Supper Club: April and Life’s Work
Spring is officially here but the weather has been mixed. For April’s Supper Club with M and T, I looked through my pantry and fridge, and decided on an Indian menu. My friend had given me a loads of Indian spices and this best-selling cookbook by Camellia Panjabi, 50 Great Curries of India.
Menu: I had a butternut squash that I was anxious to use so decided on a soup, and I have always been a fan of chaats, and of course thought a curry would be mandatory.
Drink: Sauvignon blanc
Dessert: Royce chocolates
Conversation: Changing careers mid-career
“How did you get to where you are?”
When I was working in television entertainment, I often tell the story about how students from my alma maters would ask how I got my job as a digital executive. My response was that I just followed my passions and trusted my instincts. I studied history as an undergraduate; worked in publishing in Tokyo; moved to Palo Alto for grad school; and moved to New York to join a start-up in fine art e-commerce (that went bust), then worked for Esther Dyson, and married my love for music with a gig at AOL; and then landed at Bravo where my other loves for food and fashion and pop culture were able to be fused with my by-then-kinda-long career in digital. But after many years making a living in the digital space, I hungered to get back to basics and knew that food was the direction I wanted to face. I took courses at the International Culinary Institute, and learned about plant-based nutrition and plant-based baking from Matthew Kenney Culinary. And now I am trying my hand at writing about my love of cooking, eating, and dining.
Not exactly a normal career path.
My Supper Club friends have been working all their lives but have also taken seemingly non-sequitur turns in their careers. When I met M in Tokyo, she was a news television anchor, and then went to business school, and started her career in finance. She’s looking to fuse her background with more pro-social causes now.
And T was and still is a fashion designer, producing beautiful natural fiber pieces, but she also went back to school and got her MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History from Christie’s as well as an MBA. She is now a private art advisor and curator, as well an educator.
Also, not exactly normal career paths.
We talked about the challenges of making new moves in our careers. You end up spending a lot of time explaining the shifts and weaving the right narrative to those parties who are not used to non-traditional career journeys. And we look to each other for advice, guidance and recommendations in our respective next steps. Just having open non-judge-y ears is so refreshing.
Life teaches us much and I feel that if we are truly paying attention, we would bend and grow in different directions throughout it.