I might now emulate Julie Powell, famous author of the blog "The Julie/Julia Project" that was turned into a book--and then a movie, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, which I am 99.9% sure will NOT happen with THIS blog--called Julie and Julia. I will emulate her by talking about cooking, and relating that to my life, which, like Julie's, feels wrong in some way.
There is a certain je ne sais quoi (that was an intentional allusion to Julie's story, by the way, since Julie and Julia are experiencing and writing, respectively, a French cookbook) that is making me feel very dissatisfied and uncomfortable lately. You know that scene in which Julie is eating lunch with her "friends" and they are all plugged into various electronic devices, moving swiftly through the afternoon and life, and she, unlike them, does not have some big important project about which she can gush? Fortunately, my friends are not bitches, like Julie's friends are, but I do feel like they are all growing up, moving through life, while my own situation is--and this is a situation for which I take full responsibility, by the way--regrettably stagnant.
So far, I am getting at least part of what I think I wanted out of this gap year: I am experiencing the "real world," I am not wasting a year's worth of tuition by freaking out about being away from home, and I am so bored that I am sure I will be eager to head off to college when next August rolls around. But I wasn't expecting when I chose to take a gap year that I would require an unsatisfying situation to make a wonderful opportunity--a college education--seem appealing. I was expecting that the tremendous maturity I would have to develop as a member of the American workforce would make college easier to face. Of course, I should have known that taking a job at a toy store would hardly make me grow more mature. I was also expecting that earning my own money for the first time in my life would make me feel independent (an important quality for college women!) but, I didn't realize how dependent I would feel living in my parents' house (you don't realize how infantilizing that is when you're in high school)...I also hoped that going off to DR would allow me to sack up and divorce myself from my home and my family a little bit. Hopefully, that still will happen, but that's not until January and this is October. But for now, the only thing that is preparing me for college is my increasing intolerance of where I am right now. And that is really, really too bad, both because that means I couldn't fully appreciate my college acceptance without lining it up next to something less desirable and because it means I have put myself in what is--at least for now--a highly unsatisfying situation.
But that brings me back to the banana bread. It made everything better tonight. It reminds me of my great friend Poppy, who taught me how to make it and wrote out the recipe for me on an uneven piece of cardboard from a case of Snapple. Thinking of her makes me happy; I have lots of happy memories with her, especially ones in the kitchen (we like to raid the fridge and we have made devil's food cake on more than one occasion). I also really admire her. I am sure college is burning her out, because it's burning out all my friends. But she is still strong, funny, and loving. She is a wonderful role model.
Now, I realize this is abrupt, but the banana bread is due to come out of the oven in two minutes. First let me just share another reason I like making banana bread. It smells good when it's baking, and it tastes really, really good once it's cooled. Bon appétit!
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