The Blog Inspiration

My husband and I just saw Julie and Julia with Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. What a great movie. I'm sure Meryl Streep will get nominated for yet another Oscar for her very believable transformation into Julia Child. This is a movie about a woman who is lost and finds herself by blogging her way through Julia Child's first cookbook. About halfway through her journey Julie, the blogger, says that she started the blog because it gave her something to do that was just for her. Something that was outside of her job and her marriage that made her feel good and made her stick to something with a definitive deadline and set goals.

A little light bulb went off in my head at that point. That's why I started blogging. Because I have felt lost for a while now and have been trying to find/reinvent myself. I have kept a journal since I was 5 years old and always enjoyed my English and creative writing classes more than anything else. Writing has always been very cathartic for me and I had hoped that by feeling like I was a writer again, it would help me get my life back together. And in many ways it has done that but I am not getting as much out of it as I could.

My husband works with people all day long. When he gets home he needs to decompress. I can go days without having a conversation with someone face to face at work. When I get home I want to talk. I ramble on about what's happened during my day, about something I heard on the radio, about things that have pissed me off, about everything. I have a way of talking someones ear off with this hyperactive energy which can be overwhelming if you're not ready for it. I have tried to wait until my husband is home for at least 30 minutes before I unleash my nervous energy on him but I don't always last that long. Blogging is helping me to get a lot of things off my chest without having to direct them at any specific person. It gives me the human interaction that is missing from my daily life. And because my husband reads my blog, it allows us to have those conversations about whatever is one my mind at a time that is good for both of us.

So if I am getting so much out of blogging, why aren't I doing it every day? It's not for lack of things to talk about, believe me. It's definitely an extension of the problem that I have in every other hobby in my life: lack of drive to finish things. I start a lot of projects but often need a push to finish them. Sometimes it's because things are too hard, other times its because I'm lazy or too busy doing something else. I want to do so many things that it is overwhelming sometimes so I don't do anything. I'm not beating myself up about this because I have made some real progress in fixing this lately.

I joined a local scrapbooking group last month to push myself to finish the wedding scrapbook I started last fall and to catalog other mementos that I've kept in a more efficient way. Once a month I sit at a studio for 3 hours (other people stay longer but that's all I've got) and have no choice but to scrapbook the entire time I'm there. It's great because it gets me out of the house, gives me a chance to meet new people and feeds my creative side while making me feel like I'm working towards achieving a goal.

I started taking Zumba classes last month. Zumba is this crazy high energy Latin dance/aerobic combination class. I used to go out dancing at least a couple times a week but haven't met a group of friends here in Syracuse who enjoy dancing so I rarely get to dance any more. My husband isn't much of a dancer so it wouldn't be fair to drag him to different places. I haven't made any friends in Zumba yet but I love dancing for an hour and according to my heart rate monitor burn 600-900 calories in my weekly class. Plus, I cancelled my big gym membership. I just wasn't a fan of the atmosphere and found that I enjoyed working out on my own much more.

I also started taking karate again. I have been studying martial arts since 1995 but had stopped when I moved to Syracuse in 2005. I told myself for the past 4 years that I was too out of shape to go back but I am so happy I finally got off my butt and started training again. Karate gives me a release for all this nervous energy that I have and seriously, I just love punching things.

I am in the process of making a bookshelf for my husband. I needed a push from him to finish but I think it will be done in the next couple of days. Hopefully this will encourage me to use the thousands of dollars worth of power tools , wood and other supplies that I have collected in my garage over the years for project that haven't gotten off the ground.

There are so many other hobbies that I have started or used to participate in that I haven't done lately that I would love to get back into but I am proud of my baby steps, no matter how small. I was an overachiever throughout much of my life so it is difficult for me to feel like I'm being productive unless I'm juggling 100 different tasks at once. For now, I will try to blog after I feed Chale and Tiger every night because it gives me at least an hour of time to myself and I will continue to step out of my comfort zone in my constant journey to rediscover myself.