moppy

I visited…and never wanted to leave. Alas, real life kicked in and on the plane I went, but if I ever manage to save up enough…

I’m the kind of vegetarian that gives strict vegetarians fits. I don’t really stress about from where the gelatin in my food may be sourced, and I don’t freak out if I find out something I’m eating contains meat broth, although I’ll generally avoid it once I know.

I’m pesco-vegetarian in that I’ll eat fish, but because it just feels so unethical with the way the ocean’s being destroyed by overfishing, I eat fish so rarely I have trouble digesting even that.

I did it as a New Year’s resolution because at the time I was staying for three weeks with a pesco-veg friend and had just been ordering whatever she got at restaurants since I’d never been much out of the Midwest to see what there was to eat in the rest of the U.S., and had so much more energy that I just kept it up. I haven’t lost weight or anything, but it just feels good, and it’s a great motivation for me to keep trying new foods and doing my own health-conscious cooking.

I’m not sure why I’ve always been so drawn to becoming a barista. I like people, I like coffee, I like making people happy…I suppose maybe it really is that simple. I know it’s really a lot of work, but I can’t think of a better job. I love working with the public, I love chatting up customers, I love making people smile, I love coffeehouses through and through, and I love being able to say that I love what I sell. While I was teaching English in Japan, of my Japanese co-teachers asked me what my ‘big dream’ was for the rest of my life, since we’d just been talking about a writing project in which we asked the students what their ‘big dream’ was. I thought about it and surprised myself by saying I wanted to become a barista. She was the first person to finally tell me it was okay to have a ‘little big dream’ and I’ve had my heart truly set on it ever since.