Elephant in the desert
I am not so good at being bad at things.
It started when I skipped kindergarten after two weeks, because I knew how to spell the word elephant. I suppose most five year olds spell it with an f. It’s a weird badge of honor even going on thirty-two, though I’m still not sure 1) why I knew how to spell elephant in the first place, and 2) what that might have suggested about my intelligence to my teachers.
Dysinger Elementary wanted me to skip two grades, but mom said no, because she thought I’d be bullied and too small. Joke’s on her - as it turned out, one grade rather than two didn’t equate to one-less bullies making fun of my narrow shoulders. Fuck you Justin.
Elephant didn’t set me up for success in life, but it did curse me into an eternal cycle of being afraid to disappoint others. With every sub-3.0 GPA report card that I hid from my parents came a sense that I was not living up to my potential of being able to spell phonetically-confusing words, which frankly is not such a high bar, but whatever, to me it is. To this day, I am incredibly hard on myself when confronted with my shortcomings, unable to shake the feeling that I should always be better, or smarter, or more diligent. Somewhere deep down is a fear of not being good enough, of being replaceable, of being exposed and known as the insecure, small kindergartener that I was and always will be.
This story is not too important right now, but give me some time to develop the narrative arc and it’ll make sense, I think.
I’m at the outdoor tables of our first and only restaurant on a sunny March Wednesday, trying to figure out how to wire $12k to our housing person for Coachella. This festival is killing me - it was hard being a pop-up, and even harder opening a restaurant, but it’s goddamn war trying to be both at the same time. We’re investing over $50k in total spend to be there, and there is a real possibility our 100-hour weeks will put us in the red when it’s all said and done.
I want to be upset that I have this much work to do, but I’m the one who said yes when GoldenVoice hit us up, so I’m in a bit of a pickle trying to figure out who to blame. Fuck, we have to prep so many pickles.
Laptop out, vape to its side, a full quart of cold brew that I shouldn’t but will absolutely drink, eyebrows furrowed, sighs every five seconds. It’s a microcosm of what this life is, constant chaos, cheap pain meds, caffeine to replace food.
My brain’s operating system constantly vacillates between ADHD-fueled productivity and depression-fueled procrastination. I’m starting to get the feeling that I am not so good at this restaurant thing, and maybe I am just not so good as a functioning human to begin with, so I would really like to hide in the employee bathroom right now, but I’d rather die than disappoint my kindergarten self, so I must keep going.
The corner outdoor table I’m at is near the swinging door where the team takes out the trash. Today, Betty is on trash duty. Betty is Angel’s mom - I love Angel, so when he asked if we’d consider her for a dishwasher job, it was the easiest yes ever. It’s been one of our best decisions so far; mothers don’t cease to be mothers ever, and she has become a calm, sweet, parental figure for the entire team. It’s what we needed before we even knew we needed it.
Betty comes out and, as moms always do, senses my inner turmoil.
Yoshua…
Yes, Betty?
She doesn’t speak much English, so she mutters something in Spanish that I have no chance of understanding (she did tell Angel that mi español wasn’t half-bad, but I’m limited to cebolla, carne, and queso).
Lo siento… no entiendo. (I’m sorry, I don’t understand).
She smiles and points to the sky. I look up and back at her, thinking that she’s asking for a hat, or maybe some sunblock? It’s the eternal problem-solving mode we’re in as owners, fixing whatever is broken, leaving ourselves for last.
But she’s still smiling, so she must not need sunblock. What is it, Betty?
Look! Everything is ok.
In that moment, I entiendo what Betty is trying to say to me. She sees me as her boss but also the one who took her son in, so in a weird way maybe she sees me as her Korean son she never wanted but will happily embrace. Between our languages is an understanding of stress, fatigue, and pain, and we both know that mine pale in comparison to what she has been through being a mother.
Her advice is profoundly simple: look up, idiot, your self-pitying stress is just a small speck in the world. Contextualize yourself within the grand context of this planet, understand that this moment is a small blip in the longness of life. You may not be good enough right now, but the sun is still above us, so at the very least, you will not die.
I wouldn’t dare cry in front of Angel’s mom, so I swallow the immediate lump in my throat. I smile back instead.
Gracias, Betty. I’m ok.
Back to the whole elephant thing - instead of making kids skip grades because they can spell, how about we teach them early on that life isn’t about the words you know but the ones you learn to speak and understand?
I didn’t know outcast until freshman year of college, or abandonment until my twenties, and now in my thirties I am learning resilience and reconciliation. These are the things that should be taught, but it is much easier to quantify whether you can do a times table than whether you can stare at someone across the table and ask for forgiveness ten times over.
So we are forced into homeschooling without proper training on how to teach ourselves to survive. My kindergarten self has stayed ignorant and naive, learning to fix hoses but not how to address his loneliness, able to project burger sales but not when his deep-rooted anger will spew out. We fumble our way through adulthood, putting bandaid over bandaid on top of real wounds that needs to be surgically healed, until the infection is too painful to bear.
In my case, I started a business to make myself feel important, at a time when everything and everyone whose approval I wanted made me feel expendable and worthless. It was the kid in me deciding to go to the gym to do shoulder lifts to stop being bullied, putting a restaurant-sized bandaid over a small hole in my heart. Fine, leave me. I’ll just find another place to call home.
But kids don’t know how to build homes, and the one I’ve made with Sam is big and fits a lot of people, but at least in my room, it lacks structural integrity. The wood was nailed in hastily, the roof leaks constantly, and the doors creak whenever I come out of them.
People come into this home in troves - 350 of them a day on average - and make me feel useful, because they pay us money that I can then pay to my housemates who help keep it from burning down. It’s lively and fun and crazy, but at the end of the night, everyone leaves, to go back to their own homes that they’re also building with shitty materials.
It’s at this moment that my kindergarten self peeks out, way past his bedtime, a little scared, wondering where the sun has gone - didn’t Betty say everything was ok?
We’re going to Coachella to be great. I’m not trying to waste time and be a cute little booth that everyone walks past; I’m going to make sure we live up to whatever expectations we’ve created, to be the talk of the town on the Coachella Food Lineup 2026 Reddit threads, to come out of this monster of an event stronger, better, and more firm under pressure.
I’m taking our team of dogs to stress-test them, to see if they really want this shit, to show them that success doesn’t come from talent but from putting your fucking head down and working harder than anyone else around you. I don’t have time for whining right now. Anyone who is not in the car is slowing us down - we can save the ~oh, we’ll wait for you~ for afterwards. Sorry, but I’m pushing the gas no matter who’s with me, and they can get out if it’s (or I’m) too much for them.
But, of course, this macho-man persona I just exhibited is merely a projection, and meant to be ironic, are you following??
I’m still just a kid, who happened to build something bigger than he can handle. I want to feel brave and strong, but I am incredibly weak-minded. As with any big moment of our business from the past - Smorgasburg, signing our lease - Coachella seems to be happening at a time when I feel deeply unsuited and unconfident to lead anyone anywhere. Maybe the moment is too big, and other restaurants are just better at this shit. Maybe this home is breaking, not the one at USC Village, but the one that I have willed into existence, to shelter a child that is still just a softie. Being an adult is not to build homes to cover our younger selves up, but to feel at home regardless of whether there is a roof above you.
So I am an elephant in the desert, feeling out of place, not good enough, afraid to disappoint others again, but starting to put the pieces together before they fall apart. After all these years of knowing how to spell words I did not understand, faking intelligence and vision and savvy, I am back in kindergarten, now learning the words that Betty was trying to teach me - calm, peace, empathy, grace. This time, I will not skip any grades, for I know I am yet too small to play with the big kids. I will learn these words diligently, and use them with even more care and caution.
Actually, on that note, did you know that elephant is spelled with ph because of the Greek letter phi?
The p is for the sound, and the h following is quite literally “a breath of air.”
I didn’t know it back then, but now I understand, elephants need to breathe too.