What's this blog all about - "The Weekly Three"

December 29, 2016 by Olivia Van Wormer in The Weekly Three

This blog was born out of a desire to hold myself accountable week to week. Knowing that I easily become caught up in life, I designed this blog as a space to reflect on and record my thoughts and projects with others and find new ways of being creative.

Each Thursday, I will post the “Weekly Three”

1. The question of the week. What have I been contemplating both internally and in discussions with people?
2. What impacted me this week?
3. What did I create this week? And what new skills can I teach myself along the way?

Week 13: Realization

October 27, 2016 by Olivia Van Wormer in The Weekly Three

Twenty-one years later, I understood I wasn’t born to be a line-chef.

The realization hit me on an unusually busy Monday night. Tickets printed, I began to sweat. The salad I just sent out looked sad, the arugula far from perky. I prayed for the night to just be over.

It was then, in the midst of fryer grease and shredded carrots, I discovered I hated something, I thought my whole life, I was bound to become.

Week 12: Fear

October 20, 2016 by Olivia Van Wormer in The Weekly Three

I am scared often. It is one of my best motivators.

Fear is my challenge to myself. Will I overcome it? Or will I let it overcome me? That is the decision. There is no third way. There is no truce in this game. Fear lurks in places I didn’t even know it would: at the corners of commitment, within a salmon ready to be broken down, and in the moment before I send an email. It’s an unexpected visitor and a persistent one at that.

Week 11: Connection

October 13, 2016 by Olivia Van Wormer in The Weekly Three

Phone dead. Communication cut off, I was left with one option: engage in the world around me. The airport was quiet and clean. A Kiwi couple across from me disrupting the otherwise calm nature of my surroundings. I glimpsed a familiar book cover peeking out of their oversized backpack, the type only a true adventurer lugs around.

Week Ten: Normality

October 06, 2016 by Olivia Van Wormer in The Weekly Three

If you allow it, life is a conveyor belt. Your parents place you on it, lunch packed, and it carries you along, through kindergarten to elementary school. You allow what your teachers say to be categorized as truth, although, most of what you learn when you are young you find out it is incorrect by high school. You understand that you are good in certain areas and bad at others; limitations are set in place by these realizations.

Week Nine: Responsibility

September 29, 2016 by Olivia Van Wormer in The Weekly Three

At some point in my growth, from a wee thing to a much larger one, I realized that I was not the only blame-shifter in this world. In fact, it is practically bursting with people who will go out of their way to escape the burden of responsibility. It’s a natural response to want to avoid the consequences of your actions but it’s this response that makes cowards of us all.

Week Eight: Pause

September 22, 2016 by Olivia Van Wormer in The Weekly Three

I’m learning how to drive a stick shift. It’s been, a humbling experience. Last night, after realizing the car was in 3rd gear (not 1st), the culprit of my continuous stalling, in utter distress I yelled, “I just hate being bad at things!”. After which I sheepishly, with many fits and starts, drove us home. I have this inherent, silly and deep-rooted fear of looking stupid. No one wants to look like an idiot, but my disdain can be rather paralyzing.

Week Seven: My Story

September 15, 2016 by Olivia Van Wormer in The Weekly Three

Books were habitually scattered about, small mountains of knowledge and realities I would step into, only to reluctantly leave later. Before allowing myself to dive into these various creations, I had to stealthily open the cover and examine the first line. Many will disagree, but the first line is the most important. It dictates if the book goes to the top or bottom of the stack. An exceptional sentence will pull you in like the aroma of comfort that wafts from a bakery; it hints at the delicious tale to come. But now, in this story of my life, I am left without a first line, so we will begin, quite eloquently, like this: I will never ask permission to go to the bathroom.

Week Six: Memory

September 08, 2016 by Olivia Van Wormer in The Weekly Three

The story started with a wooden spoon. The spoon was clutched in a small hand, the hand was attached to a little body, the body was perched on an old bar stool, and the stool was pulled up close to a steaming ceramic pot. What was inside the pot remains a mystery.

Week Five: Travel

September 01, 2016 by Olivia Van Wormer in The Weekly Three

By the time I was twenty years old, I had visited twenty-two countries and presented my passport like a treasured relic to any customs officer who asked for it. Once the travel bug bites you, it’s hard to fully scratch that itch. I thank my worldly mother for that particular ailment.

Week Four: Knowledge

August 25, 2016 by Olivia Van Wormer in The Weekly Three

In my year and a half as a sushi chef, I have chopped legions of cucumbers. When I tried to calculate the number, it was somewhere in the several thousands. This fact unsettles me because I ponder what numerous other skills could I have acquired if not for these damn vegetables? This precise concern is telling of both myself, and my generation. We are a group of learners and, in many of our humble opinions, masters of just about anything and everything we decide to watch a youtube tutorial of.

Week Three: Gratification

August 18, 2016 by Olivia Van Wormer in The Weekly Three

This question came about over breakfast; as I believe many great questions do. As we listened to Oldies, my boyfriend and I started discussing the loss of slow love, of courtships, hand written letters, and time spent waiting. I have romanticized these ideas to an extent but there seems to be something decidedly hurried with the way my generation enters into, develops and ends relationships. A frivolous process in which many skip from one insubstantial connection to the next.

Week Two: Loneliness

August 09, 2016 by Olivia Van Wormer in The Weekly Three

The concept of spending 24 hours alone, in the woods, at age 11, with nothing but my tent, water, clothing and a journal, never crossed my mind as odd. Then again, I was homeschooled and, thankfully, unaware of what was socially “acceptable” at the time. I am exaggerating slightly when I say alone, but as J.R.R. Tolkien writes “Good stories deserve a little embellishment”. There were several other young women scattered throughout the forest as well as mentors to keep an eye on us. But, in my young mind, it was the loneliest I had ever been.

Week One: Success

August 09, 2016 by Olivia Van Wormer in The Weekly Three

To begin, I found the Merriam Webster definition for success, to get myself oriented and start to unravel this term: favorable or desired outcome; also: the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence.

The other evening, I was having a discussion with a friend about the need to go to college, he being pro-college and me, being more than skeptical. As the argument became more heated and the wine drained from my glass, it struck me that our fundamental principles differed. At the core of this conversation was an erroneous assumption that we had the same definition of success.