Anakalian Whims

Julie & Julia – & JJ

December 8, 2012 at 8:13 pm (Recipes, Reviews, The Whim) (29, books, Coffee Cups in Trees, cooking, food, Julia Child, Julie Powell, memoir, photography, reviews, Tidbits from Miss Golightly, writing)

Some people are appalled at this, and some find it wonderfully convenient, but I have friend categories.  With me, people always know where they stand, because that is what I appreciate most about my own interpersonal relationships.  I have a ‘best friend’, a ‘best friend since kindergarten’, a ‘roomie’ (my college room-mate),  a ‘sister-wife’ (a very bad long running joke with my bestie of a cousin, no we are not actually sister-wives), and a ‘favorite friend.’  I can proudly say that JJ Golightly, of the Tidbits from Miss Golightly, is my favorite friend.

Favorite friends are those people you can go lengthy times without seeing, but once you see them again they are like crack to your system and you want them more and more.  Favorite friends are those friends that if you ever chose to be lesbians (which we are not) you’d spend your life with them, because they are the ones you call randomly and say in the most superfluous and hyperbolic way possible: “I have a longing for you!”  Favorite friends are the ones that you’ll hold hands with in public and not care if people look at you funny or take it the wrong way, because like a surrogate sister, your favorite friend is someone you would love to have literally attached to your hip, or in your back pocket if you could keep a miniature of them.  They are also the person you happen to see the least of, and maybe that’s why the magnetism toward them remains forever in tact.

I recently had a wonderful visit from both my Roomie (Coffee Cups in Trees) and my Favorite Friend (Miss Golightly).  What happens on these trips is this:

Roomie drinks coffee at the table, Favorite Friend bakes and cooks all sorts of goodies and photographs the results, I scurry back and forth trying to decide which I’d rather do, help cook or be lazy and drink coffee. The coffee usually wins.

Maybe it was because of one of these visits (in which all three of us gain five pounds over night), or maybe it was because Glen at the HPB Humble Book Club meeting brought up Julie Powell in our discussion of The Old Curiosity Shop, or maybe it was because I’d had the book sitting open to page five on my coffee table for about a year, but I finally got around to reading Julie & Julia.

Nothing like reading a memoir about a frazzled maniac with a serious obsession for obsessions and sci-fi shows – in the kitchen – writing a blog and book when you too are nearly 29, frazzled, obsessed (but not dedicated), writing a blog, and most recently lost your entire book (again) to a computer virus.  It gives hope.  It gives motivation.

I will write a book in the next 30 days.  Not the one I intended, I’m too crushed right now, but a different, lighter book that is loitering in a journal in my cabinet just waiting to be properly edited and put into a computer.  I have 30 days.  If Julie Powell can cook 523 recipes in 365 days, get published, and not be a loser by age 30, damn it, so can I.  Except I’m not cooking.  I’ll be ‘writing’ a nearly already book (from paper to computer) in 30 days and getting it to Smashwords by my 29th birthday.  This I do vow.

In the mean time, I will still be reading, writing this blog, eating if I can afford it, and teaching Kung Fu… because that’s who I am, that’s what I do.  Funny, that I had to be reminded of that by a memoir about French cooking.

Which is a delightful, by the way, all the way down to her swearing like a sailor, something I wouldn’t have even noticed had she not pointed it out.  She may live in Long Island City, but when it comes down to it she’s from Texas, and as a Texan I can say there are two kinds of Texas women… the kind that swear, and the southern belles who don’t.

I appreciate her kitchen woes, I love to eat but have many cooking woes myself.  I appreciate her small and outlandish apartment, I have a once lovely home that has just been utterly broken by this recession and a foundation problem.  There’s just so much to relate to, and frankly, Julie Powell is down right endearing.  She’ll never be my Favorite Friend in real life, as that spot is forever taken and I doubt I’ll ever even meet her, but she is definitely a favorite on my bookshelf.