Day One...oh dear God...

I was never a girl to write a diary or to keep a journal, this can be blamed on adolescent paranoia that my super secret feelings for that certain boy in Jr. High would some day be read for all to hear over the loud speaker during home-room, or just pure laziness--who had TIME to recap the entire day in a miniature little book with a lock that could be broken with an abrupt sneeze?  Nope, I was not that girl.  However after seeing the movie Julie and Julia a light bulb flashed in my head...a light bulb the size of a watermelon.  We all have that movie that "speaks to us" for some women it is Eat, Pray, Love or Under the Tuscan Sun, and for some men it is Fight Club or Scarface (**sigh**), regardless of the reason, that movie embodies where we are in our lives at that moment; puts it into motion picture form with highly attractive celebs fulfilling our inner most hopes and dreams.  For me, that movie (and later the book) is Julie and Julia. 

I am a moderate cook at best, and while Julia Child and then Julie Powell mastered French Cooking, I am what Julia would have referred to as "not a real cook" because I love Italian cooking.  Throw everything into a pot with some choice ingredients and PRESTO CHANGO it is a meal.  So while the French cooking--with all of its complexity--didn't really speak to me, Julie Powell's quest for self discovery screamed at me.  In the last 5 years I have spent a majority of my life at a dead-end office job where the day to day events (or lack there of) would drive most normal people to the brink of pure insanity.  I have been saying for years I need a new job, I need a job that makes me not hate my life from 7:59am to 5:01pm.  However with the stellar condition of the economy for the last few years finding a job no matter how fiercely I search...has proven fruitless thus far.  So after watching Julie and Julia for the billionth time I started reading the book, hoping, wishing, in fact praying that I would get some sort of subconscious inspiration from it.  Well I did. 

The other day while in the midst of balancing my checkbook (well not really--but going over my finances) for the next few month and seeing a very bleak horizon I did the unthinkable.  I called my college loan peeps and asked to put off my loan payments for a while.  (**interest still accrues--HUGE CRINGE**) however a girls gotta do what a girls gotta do right?  The lady asked me how long I wanted to put off my loan payments.  When "forever and a day" wasn't an option I went with one-year.  After I thanked her a million times for temporarily saving me financially I got off the phone and as if the phone click was the "dong" of the bell it hit me at once.  Julie Powell gave herself a year to do something to change her current situation.  I just got one year.  One year to do SOMETHING to change my current state of affairs.  One year to get out of this god-for-saken job and into a career that makes me happy and if I craft it correctly will make me enough money to get out from under this college debt from hell.  I have a few ideas hatching around in my head for what that career might turn out to be, but for now I am going to bestow Julie Powell the best kind of flattery and "copy" her idea of blogging about it...each day (I hope)...so that I can keep on myself to keep pressing on and in one-year hopefully look back at my current situation and laugh a good laugh.

So here I go.....
:)