"A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin..."*

Week 4. Let's review:

• I probably did get that $20 stolen earlier in the sessions, because Chef made a head's-up announcement: make sure we don't leave our personal belongings lying around. Apparently, there's been a mini-rash of $20 being taken from several students' wallets.
  
• The male restaurant lifer told me again that I'm not professional, because my Top Chef bag is covered in flour. No comment then on his florescent-green key lime pie, or the fact that he basically rolled his name, and then baked it, onto his pie crust, via a Sharpie pen and a piece of reused plastic wrap. Chef rolls her eyes sometimes, but I think he means well.
  
• I saw a drop-dead gorgeous man at school yesterday, but alas, he was only a mirage. I mean, visitor.
• There is no way in the world those restaurant uniforms, which arrived yesterday, could flatter and/or complement anyone's body, mind, spirit, or ego. Am trying to figure a way around the lost-in-a-shapeless-bolt-or-two-of-ugly-fabric look, though, like turn the above-waist-high elasticized waistband into more of a low rider thing. Then take in the legs, maybe belt the jacket, embroider something over the school's logo, and voila. It'd still be hideous.
  
• I saw a kind-of-cute man at school yesterday, and he apparently works there. I should have realized when I spotted his crazy vertical chef's hat on the desk next to him, though I'm not sure he actually wore it. Chef Nola doesn't don one of those restaurant fetish items, which I sincerely appreciate.
  
• Essential oil of lavender does work to relieve pain, blistering, and scarring of burns. I've doled out my trusty travel bottle twice in class so far: once a few weeks ago to a slightly quiet chocolatier, a single mother of three, who swore by its effectiveness—no blistering—though I'm not sure how she burned herself; and the second time to the other guy in the class, the bakery owner who comes with his wife, a cool dude who felt bad that he dropped my pretty tart shell when he picked up the hot pan using the thermal oven mitt with the hole in the middle of it. He seemed okay, but was very apologetic, though I wasn't that bummed. In fact, I'd put everything away and didn't want to make a new dough, but Dee and the baker man weighed out everything for me again, and it was kind of sweet. In the end, the new crust was probably better than the first, particularly when Chef used the melted bittersweet chocolate (which came in a brown-paper-wrapped brick of maybe about twenty-five pounds that she smashed on the table several times to procure a few hunks of), to reinforce any cracks in the final product (I never said it was perfect, just amazing).
  
• *—Praise Song for the Day, Elizabeth Alexander