In 2011

In 2011 I was 35, living on South 11th street with a conventionally hot boyfriend and two funny dogs. Was I happy? Meh, I was content I guess, for someone with chronic bulimia, celiac and hashimotos disease. I had every notion that I was living with the person I was going to be living with for the foreseeable future, in a cool converted warehouse apartment with the bearded lady next door and the rock bands and Marc the squatter and all the hipsters. My career was definitely a bit of a schmear, but for some reason this has never really bothered me, in any event, all signs pointed to keep going, keep doing your thing.

My thing was, for some reason, making bread. Well, that and getting fired. I started making bread as a result of getting the boot from not one but TWO jobs. The 2011 firing was by PIMCO for not opting out of expensing my PM’s wife’s skis to be flown to Aspen. It was in the days where we used instant messenger by MSN. Is that still a thing? I know that some offices still must use instant messaging solutions, correct? Anyway we would chat, my “bosses” back then. It was weird being an executive assistant. You would have an executive assistant boss like office manager admin HR lady but then also your people who you supported in the financial institutions who actually go out and make the company money. Like the Project Managers or Bankers or Sales or Analysts or whatever. And my job would be to book their travel and whatnot, and the way they would communicate is to send an instant message saying something like “will you get me a cup of water?” and I would ignore it and then he would say “why haven’t I gotten my $466.23 back from my trip to Aspen?” and — get this- ok. to clarify here I had a few people who I supported but the guy who I’m talking about is the guy who got me fired, and GUESS WHAT. HE had gone to my fuckin high school. The high school that my MOTHER WAS A TEACHER AT !!!! HE WAS IN HER CLASS !!!!! WE LIVE IN FUCKING NEW YORK CITY!! I know. It’s a lot to process there. Definitely a huge source of this website and all of my serious emotional trauma but LET’S FOCUS!!

I begged the executive assistant boss lady to please, under no circumstances should you assign him to me but no. she didn’t listen!

Anyway they gave me like 8 weeks severance or something so I just stayed home making bread. I went to the kosher grocery stores in the Satmar Shtetl on Division Street and spent all the money I was making in severance buying weird flours and grains and syrups from these super jewy granola stores. Those shops are still there, the business district east of Lee Ave. It looks like 1942 all year round. Sometimes you can even see the rabbis killing chickens. It’s disgusting and smells like horror.

Failure Musings

As far as I can tell, the wide majority of media-consuming Americans believe something like this : the more I produce, and the more people who know me, the more successful I am. We also believe, and are taught, that success means that we have to gain influence over, at the very least, a fraction up to large swaths of people we know or don’t know. We definitely should be the envy of our peers. You, as a human, must get good at something, get known for it, and get paid for it. You must buy the clothes with the money you got paid for working and you must wear them to the parties you get invited to. You definitely met the people who host the parties though the people who pay you or someone who pays someone else you know.

The woman who started free bread was a machine. She was the media-consuming american who who was longing for something to get good at. Something to get known for, something to believe in. Sometimes I forget I was like that. Sometimes I become fearful that I will become like that again. That woman found something that she could produce, something to actually make revenue, something she could learn about and maybe to Excel in.

So as a result of a Celiac Disease diagnosis I was told I had to quit eating gluten. I would like to point out here that my doctor was a gastroenterologist with a lisp. So after the endoscopy and colonoscopy he called me in to diagnose me with a disease I had never heard of, Theliac. This was 2008, So close to the financial crisis.

Five months ago I halted production at Free Bread Inc. I want to tell the story about the company I killed but I confess that I have always assumed that no one would care. And then after some thought I decided that I don’t care if people don’t care. That will have to be another post, why I quit caring that nobody cares.

  • Free Bread was like a very sick child as a result of decisions that I, its ‘mother,’ made over time
  • Free Bread was not going to get better under my care alone.

Driven

I quit Free Bread Inc about 5-6 months ago. Part of the reason I am writing this is to get the story down on paper because I think its a good one. It’s a story of quitting your dream. I have quit more than one dream, which sounds defeatist. Maybe it is.

My memories of the very end of free bread’s 8 1/2 year life come in memory flashes that actually bring discomfort and pain. It was a dramatic time for me because there was zero money and the work I was doing required a great deal of physical labor. I was running on fumes again, always running on fumes.

Free Bread started right around 2012, you can read a little about its beginnings here if you are so inclined. You’ll notice a few other ventures that I have tried- there was a garden that you can read about here and a failed blog here. At some point I will get up the nerve to write about my AdHd diagnosis where I start to understand why I have so much fucking spaz energy but this is kind of how everything ties together. Here, at iquiteverything.com. It’s February 26th 2020. I don’t have a job, but I might get a paying gig- so while I wait for someone to pay me to do something I thought I’d at least spend some time writing shit down.

I had been trained as an actor (I actually got kicked out of acting school but that’s a different story) but was not a fan of the way acting made me feel about myself so this led me to quit acting. I was very poor after grad school, and a last ditch effort I decided to work as an administrative assistant at a Private Equity group which was a nice 60K salary and I could start living a decent way of life. This