#25 A different outlook
How we can see things differently
Hey there! I'm glad to have you here.
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A single talk can change your life; a different way of looking at your job or the world around you will bring many insights and wonders. Enjoy this writings!
Strangers with Benefits
Portraits of people who’ve shaped me.
Every time I’ve met and connected with a stranger, my world became a little bigger. I learned something, I felt something. Strangers helped me grow. David, the Indian cofounder, my one-night angel and my partner of four and a half years have all shown me how to love. Without any judgment or doubts, they allowed me to experience life through their eyes. They opened a space for me to be. Particularly with Mark in Pisa, I had one of the most intensely transformative experiences of my life. It freed me.
How to work like a chef
Find your own... personal... freezers
In these posts, I plan to write about how I cook and what I learned in restaurant kitchens that made me the cook I am today.
I really hope these “Notebook” entries of mine can be of some help to you as well.
So, where to start with such a massive project…?
Well, today I’m sharing my updated (though by no means exhaustive) list of what seem to me the most important working habits and beliefs of the restaurant chef.
So let’s go…
Drops of Beauty #150
November 14, 2023
I had a local friend ask me where I take my photos and when I told her she said, “Wait, we go there all the time but I don’t see what you see!” Isn’t that the way it is?
There are things I look past and around to take the photos I take. There is (way too much) trash, there is noise from the two major highways nearby, sometimes there are events that block access like the recent marathon and the upcoming fireworks. Some days it would be easy to look around and think there is nothing here to photograph - yet there always is. There is always something of beauty, something to be grateful for, something unexpected. It really is like a treasure hunt.
Read a collection of stories from citizens displaced by war
We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled — Wendy Pearlman
The stories that make it far and wide are often not the stories of people just like us: ordinary citizens with mothers and fathers and children who want to go to school and live a quiet life. This collection is about those people: the ones who are just like everyone else in the world. And amid the terror of the war and the uncertainty of their present day, they remain hopeful and wishful for a future that may be better for their children.
Capdown: Civil Disobedients
"You should know upfront, this is not a love story"
Anyway, we queue up outside the venue, we pay the entrance fee, the doorman secures a string of blue paper around my wrist. We climb the brightly-lit staircase to a dark room where the bass thumps and people lounge around on low sofas waiting for the first band to come on. This is before social media, before smartphones. Tomorrow, on MSN Messenger, the night will be scrutinised in detail until one of your friends’ mums wants to use the phone and you have to disconnect the internet, but right now there’s nothing to do except drink and talk and, later, dance.
069: diving into the astronomical twilight of our fears
December in Iceland, a waxing moon, Beowulf, and of course, monsters and fairies
To me, the dark time of the year is opportunity to go right down into the gloaming and dive into astronomical twilight of our hidden fears. In the blanketing quiet of mid-winter, we can acknowledge that nothing is ok, that we aren’t safe, and we will all eventually die. Then we can go on singing, anyway, because fuck the cold and fuck the dark, we can still tell a joke and fling our arms around each other.
Before you go…
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<3 <3
Thank you so much for including my post in this!