options are, what the details of my “good coverage” with university insurance entails. I can tell she is proud and passionate about the University coverage, and she delights in taking a solid 15 minutes to explain to me the breakdown of how things get billed, sent to insurance, and what is left to bleed from my pocketbook. She can tell I am unenthused about the prospects, and she responds with the all-too-familiar “it’s just the way things are”.

The conversation shifts to quality of care and moves into a more abstract version of the same topic; opportunity and access. We discuss the United States healthcare system and Northwestern University tuition and how these relate to the “quality” or “opportunity”. She argues cutting-edge technologies are worth expensive premiums, potentially pushing people into paying as much as $1000 dollars a month to even have access to coverage with a deductible. In Canada, she says, people might have to wait months before an operation…

She goes onto compare my education at Northwestern in a similar way; the $54,120 in tuition buys not only a beautiful looking campus, but access to opportunities to expand potential through research grants, quality resources for Fulbright applicants, summer resources and other “cutting-edge” opportunities.

I sit there and absorb her words, her perspective. I’ve never had the opportunity to live the realities of healthcare elsewhere, higher education elsewhere, but I’ve talked to enough people abroad to understand that they laugh at our system, hurt for the people who are stuck with hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical bills and/or student debt.

My emotion; conflict.

I leave the doctors office, ride my bike to Jewel-Osco, and buy some peaches and cottage cheese. Peaches; 4$. Cottage cheese; $2.50. I pedal my way home, ride the elevator up, enter my apartment, crack open the cottage cheese, cut the peach and take a bite.

Flavorless.

In that bite of peach, my world solidifies. I am transcended by memory back to the 60 cent peaches of Spain, plump and fresh… the 70 cent peaches of Italy, sun-stroked and  juicy, rich. Tastes of the earth, tastes of life. The flesh of the peach is there, but the life in the peach is nonexistent.

I need to make my home in this place again.. I will find my flavorful, fresh peach. I will make use of the opportunity, access. After I pay the medical bills, that is.

Outpatient care wait list: three weeks.

Flavorless Peaches.

East London is my temporary home, but I foresee a budding long-term relationship with it.

I had a conversation last night with a friend I met while in the Swiss alps regarding free will, determinism, and solo travel as we grabbed pints at a place in East London and joined a crowd of ultra-hipster residents on some colorful, claustrophobic benches.

I’ve been taking long-term solo trips since the day I turned 18 and took off with a one-way ticket to Seattle. America, Canada, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Great Britain, Mexico, Singapore, Vietnam, Philippines…. I’ve learned that these places are simply empty landscapes. What makes a place, a trip, or a meal special is the company. Every place I’ve traveled has left a string of shared experience and each person I’ve met has left an imprint; I synthesize what relevant thing was learned and return “home” bringing with me a new way of living and seeing the world.

This is what differentiates the traveler and the tourist. Travelling is a way. The word itself implies a deeper way of moving, of absorbing. Travel allows for the world to push and pull you at its will; a tourist will plan, a traveler will allow. The beauty of this lies in what is allowed and the resulting lessons learned. Cultural osmosis at its peak happens through conversation, usually over shared food or drink. When I travel, I seek out these occasions everywhere I go.

The past few weeks in London has fed my entrepreneurial fire. As I sit in coffee shops and bars sipping endless espressos, pints, and gin & tonics next to people a decade older and further into the research and development of their lives, the clarity and immensely terrifying reality of the next decade of my life becomes more and more real.

I want to take my accumulated 9 months of solo backpacking around the world and inform new entrepreneurial motivations.

The push and pull, the planing and the allowing, the free will and determinism.

Keep allowing.

fish&chip.

8/12

Overdid it with the caffeine.

Spent the day exploring, once again, the Shoreditch neighborhood of East London; ultra-hipster, quaint, just far enough away from the core of the city center…

My first stop this morning (afternoon?) was at a coffeeshop just across from the Tower of London. Stomach rumbling, head aching from a night of ball-pit frolicking, gin-drinking blasphemy, I bopped into the cafe of a four-star hotel out of necessity. Once inside, I was greeted by a perky guy who spent an exorbitant amount time explaining the various pastries underneath the thick glass dome. I obliged him and purchased an dark-chocolate, orange lump of loaf along with my Flat White. The space was sterile yet charming. The ultra-clean marble-lined tables alongside the saturated colorful artwork left me wondering if the place had ever seen any real sit-down customers.

After clicking away for awhile on my laptop, I overheard the barista talking to another cafe customer about the City of London during this time of year. He explained to her that the city center around the area where I am staying is generally vacant as a result of some political, financial reasons. I decided to take him up in conversation about the city, its culture, and where to go next.

Thirty minutes later, I have learned about probably a dozen nuggets of dining, drinking, and exploring in London. A paper receipt scribbled with 7 different specialty coffeeshops along with the names of the best baristas at each place has me now tackling a new goal: drink the best coffees by the best baristas in London.

Fast forward to three train rides, four miles of walking and a smoked-salmon and cream-cheese lunch and I’m now half way through an espresso sourced from Kenya that is highly citric, immensely powerful and actually keeping me from doing my real work..

8/14

Two days, four coffeeshops later.

Kafein, PrufRock, Climpsons & Sons, Mare St. Market

Each shop in a different area of London; my way of travel. Never would I have had the same opportunity to “come across” these specialty coffee shops without the help of a local, deeply embedded into the scene.

Business ventures on the horizon.

Being sick on the road in the summertime is the ultimate punishment. I’ve been fighting off a lingering cold since Rome a few weeks ago and for some reason it’s getting worse. I distinctly remember when I checked into my hostel in the center of Rome and learned that two of my roommates were fighting something… I’d be doomed.

This reminds me of last year during the tail end of my August ventures around western Europe. I remember finding myself sick, teary-eyed, curled up in my hostel bed in Madrid with two weeks left of travel. I am in the same position now. Last summer I found respite when I landed in Paris and my travel partner had arranged an apartment for us and he carried me off to a resting place for a few days. Imagine.. landing in Paris and wanting nothing more than a bed, rest, and some television. London provides me the same situation now.

This time I am at the whim of my own decisions. Do I walk around the city in the heat during mid-afternoon, constantly clutching a water bottle and hoping a fountain is around the next corner? Do I grab a beer or two with some strangers, chatting and enjoying conversation while silently dying? Or, lay in a hostel bed for hours, hoping no one comes in and disturbs the peace?

Health is all we have, folks.

My entrance into the UK came with all the expected (and also probably fulfilled by my subconscious) difficulties.

From the Ryanair flight stranded on the tarmac, door open, unable to relieve passengers until London Stansted retrieved proper personnel to deploy the staircase to the insanely incompetent staff at the poorly reviewed backpackers hostel that I booked at 11 PM simply out of necessity… I am here regardless.

*sigh*

I am here regardless of where I rested last night, ate breakfast this morning, decided to spend my time, my money, my anxious energy. With each pound spent, always calculating the relative equivalent in dollars, my blood pressure rises. It’s OK, I will replenish the bank account once I’m home.

The world is equally as strangling as it is liberating. I have decided to find liberation through staying put. I won’t go to Glasgow, I won’t take the 20$ RyanAir flight from Glasgow to London on the 16th of August (which I failed to acknowledge would actually end up costing hundreds more, considering the travel to Glasgow, even to and from the airport..), but I will spend 17 days in a city filled with endless possibility.

Things are looking up. I’m sending countless emails to people in my research-related field. I’m endlessly seeking some type of intellectual social stimulation outside of the brain-frying carbon-copy hostel-goer conversations that are a right of passage for a 21-year-old college student traveling for an extensive period abroad. I’m sure I can find this stimulation in a place that breeds some of the most intelligent people and high class institutions in the world. I don’t know what I’m looking for, so I’m sure I’ll find it.

In the meantime, I’ll keep flipping my way through a book given to me by my host/professor/friend in Tuscany. I started this book on the beach, under the Tuscan sun, with sand in my toes and salt drying my ever-darkening skin (so thankful to my Native American ancestors for this trait).

An excerpt from Zadie Smith’s On Beauty: 

..Howard had pitched his tent and made his case. He had offered them a Rembrandt who was neither a rule breaker nor an original but rather a conformist; he had asked them to ask themselves what they meant by ‘genius’ and, in the perplexed silence, replaced the familiar rebel master of historical fame with Howard’s own vision of a merely competent artisan who painted whatever his wealthy patrons requested. Howard asked his students to imagine prettiness as the mask that power wears. To recast Aesthetics as a rarefied language of exclusion. He promised them a class that would challenge their own beliefs about the redemptive humanity of what is commonly called ‘Art’. ‘Art is the Western myth’, announced Howard, for the sixth year in a row, ‘with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.’ Everybody wrote that down.

Loved this passage.

When I was first given this book, I explained to my friend that I typically don’t care to read books in which the voice of the author is highly different than my own; that when I read, I want to imagine that the dialogue lives in another part of my own psyche that I can identify with, make my own, meld myself to. I began this book with no context, did not like the introduction, but continued to read regardless. I’ve found that although the characters and plot are highly different to my own character, my own life plot, I find constant nuggets of literary mastery that do end up resonating with my voice.

I guess the same thing has happened already since entering London..

I will keep reading, keep experiencing London, and I will find the nuggets of this society, this city, maybe even some people, that resonate with me.

British Library, Saturday Morning.

Last day in Italy.

It’s always sad leaving a loved one; watching them drive away in a car full of life, bound for a city thousands of miles away, or, leaving them behind for a new destination, the door closing with an ultimate “thud” behind you- no, in front of you- as their face disappears and the world shifts under you.. the sad pit in your stomach as you realize the next time you see them is unknown.

Transit is always a time of sulking; the bitter-sweetness that accompanies the train ride, the blablacar, the movement away from something, towards something, towards nothing, really.

I’d rather be the one to leave it behind. I’d rather be the one gripping the steering wheel, foot pressed against the pedal, moving forward into the world. I’d rather not be the one left behind to sulk alone, stagnant.

So, this time, I’m leaving Italy with force. This time, though, my destination is a destination of necessity. A destination of timeliness, the unfolding of travel-induced events. I have no idea what will come of this leg of the trip. Maybe, then, this is freedom. The unknown as freedom.

My generalities are telling me that I’m voyaging away from a place with the richest of food cultures to a place lacking in it. From Tuscany to London; from wild, unadulterated gluttony to proper, pint-guzzling days of poshness. Disappointing, maybe? More to learn from.

What I’ve learned in the past week: I enjoy basking in the non-traditional path. I need to accept this. Just because someone travels, doesn’t mean they’re traveled. Intellectualism is ultimately most attractive. Confidence is key to language enhancement, piano-playing abilities, most things in general.

See you all in London.

Following the crowds through the 90 degree sun-soaked streets was definitely worth it.

The Vatican City: A place I was always taught was closest in this world to heaven, to God. Little 10-year-old me, sitting in my tiny 3rd grade catholic school classroom in Plain, Wisconsin, learning about the Pope, Catholicism, and hypocrisy.

I’m thankful for it.

Fast forward 11 years: I step into the Piazza San Pietro alongside thousands of other sunscreen-blanketed, water-bottle clenching people. Through my earbuds plays Eric Satie’s Gnossienne: No. 1.

I settle into thoughts about faith, divinity, history. There is a palpable sense of grandiosity here and my reverent acknowledgement of the millions of religious people taking a pilgrimage to this site leaves me questioning what I ultimately believe in, prescribe to. These monuments, bigger in time and space that I will ever be, certainly must bring forth this feeling in the minds of everyone in their presence..

Within St. Peter’s Basilica, I take in the sculpture, the art, laying my eyes on the tombs of popes that have come and gone, as we all do, all will. Walking into the massive structure stirs within me a desire to sing.. to fill the space with a beautiful sound. I ponder the lyrics to the aria drowning out the sounds of the crowds around me, and they seem to me almost sacrilegious. How can something so beautiful express such trivial emotion? Where is this reverent feeling coming from within me? The other-worldly awe tangible in the space shared with thousands of buzzing tourists is powerful.. but…

This same sense of awe, for a girl that grew up a 15 minute rural drive away from a small town of 1200 people, lay in the rolling hills of my childhood. Native Americans wandered the untouched 340 acres of land that my father owned thousands of years before we even arrived. Instead of reverence directed at sheer grandiosity of structure and historical relevance present in the Vatican City, the reverence I had intuitively as a little girl was instead directed at the beauty of nature and the same deeply held beliefs by our native predecessors to protect land, preserve it, and live according to the lay of it.

I’d walk and sing, explore and play with make-believe friends in tall grasses, wooded tree lines, trickling creeks and open fields of green. My brother and I would occasionally find Native American arrowheads; we kept a box of them under our bunk bed in the basement of the Inn. Relics of the past, symbols of what was. I’d watch countless sunsets alone, wander with our German shepherd exploring the treeline, the perimeter of “our land”. I’d witness the change of the seasons in an unobtrusive way; the foggy mornings of springtime that wet the blossoming earth, the sun-stroked countryside of summer, the evolution of the Earth’s color palate in autumn, and the pristine calm that follows the first snowfall..

The closest thing to heaven on earth.

Pantheon: Late-July, 2018.

Here I am in Bologna, gastronomic centerpiece of the Emilia-Romagna region, sipping burnt coffee that’s been stagnant on an all-too-familiar drip-coffee burner at my hostel all morning. I’m silently pondering my dinner last night of peanuts, 2 pints of ice-cold German beer and half of a pizza shared at midnight with a hostel resident of Roman, Egyptian and (Cuban?) roots while chatting about Umm Kulthum, Egyptian and European music traditions and dating in Italy…

What is an “authentic” experience?

Each of my successive trips to Italy has left me less and less romantic about this country and yet more deeply in love with it in general; like a relationship with a significant other that transitions from the all-too-exciting high of the first few months and settles into the reality, the routine, and the progressing stages of familiarity. My relationship with Italy is becoming decreasingly romantic with each train cancellation, deepening knowledge about the economic and political problems, and the witnessing of the effects of mass tourism (which I understand that I am apart of..).

Yet, coming away from my one-night stay in Verona with my host family from two winters ago, I reminisce about why I romanticized Italy in the first place. Was there a reason why I purchased my first solo trip overseas to the most romantic of all cities in Italy, arguably all of Europe? Did my childhood exposure to Shakespearean tales of impassioned love, lust, and loss really dictate unconsciously how I decided to romanticize Italy and spend my travel dollars?

Regardless, each trip to this place has deepened my sense of reality about travel, life outside of the United States, and the beauty of being a romantic in the first place. I never really considered myself a romantic person, but now as I feel my quasi-romantic nature slipping out from under me, more and more I am trying to cling onto the lighthearted freedom and bliss that lies in naivety. Perhaps, though, I could hold onto my romantic nature through the experience of navigating a new reality..

For now, I question the “authentic” experience as I weave my way through the same streets that I passed on my first trip in Italy. I stroll past the bars that I had my first Italian coffees in when I was unsure of the ways of coffee culture in this cultural context. I see groups of people that I can now group together in my mind as being from particular places in Europe, in Italy. I pick up on more minute differences in Italian accents. I can understand the differences in age gaps; the differences in the complexities and expectations between American early-twenty-somethings and Italian early-twenty-somethings.

This is my new romantic world… getting deeper and deeper into the culture while still remaining outside of it. Outside of my own, even. Peering in from the edges of the world.. a short-term transplant, enjoying the way things are done without ever fully prescribing to them, anywhere.

Arena di Verona.

I decided to sign up to run the 2018 Chicago Marathon on a snowy day in November last year. As soon as I made the commitment, I felt a sense of excitement met with dread because I knew my summer plans would put me in a nomadic position.

Fast forward to now. It’s July. The Italian sun beats down on the earth and I am not in the midst of a productive training schedule. If anything, I am overwhelmingly stressed about the impending race in October, my lack of raising funds for our marathon charity, and the lack of stability as a nomadic traveler.

I moved out of my apartment in Chicago on June 1st and am currently 7 weeks living out of one single backpack: three dresses, two jeans, three shirts, running shorts and shoes, sandals and a nice Italian-made skirt. Half of my clothes are dirty, half are kind-of clean.

From a farm in rural Wisconsin, a friend’s sofa in Chicago, my mom’s on the coast in Maine, a variety of Airbnbs in Milan, Turin, Bra to many trains, BlaBlaCars (one of which got a flat tire during the trip), planes and motorcycles; I have eaten at tables with complete strangers, alone, and with people who feel like family.

I create my own schedule. I have been awake at ungodly hours, have overslept, under-slept, overeaten, under-eaten. I have gone days without having an in-person conversation with anyone; I have also spent hours chatting with people I met only hours previously.

I have ran in Bra, Italy during the hottest part of the day (why do I do this to myself). I have ran along the Po River in Turin, accidentally joining runners in a 10K race. I have ran along Lago Maggiore in Switzerland, hopping in the crisp water to finish things off.

I have eaten more pasta in the past 10 days than I have in my entire life. I have drank more beer around a campfire than ever before. I have eaten wild strawberries, wild blueberries, wild blackberries.

Looking at the rest of my summer, there are so many questions. I don’t know when I will fly home. I don’t know where my next run will be, let alone my next bed.

I think about the Chicago Marathon. I think about stability and instability. There is no floor underneath me at the moment. I am free falling, enjoying the ride, but need to open my parachute sooner rather than later.