I remember a time I knew what happiness was--

There are spans of time when I get hungry. So hungry. "My lunch on Friday was a quarter-of-a-dinner-plate pile of brown rice, a half-a-dinner-plate pile of collard greens and onions, and two pork chops" hungry. "My dinner Saturday night was six slices from an eight-inch radius pizza pie" hungry. The latter was made even more hilarious by the fact that my dining companions (who had been the ones to suggest getting pizza after getting groceries after work -- we're working on a project out of town and I'm the one with a car) apparently hadn't been aware of the fact that I'm a, shall we say, heavy eater.

I've always been a small person with a huge appetite. I won't lie -- I've sometimes played it up for laughs, I've sometimes gone further than I should out of a macho impulse. But while I might occasionally give it an extra push, it's not faked. And while it's a great ice breaker, a fun thing to be known for, and actually makes all-you-can-eat buffets good value meals for me, it's not always easy. I'll be the last to complain about having a high metabolism, but when you're hungry all the time? It's not cheap. All that food don't come for free.

And you know the word "hangry" -- hungry + angry, anger stemming from hunger? It's not a joke. What other people usual describe as the monster that is born from their not having had their morning coffee is what takes me over as my hunger grows, like a full moon rising to pull forth a rabid werewolf. And what that means is that I have to plan a lot of my life around food, the ease of which varies widely depending on where I'm working, when I'm working, etc.. It's also interesting being in a field where it's common for people to, at least during certain phases of a production, work rather than do things like eat, sleep, or shower, just in order to get the work done. I'm at the point in my life, however, when I don't apologize for needing to eat. I know what I need to function as a professional and just as a human being -- trust me, you won't like me when I'm hungry -- and I don't feel a need to apologize for that.

Anyhow, that's all to say... Here's another restaurant round-up! New York City this time, from places I've eaten within the past few months. Again, these aren't so much reviews as recollections and recommendations.

A song that hits you so hard--

I have a half-written blog post that had been intended to be for last week, but then I was in too much of a funk to finish it. It seemed like the perfect subject, the perfect timing: I was out of NYC for a while because of work and I had been ravenously hungry for a week, so I began writing a NYC restaurant round-up of places I had eaten in the past few months.

But that proved to be too depressing. I love food so much that writing honestly about my experiences produced a positive tone, while my mood was such the opposite that it felt nauseatingly fake. So I quit writing, drank wine, and got a health amount of sleep instead. Observing the experience now with detachment, it might be interesting to do a depressed food post, where ecstatic salivating over memories of food is used as a tool to create contrast with existential/situational despair. "See, how wonderful things once were! All that remains in my mouth now are the bitter ashes of loneliness."

I grew up in a rural environment, so unlike my city-boy director, I was not caught off-guard by not being able to stop by a bar for a few hours after work at midnight on a weekday. Timing aside, you would need a bar, as well as preferably a way of getting there that didn't involve driving. That, and the lack of other urban creature comforts, did not bother me a bit. But I was surprised by the effect of the combination of social isolation and lack of anchor. Sure, there might not be much going on in my native corner of the woods, but it's still mine. Being a stranger without a home in the middle of nowhere -- that is not nearly so idyllic. And rather than warming me with the glow of happy memories, even though I'm a cheap homebody who actually only goes out maybe three or four times per month, I found that reminiscing about food -- and the experiences attached to that food -- was making me homesick.

On top of that, I was absorbing a lot from work. Being a stage manager is sometimes a little like being a combination air quality sensor/air filter. You have to be able to take in and read the environment, and then be able to optimize it. But that can make it draining when there is bad energy, because striking the balance between being close enough but also far enough to deal with it can be difficult. And in this case, it wasn't the usual energy problems of personality difficulties or the like, but a series of tragedies at my current workplace -- four sudden, unexpected deaths within the span of less than a month, three of them young people. Outsider that I am, I wasn't directly affected, but a couple members of our cast very much were, and in any case, four people in a very small, isolated community dying within a month is enough to creep a person out. I've never actually seen any of the Final Destination movies, but I'm pretty sure that's kind of what they were about.

Did I mention that the place they're housing me in has a lot of creepy taxidermy?

All in all, I am a very fortunate person who is in a bit of a funk. And I'm treasuring the homesickness that means that there is someplace to which I am bound to return and be glad.