In honor of Julia Child’s birthday, and because I am a
slacker and our cable and internet
were down today, I popped in the delightful little film Julie and Julia. My favorite
scenes almost exclusively involve the Julia and Paul side of the story, but
watching this time, I felt a lot more connection to the Julie and Eric side
than usual.
I am married to a very nice man. He too works at an unsatisfying job where he
is perpetually unappreciated, but it pays enough that I am not also forced to
work at an unsatisfying job. Trust me,
he is better at it. I have done the 8 to
5 cubicle thing, and I became a very hateful person.
So I have this great opportunity to be at home, to pursue my
interests. But it is so hard, and so
very frustrating. Life intrudes like an
unwanted guest all the time. Health
issues leave me sick and drained. School
lessons need planned and taught. We have
3 rehearsals a week. Church obligations
must be fulfilled. The car needs an oil
change, it is taking me 4 days to finish the laundry, I have to go to the
market again, the garden is a disaster, and that stupid nasty hard water ring
in the toilet just keeps coming back.
Sure, we all have these types of issues, and there are
bigger ones too. We’re not happy with
where we live: we have outgrown our premature ideas, forged during the infancy
of our marriage. We ache for some land,
to be out of noise and congestion. We
long to start somewhere fresh, where there is access to a larger atmosphere of
the things we love and love to do. I’m
not simply bashing our current hometown, frustrating as it is, but I find it
harder and harder, sometimes moment by moment, to gain any fresh perspective
when turning down the same streets, seeing the same landmarks, living the same
routine, and nothing really ever changes.
Some folks are perfectly content with this sort of life, and
that is perfectly ok. I am not wired
that way, and neither is my husband. We
are explorers at heart, both knowing that there is a great big, wide world out
there waiting to be experienced, to show us new things, to wake us up and scare
us a little, to make us cry and laugh.
So how do you? I
meant that question, in all its ambiguity.
When you don’t rightly know for what you are searching, you have to
start with very generalized questions.
We know the things that excite us.
We know the things for which we yearn.
I love food in every way, shape and form. I really do want to try this writing
thing. I love to sing and want to be so
much better at it. I am teaching my
daughter how to learn and fostering her curiosity and talents. I love my husband. He is so intelligent, so gifted, and ever so
tolerant. No one else on this earth
could possibly put up with me.
And so I try. Some
days I succeed, many days I fail. I fall
flat on my face. Everything is
disappointing. But I so want to do
better, to go further, to accomplish…something.
So I cook, we eat, we travel, we sing, I write, I teach. We just keep swimming, so to speak, having
enough pragmatism to know that all of life is a huge process that really never
stops. I just hope at some point we can
breathe, and that we can get really excited.
About something.
