Julie/Julia

This weekend was not only very busy but marked the end of the second (and final, thank goodness) compulsory clinic of the summer--aka the longest week ever.

The culmination of all my busy-ness was Sunday's 4th of July Parade, in which I walked with 20 of my competitive and precompetitive gymnasts, their parents, and two other coaches.  I've been in charge of organizing Bay Island's entry into the parade for the past 5 years and thankfully it has gotten easier: this year instead of doing the traditional meet-at-the-gym-stupid-early-and-carpool-to-the-parade-and-then-back thing (that wasn't my idea in the first place), I had everyone meet on the parade route, and get picked up from the parade route at the end, and no one had to go to the gym at all.  This meant a huge reduction in time and stress, and I was only parade-bound from 8 am to 1 pm.  Piece of cake, right?

Post-parade, friends and I had a barbecue chez Adam and Stephanie where I enjoyed a delicious grass-fed cow burger, one beer, and some of Stephanie's flag-patterned granola ice cream fruit concoction before sort of falling into a doze beside Oleg on the couch.

Now, I'm officially on vacation.  Huzzah!

So what do I do on vacation?  Today, I ran errands.  Later, I headed into Oakland to help Tamar with her campaign to make Mosswood Park the "Dolores Park of Oakland" by sitting next to her and some friends on blankets while everyone drank wine and listened to disco radio.  When I got home I wrote a draft of a script for a movie we're planning to film over our trip to Tahoe this weekend, and by the time I was done it was almost 10.  Bed time?  Nope, time to knit.

I have this really fantastic yarn I've been wanting to knit with since I got it in January and I finally started working on a glove only to discover that the yarn is perhaps too fantastic for its own good.  Knit up in a solid piece it's too much, which meant I had to figure out a way to use it wisely, and sparingly.  I decided to do a Katey's Glove in white and use the fancy yarn as trim, which seems like it'll work out okay (I have the glove finished and the bottom piece of trim done, but not the top and thumb edges that I was just too tired to bang out before heading off to bed tonight.  Not, however, too tired to blog...).

But this isn't what I really wanted to write about tonight.  What I really wanted to write about was the stupid movie I watched, Julie/Julia.  I watched it on Netflix Instant not in spite of, but because of the mediocre reviews I'd heard.  For some reason that (coupled with the constant visual presence of the movie poster in the Netflix scroll bar) intrigued me.  Plus, I kind of like watching what I consider throw away television while knitting because it means that if I miss much of the on screen action, I don't really care.

My friends (and the reviews) were right: it's a mediocre movie.  In addition, Meryl Streep as Julia Child is nothing special (unless you have some sort of Julia Child impression fetish.  Or Meryl Streep fetish).  But for the most part Streep/Child is totally innocuous.

Amy Adams (who I actually find adorable) plays a character that I found completely insufferable and whose failure I was rooting for even as I ignored the majority of what was happening on the TV.  Unconsciously, as the movie went along I found myself liking her less and less until finally the movie reached a pivotal moment where she, as Julie, discovers that Julia Child hates her blog.

And I said, "Ha!"

That was my favorite part of the movie.

But then while I continued to watch the conclusion, and the resulting hullabaloo that came with the sudden blogosphere fame that Julie Powell enjoyed after the New York Times published a piece on her (thanks for that, you bastion of journalism you...) I was struck with this one cycling thought: why can't I think of some stupid project to write a blog around?  True, I have many blogs, most of which are silly and some of which involve projects, but it seems like the ones that go crazy big are the ones that involve the type of solid structure that the Julie/Julia Project had.

Stephanie recently posted a blurb about the 17 year old high school blogger who chronicled a month of living by the pages of Seventeen Magazine, which is the same kind of thing that Julie Powell did: blogger hands out arbitrary-but-clearly-defined assignment, then writes about it, achieves internet fame and glory.  It made me feel like I'm missing something by blurring the lines of this blog to include the things I've been writing about recently rather than keeping it fiercely relegated to the crafting world.

But I'm not all about crafting.  I mean, I like making things (and if it weren't 1:59 am I'd prove it by finally posting the photos of the new kick-ass notions, needles and hooks holder I made last week) but I also like not making things, and playing video games, and writing other, snarkier blogs than this one, or movie scripts, or watching movies, or reading books, or listening to and/or playing music.  And I like driving.  And eating.  And eating while driving.

Anyhow, what I'm getting at is that I kept trying to figure out what thing would be my thing if I wanted to create some assignment for myself and I kept coming up empty.  And it made me kind of angry, because there I was sitting and watching this dumb movie about this mostly annoying woman who in the middle of her 29th year (which is, shock, right where I am) stumbled upon the key to her ultimate success with a simple assignment that could've come out of the pages of Blogging for Dummies.

It bothers me that people (and I'm here including the inventor of The Snuggie, which will forever--hopefully--be the epitome of stupid inventions that make me want to smack my head in why-didn't-I-think-of-that?-ness) have dumb, completely obvious ideas that so thoroughly take off as to set them up for life.

For life.

Except it doesn't just bother me.  It infuriates me, because not only doesn't it seem fair, it makes me feel like an imbecile for having failed to think like an imbecile.  If we lived in a Snuggie-less world and Oleg came to me tomorrow and said, "Hey, check out my invention: it's a blanket with sleeves!" I would say, "That is the dumbest thing I've ever seen.  Haven't you ever heard of a robe?"  (Which is not to suggest, by the way, that I don't have imbecilic moments or even tendencies.  I know I have moments of idiocy--just not the right ones).  And then either he wouldn't invent the Snuggie, or I'd mock him while he did only to be cut out of his bazillions when it finally went global.

And that so sucks.  Because I'm rounding the bend to my 30th birthday--in fact, I officially rounded it two weeks ago--and I'm not even close to a good stupid idea.

Sauce of the week?

My best hair styles?

Puppies on ice?

(That could be good, actually.  Oh, wait, it's already a thing.  I mean, eew, it's already a thing.  Also, a less creepy thing more along the lines of what I originally meant).

That's all I've got for now.  Maybe I'll dream up something better tonight.  Til then, here's this: