I Will Sleep When I’m Done With This Post

(I apologize, it’s a long one…)

It’s 10:31pm on Sunday night and I’m sitting in bed, typing away on my rockin’ new laptop. I just got back from the movie theater. Well, actually we’ve been back for a little while but I had to take Rookie outside and I had to brush my teeth and then I had to cut my fingernails because they were so long that I feared that I could be mistaken for a lady of the night. Minus the fishnet pantyhose and clear plastic stilettos. And the whole slut thing. 

We saw Julie & Julia. If you haven’t seen it, don’t worry. I’m not going to spoil anything. There are no surprises in this movie. Such is the case for all true stories. Nobody was shocked when the Titanic hit the iceberg. Or when Rudy made the team. So don’t get mad at me if I happen to let it slip that Julia Child got her cookbook published.

I don’t go to the movies often. I don’t like them very much. I think it’s because I’m not very creative. I have a hard time “playing along” with the story lines. But every now and then, there is a movie that comes out that I get excited about. I remember seeing the preview for Julie & Julia. I can’t, for the life of me, remember what movie it was that we were seeing at the time. But I do remember looking over at Stephen and saying, “Oh my gosh. Oh. my. gosh. OH MY GOSH!” I fell in love with the story before I saw it.

I have a job that isn’t very stimulating. Now please, please, please don’t get me wrong. I do not take my job for granted. I am extremely appreciative of it and I know how lucky I am to have a secure job in this economy. But there are very few days at my job when I actually get to be creative. That’s not what they hired me for. And that’s okay. Really.

So that’s why I come here. That’s why I, day in and day out, sit before my blank screen and will the words to come. And then after the words have come (however fun, boring, entertaining, or ridiculous they may be) I will you to come. Hello online world, come here. Come see what I’ve written.

Now if you haven’t seen the movie and you don’t want to read any of the one liners or know anything about it, feel free to quit reading now. Like I said, I’m not going to ruin anything for you, but I can understand if you don’t want to know even the slightest bit. If that’s you, push that little “x” at the top of your screen and then come back tomorrow when we’ll discuss something else.

For the rest of you, let me say this. I love this movie. Actually, I don’t think that “love” is an appropriate word. I adore this movie. I will own this movie. I will watch it over and over until I have memorized it the way that I have memorized You’ve Got Mail. Because I love stories that are centered on words. I love words. I love words that make a beautiful story. Especially a relatable story.

On the way home from the movie, after smiling for approximately 123 minutes, I turned to Stephen and said, “I loved that movie. Like, a lot.” He smiled and said, “I know you did. I knew you would. Why did you love it? Is it because you saw you in it? Like, sometimes verbatim?”

I think many of you reading this can relate. Many of you are also bloggers. We are people who love to write but never do it because we have this terrible fear that we will spend thousands of hours of our lives writing something that someone in some big office will decide isn’t worth it. We’ll pour our heart into something and get a letter back in return that is so politely written, yet tears us apart in the worst ways possible.

So we blog. We blog, as Julie’s husband said, because we can just write and then press “enter” and then it’s out there. Nobody can tell us no. And nobody can take it away from us. And there is something about that freedom that is, well, freeing.

There are so many conversations and lines from the movie that are so familiar. I laughed out loud when Julie claimed to have ADD because she needs short term goals. And maybe that’s why she’s never been good at cleaning. Oh girl, me too. Me too. And I can totally relate to her when she told her husband “Today my blog got 12 comments and they were all from people I don’t know!” And it hurt my heart a little bit when they fought and he told her how narcissistic she was and that her readers could live without her. And while that’s true, it’s hurtful.

It’s very possible that I would still write each day even if nobody took the time to read. But I truly enjoy the friendships I’ve made because of this blog. Even those of you I’ve never met. I just love getting to know everyone. And like Julie, when you take the time to comment, it makes my day.  

I’m doing my best to make some sort of point here or at least come to some sort of an end. The point is just that I loved this movie so much that I’m inspired and giddy. Stephen just asked “What are you writing?” My blog. “Oh, what’s it about?” I told him it was about the movie. He asked, “Do you want to put a PayPal account on there?” Well, hmm, seeing as I”m not purchasing things that will directly benefit my readers, no. If I put a PayPal account on here I think I would need to grow my fingernails back out because the money exchange would surely be something shady. Very much like a lady of the night.

Minus the slut part again. Always minus the slut part.