Girl, thirty-one

Today we went to see "Julie and Julia" with my parents. It was a good movie; not anything over the top, not anything extraordinary. Just a girl with a dream, living life the best way she knows how. She was a girl a lot like me. No less than three times during the movie, I got poked in the ribs, patted on the knee, or pointed at, all because the things she was saying were things that I say, or the things she was wishing were things that I wish.

Here's the premise of the story. Girl, thirty years old, with a husband and a cat, has half finished novel and an awareness that her life at thirty is not at all as she planned it. She was supposed to be a published author. She was supposed to be successful. She was not supposed to be living above a pizzeria. 

Meanwhile, here's my story. Girl, thirty-one years old, with a husband (the cat kicked the bucket), has finished novel and an awareness that her life at thirty-one... well, you get the picture. 

It was a neat thing to see how the things in her life came together. She found her emotional center with the help of a Julia Child cookbook, a kitchen roughly the size of a telephone booth, and a blog. In my case, I can say with absolute certainty that Julia Child will have no part of my future. I have no interest in steaming a live lobster, deboning a duck, or making a jello mold out of the meat juice from a cow's hoof. (Blech.) But that's all right, because the point is still the same. You just keep doing what you're doing, you don't give up, and you try new things, because amazing things can and do happen every day. Sometimes they happen in big ways, and sometimes in small ones, but they happen.

And even if they don't, at least I don't live in a 900 square foot apartment above a pizzeria in Queens. There's always that.