Sans Telos

Yes, that’s right; I’ve decided once again that it’s time for a new iteration of Sans Telos. Why? Well, there’s one major reason: I’ve been struggling with staying motivated to drag myself through school lately. At the same time, I’m also finding myself more and more drawn toward the masochistic career that I’ve been trying to avoid (at my parents’ suggestion) for my entire life: cooking.

I can’t explain it, but nothing I have learned to do holds my interest quite as well as cooking, and in my opinion it’s really the one thing I excel at. Sure, I can handle programming, but it’s just not the same as shaping a boule of sourdough or whipping up a batch of earl grey ice cream (more on that in a future post).

After years of telling me that I should stay out of professional kitchens, my mom has suggested that I take this summer off and work full time at my current job doing pastry at the Nasher Museum’s cafe on Duke’s campus over in Durham. As the only person at the cafe who works pastry, I’m in charge of desserts there, and even get to contribute quite a bit to the menu. I really enjoy the work, and am lucky to have so much creative control with so little experience on my resume. The best part is that the skills seem to come naturally to me; I am still a little slow in the kitchen, but I have yet to fail completely at anything from baking warm chocolate cakes with ganache centers to making a lovely lemon curd and short dough for the personal-sized lemon tarts I’m serving right now. I have to admit, programming has never seemed as cool to me as the culinary arts.

So I’ve pretty much decided to give it a shot. I’m going to work this summer, and then decide what to do from there. In the meantime, I’m going to try as hard as I can to overexpose myself to food, in an attempt to become sick of it. Assuming that a) I’m not driven to kill anyone at work and b) I don’t burn out immediately, I’m pretty sure I’ll have a new career path to look into. So, onward and (hopefully) upward! I’m looking forward to having some new projects to blog about shortly.