I’m reading Julie & Julia: 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen. You might have heard of this book by Julie Powell.  It details how “one girl risked her marriage, her job and her sanity to master the art of living,” or more specifically master the art of French cooking as outlined by Julia Child. I’m only 59 pages into it and the more I read it, the more it inspires me, not only to cook, but to write. Write, write, write. That’s all I want to do. Most days I dream about writing a book, but when I’m reading one, I wonder to myself, “how in the world can I master this?” Some days it just seems impossible. Julie Powell is inspiring me to write. After all, in her book, she details how she started a blog, the Julie/Julia Project and after just two entries, she had already received a comment from someone stating how her writing was well liked.

This was her original blog entry:

The Book:

“Mastering the Art of French Cooking”. First edition, 1961. Louisette Berthole. Simone Beck. And, of course, Julia Child. The book that launched a thousand celebrity chefs. Julia Child taught America to cook, and to eat. It’s forty years later.  Today we think we live in the world Alice Waters made, but beneath it all is Julia, 90 if she’s a day, and no one can touch her.

The Contender:

Government drone by day, renegade foodie by night. Too old for theatre, too young for children, and too bitter for anything else, Julie Powell was looking for a challenge. And in the Julie/Julia project she found it. Risking her marriage, her job, and her cats’ well-being, she has signed on for a deranged assignment.

365 days. 536 recipes. One girl and a crappy outer borough kitchen.

How far will it go? We can only wait. And wait. And wait…..

The Julie/Julia Project. Coming soon to a computer terminal near you.

I like her writing style. I like her. I like the fact that she was able to turn something she thought was going ot be ‘nothing’ into a full fledged publishing career. The same can be said for Twilight author Stephenie Meyers or even Heather from Dooce OR my newest favorite Wife in the North. All these people never really set out to become authors or be known or make a living off of a blog or a few chapters that were strung together on a whim. But they did, and I admire and envy them for that so much. I have so many ideas I want to explore, so much I want to write and see and bake and cook. Sometimes it all gets a bit too overwhelming. Sometimes I just have to take a step back and tell myself that I can’t do it all at once. That’s part of my problem. I want it all at once.  I just need to focus. Maybe this blog needs a bit more focus, or maybe focusing means starting an entirely different blog all together. I’m not really sure.  I don’t know if that even matters.

I know the archives of this blog only go back to June, but that’s some what of a nomenclature. I had about 2 years worth of content on this site, until one unfortunate day, I managed to accidentally wipe out everything I had written over the course of that time in one single click of a button. Not to say that anything I had written was particularly worthwhile, as far as prose is concerned, but still, they were my words. The words I had found time to written while going to college, holding down two jobs and falling asleep while driving home from said college and jobs.

I hope at some point, I can turn what I love to do into what the aformentioned people in the paragraph above did. I truly sincerely hope that I can. Because it means a lot to me. It makes me feel like I’m contributing something (useful or not, that’s up for debate) to the world, or at least to the world wide web.

This week I came to the realization that, now more than ever, I actually feel my age. When I was in high school, I would go through six classes, stay late into the night working on the yearbook and school newspaper, get home around 10, do homework until 2 a.m., wake up at 6 a.m. and do it all over again. In college, I would be in class the entire day, while I was working at the University newspaper and magazine. I would get home late at night, manage to do some school work and repeat it again for most of the week. These days, I can’t even wake up on time to get to work by 9:30 in the morning, even with a full 8 hours of sleep. Granted, I still do a lot outside of the full-time job I have, but the gradual slowing of my energy levels has not gone unnoticed, at least by me.

I had a quote once in the “Quote of the Week” category of this blog that was about not having enough time. “Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein,” it said.

It’s so true. I hate, I loathe saying I don’t have enough time, but I find myself not having enough time a lot. I don’t have enough time to get ready in the morning, or to straighten my hair. I don’t have enough time to eat a proper breakfast, or spend with Henry, I don’t have enough time to read or knit or work on various writing projects, and yet I have the same time that was given to the aforementioned people.

I just don’t like the idea of going through my life with the pressure of not having enough time. That sounds horrible. If I don’t have enough time now, what happens when I get married and have kids? How do I create time then?

This entire anxiety has made me come to the conclusion that I need to have better time management so a) I get things done and b) I don’t feel so drained. I guess you could say that that’s a life lesson learned. There is so much more I want to do than I’m doing right now and as much as I love sleep, I would forsake it if it meant I could accomplish my goals in life. Do you hear that God? I am ready to take working hard over sleep. I must want it badly. Yea, I definitely do.