This Is My Brain in Love - I. W. Gregorio Page 0,29

(we failed at capturing all the customers that we could have).

I glance at my watch—it’s almost one o’clock and we’ve been working nonstop through lunch. I grab a carton of the fried rice. “Hey, I don’t think any of us has eaten since this morning. We’ll all feel way better if we have something in our stomachs.”

“Thanks, I’m not hungry,” Jos mumbles, still looking out at the people lining up at the other food carts.

I start cleaning up the serving area in silence. Jos joins me eventually, packaging up the fried rice into take-out containers that we sell for two dollars each. It’s still a moneymaker, given that it’s concocted from yesterday’s fried rice and leftover veggies, but Jocelyn’s distress hangs over us like a darkening sky before a thunderstorm.

Maybe she just needs perspective, some cognitive reframing.

“You were amazing today,” I tell her as we pour the dumpling water into a bush by the parking lot. “I can’t believe how many customers we had. This is such a win for the restaurant.”

She glances away and gives a half-hearted shoulder lift. “Sure.” I know someone deflecting praise that they don’t believe when I see it. “I can’t take credit for it. It was your idea.”

“But it was your execution,” I insist. I recognize the disconnect between what I see and what she thinks of herself, because I do it, too.

“Then the execution was shortsighted. I can’t believe I set our expectations so low,” she says, her voice cracking. She sniffs and rubs at her nose angrily. “You were right that we shouldn’t have worried about not having enough customers. We should’ve made twice as many dumplings, and boiled them all beforehand to save a step. Our price point should have been higher, or maybe we could have given out only four dumplings per order, not five. And I should’ve gotten one other person to cook so two people could run the register when we fell behind on orders.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” I tell her. The irony of my using that phrase on someone else does not escape my notice. “This was the first time A-Plus has ever done something like this, right? Even if it wasn’t perfect, we definitely turned a profit, and the exposure is priceless.”

“You can’t pay rent with exposure,” Jocelyn says. “I don’t know if it’ll be good enough.”

“The fact that I’m getting a hernia picking up our cash box suggests that it will,” Priya says, making a show of struggling to lift our register. “Hey, Catastrophe Girl, let’s wait to do the math before you beat yourself up.”

It’s then, when I watch Jocelyn shake her head and go back to cleaning up, as if she can’t bear to watch the blow-by-blow of the accounting, that I realize our crucial mistake: We made such a conscious effort to keep our expectations low that we didn’t set ourselves up for maximal success.

I’m used to setting myself up for small potatoes, informed by years of therapy and lectures from my father about how “unrealistic expectations breed disappointment, perfectionism, and anxiety.”

But Jocelyn? She can’t bear to count how much money we made, because no amount would be good enough to make up for opportunity lost.

This Is My Brain on Fatigue

JOCELYN

After I do the math, we make back the entrance fee plus an $800 profit, which seems good until we count the time it took to fold all those goddamn dumplings—forty-plus hours of work? We barely break even, even if we only pay ourselves minimum wage.

What a bust.

As we load our equipment into the van, Priya and Will chatter quietly behind me, but I can’t bring myself to join in. I know I’m the wet blanket—God, I always know it, but there’s nothing I can do to get rid of the sensation that my head weighs too much for my body.

Failure doesn’t need to be spectacular, like with that face-planting ski jumper they show every time the Olympics roll around to illustrate the agony of defeat. Actually, I’m beginning to realize, it’s usually pretty boring, sometimes even masked by a thin veil of achievement. We sold out of dumplings. Woo-hoo. I don’t know why we thought it was so crucial to have handmade dumplings in the first place. People at the Boilermaker couldn’t care less if the thing they cram into their mouth is a handcrafted piece of exotic culinary art. All they want is fuel.

As I pull out of the Mohawk Valley Community College parking lot, Priya snaps a