Julie and Julia

I just finished the book.  I watched the movie a few months ago and really enjoyed it.  A cute little chick flick, exactly as they wanted it to be.  When I was reading the book, there were a few times when it hit me that I really didn't like Julie so much.  Then the lightbulb went off.  She's not a fictional character.  She's a real woman with real feelings, emotions, and everything that goes along with it. You're not going to like a person every second of the day.  There is a lot of good, a lot of bad, a lot of not-so-pretty parts.  A friend of mine calls them the 'prickly parts.'  An apt description.

What I will tell you is that about half-way through the book, I realized that I felt a little kinship with her.  I identified with a lot of how she was feeling.  A young girl with no clear path, working for a government agency because it paid the bills and having a lot of frustration.  Okay...so I may not be all that young, I don't work for a government agency but I do have a lot of frustration.  I work for a company that hasn't given out raises to its employees in about 4 years, yet managed to spend thousands (if not millions) on new 'props' that were infested with some kind of Asian wood beetle (these props then had to be picked up, sent out, fumigated and returned--and the problem still exists.), expects more and more with giving less and expects the American consumer to drop $100 on a 100% polyester garment.

This does not make me special.  I can only imagine the millions of people who feel exactly as I do.  It's been a stressful couple of weeks, culminating in a huge disappointment for energy put in and being shot down.  I'm tired of running on the hamster wheel.  This is not the daily grind I want to be a part of.  While I'm not going to pick up a copy of 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 2' and blogging about it, I am going to push back the blinders, break out of the old, heavy-as-cement habits and move forward finding that niche where I wake up in the morning with my soul singing.

And if it involves cooking....all the better.