Solitude

This week was a solitary week. I’ve spent eleven years in customer service and seven in restaurants. When you live this lifestyle, people surround you at all times from the clientele to your co-workers. Some interactions can be unpleasant, maddening, and appalling. Some can leave you smiling and can even change your perspective on life. Maybe sometimes if you’re lucky, you can return the favor and blow their minds with dry sherry.

I miss it. I’ve been craving social interaction more than I have chocolate ice cream this week. Not that I’ve been hibernating, I’ve been taking walks with my best and her babe, seeing old friends at the coffee shop, and meeting some of my favorite professional colleagues for cocktails but it is surely not the same.

Now I spend a lot of time writing, reading, cold-calling, tasting with strangers, driving my car, running, planning, budgeting, brainstorming, guitar-picking, book-browsing, and sleeping. I know this sounds fantastic and idealistic but it is comforting going to the same space five days a week and seeing your co-workers who you spend more time with than you do your own family. Then you leave the lifestyle and your friends who are in the restaurant industry work... when you don’t.

As I transition to this new life of solitude which I’m sure I will love in a week or so, I’ve had to find comforts in other things. One of them has been getting back into the kitchen and rather than snacking on cheese, marcona almonds, and the quick hamburger, I’ve been varying things up and mainly with a little help from my friends:

White Bean and Chicken Chili

Scallops and Chorizo

Lamb Chops & Winter Greek Salad

Nostalgia

I was looking for the right word recently to describe how nostalgic I can be. Nostalgia isn’t quite the word as I don’t yearn to be somewhere in the past, I just tend to be sentimental about my position in time and space. For instance, I love when a couple years down the road in a relationship, lovers are finally able to talk about the agonizing first dates or the previous unrequited love. Or realizing that someone you know well now was having a conversation with your best friend’s husband halfway across the country before you even knew them. I tend to over-think things but I recently went through my old blog and was reading some posts I wrote over a year ago when I first moved to Austin. I wrote this one after I bought my first book on classic cocktails:

http://rachelsotherthings.tumblr.com/post/1354404564/the-cocktail

After this past week, I can’t help but laugh after reading that post not having any idea I would have a job representing the most interesting and unique liquor portfolio in Texas. I also laugh at the last line not having any idea what I would actually mean when I said I was beginning my foray into heavy drinking. Although I did have a hard time transitioning, this past week, the work and the perks made me realize how lucky I am as my current job requires me to be at places like the San Antonio Cocktail Conference and requires me to taste some damn good liquors with their importers and distillers.

Tasting through Bittermens line of bitter liqueurs at Haddington's with Janet and Avery themselves. I'm a sucker for the citron sauvage myself:

-->

Getting to watch Eric Seed’s under 17% sales pitch. It’s not difficult when the line-up looks like this. Heavy drinking means zucca and tonics at 11 am and that’s okay:

-->

The Mezcal Mule at Esquire Tavern was my first drink of the conference and the first drink of my royal rookie mistake. My advice is not to drink too much on night one of a cocktail conference…

 

-->

…especially when you have to stand around at the Virtuoso tasting tables for eight hours at nine am the next day:

 

-->

Tasting and loitering with David Suro of Siembra Azul when it’s all said and done:

 

I really wasn't lying about the heavy drinking.