i'm a glassblower from wisconsin, been on the torch since late 2011-early 2012 when i was still focused heavily on sculptural metalworking and sculptural metal turning. i went back to school after many years of working culinary, everything from dishwasher to pastry chef, saladier to banquet chef at the biggest venue in town. before i continue, i want to stress that this is a rant, and not a call for sympathy or for help. fuck all that, we've all got our problems.

twelve years of culinary and eventually my body broke down in the form of disintegrating lumbar discs. two of them.. one of these disc chunks was nice enough to give my spine a nudge and left me with little use of my left leg for almost a year. i didn't have insurance, and at the time i was making less than $12 an hour after as many years in the business. unfortunately, the actual injury happened at home, after almost two years of fairly constant back pain and inability to sleep. this would have been late summer, 2011.

it was almost a relief when i found out there was actually something seriously wrong with me, because people tend to roll their eyes a bit when you start whining that your back hurts. i get it: i don't have your headache, i don't feel your cramps. i feel fine, and you're slowing me down. that's how systems work when we're driven to the limit of our abilities. get it done or get the fuck off my team, i'm going to get this done with or without you. empathy is for people with time to spare.

this is the result of a service-based economy that can do naught save trim down, filling the job with people that are already in the system. i watched my banquet team dwindle from five to two souls during my service, and at that point i was demanding whoever could help. plating banquets for a thousand people with three dishwashers and a prep cook, all of whom were making minimum wage; middle management apologetic about The Economy that couldn't allow them to fill the positions we were missing. i was originally hired as a replacement for the pastry chef that had left to start his own business, and shortly thereafter middle management decided there wasn't really any use for a pastry chef at a high-end venue.

for the record, a thousand-person buffet wins the venue something like $30k. one of them was enough to keep our sous-chef on for a year.

one of them was a whole lot more than i was making in a year. one big wedding with 800 or so attendees saw the venue throwing $5,000.00 in steak at me and telling me to go to town. it was good stuff, i mean you can't skimp on steak, but hey.. you're trusting $5000.00 in elk tenderloin at a guy that you only pay $11.50 an hour. or, $5,000.00 in high-end bone-in ribeye; several thousand in seriously pricey ahi tuna. people overlook things because of places like taco bell and even hardees: culinary is an art. culinary is not industrial food production at the same time that it is, especially at the high end. every plate is a piece of sculpture if you're doing it right, and for that to come together in the slack-ass situations i've described, you MUST have either well paid employees or a highly respected team, with a capable leader.

large venues understand this from a really rudimentary level. when i left our local venue the hotel general manager begged me to stay. he couldn't offer me anything, mind you, just wanted to tell me that i wasn't replaceable and oh by the way good luck in the future once i told him to fuck himself. he shook my hand apologetically. i'm not trying to blow myself here, just to illustrate the dynamic in a corporate setting between an absolute peon like myself and the corporate head of control doom controller in the local hierarchy. at this point, maybe for the first time (and more importantly, after it didn't matter) i realized that the highest end of the venue a) knew who i was, and b) understood how fucked they were by the system.

by some sort of serendipity, i'd received a paper letter from the UW telling me i qualified for a great deal of financial aid a month or so before i injured my back, i assumed it was because of my age. i guess colleges are more likely to bet dollars on a 30-something before a high school graduate. i went back to school to finish the art degree i'd started in the mid-90s and didn't look back, and now, several years later, i'm producing glass stuff i used to drool over when i was younger... glass that Normals drool over because it's super seductive. i've seen absolute lust in people looking at glass work.

i spent two hours in the shop tonight. it's pretty humid in wisconsin right now, but i just received a fairly big color order yesterday, and i needed to play with some stuff. i made several chunks of tubing from the raw color material, and spent almost half of that time playing with a new color, turning rod into tubing and very carefully shaping what i guess could be described as a pinchie.

you've got to pay a lot of mind to heat in glass, because glass explodes when you stress it with heat. especially borosilicate. in my zombie-rush to finish the piece, i fucking blew it up instead of gently re-heating a portion that had obviously cooled down.

and i realized: fuck. i'm still in a hurry. i'm still trying to do things faster than i can do them because that's how my work regiment is programmed. that clock is the rape of the american worker, and it's something we need to rid ourselves of. permanently. otherwise, everything we create is predicated on frustration.