The Year of Living Unremarkably?

Recently, the spouse and I watched Julie and Julia, about a thirty year old aspiring writer in New York whose life was going nowhere, until she decided to blog about cooking all of Julia Child's recipes in one year.


The blog took off, Julie got a book deal, and now a movie! Modern fairy tale ending.

It seems all you need to make it big is a kooky idea that takes about a year to implement and *poof* you too can get a book deal and possibly a movie!

Like this lady who decided to read one book a day for 365 days. She's now been tapped to write a book about her experiences.


Or the guy who lived a year with 'zero carbon-footprint'.

Or the guy (A.J. Jacobs) who 'lived biblically' for a year--what the heck does that mean anyway. I guess he was uber-kosher, or something.



A.J. Jacobs, incidentally, is a freaking gimmick genius because he's struck lightning not once, but TWICE. He's also the author of The Know It All, the book about him reading the entire 32 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.


With the dawn of the new year, it really makes me wonder: What gimmicky thing can I do for a year, blog about, and maybe never have to work my day job again?

Um...so far I came up with:

My Year of Mediocre Homecooking and the Occasional Take-Out

My Year of Watching One to Two TV Shows a Day

The 365 Corporate Slave

365 Outfits, Some of Which Are Repeated Often (Actually, there is this one girl who only wore black dresses for a whole year, so this is not far off the mark!)

A Tattoo A Day (The spouse would not like this, or its corollary--A Piercing A Day).

The 'M'Eat-It-All (I will eat one different species of animal a day. We quickly move from the familiar (beef, pork, poultry) to the exotic (cat, dog, mouse, squirrel, horse, glurp...pardon me, I just threw up a little in my mouth).

????

This is proving much harder than it appears...I guess I won't be saying goodbye to my day job anytime soon. Sigh.

Merry ChristMAS

Sometimes my spouse says something brilliant. Yesterday he said:

Evangelicals like to say "Let's put the CHRIST back in Christmas."

But don't you think Catholics would say, "Let's put the MASS back in Christmas"?

I've never heard that, but yes, I believe that would make a great slogan for them! If they ever start using that phrase, I hope I get royalties from the Vatican.

Tiger 'Cheetah' Woods and Friends

The title of the newest issue of Newsweek offends me. It has a huge picture of Tiger Woods on the cover (so big that I couldn’t even recognize that it was him for a while) and the words--Why Can’t We Look Away?

I got news for YOU, Newsweek. I CAN look away. I’d love to look away. But you and your media friends won’t let me! Everywhere I turn, stories about Tiger are splashed around. And I could care less. I have no fascination with the best golfer in the world. That really means nothing to me. I’m not interested in a man who is the best at putting a small ball into a small hole on a large field of grass.

And while we’re on the subject of celebrities and tragedy, I have to say I just don’t understand why the general public cares so much.

Like, Michael Jackson’s death. People all over the world were swooning and sobbing over the news. It’s like, really? Wasn’t his career effectively dead for decades? He had morphed into such a sad, bizarre creature that I wasn’t sure there was anything to mourn. I would sooner mourn his adorable younger face un-mauled by the horrors of plastic surgery.

I remember when I was in junior high and Kurt Cobain had died. People came to school teary-eyed and depressed. I guess I just didn’t connect to his angsty lyrics all that much.

In fact, I can’t imagine feeling miserable at the death of any celebrity. And there are some I wish would die (at least whose publicity would die). Can a popular icon touch your life so profoundly that you would feel such a tremendous sense of loss without him or her?

I can’t imagine.

Although, if I were very hard pressed, I guess I would feel kinda sad if we lost Tim Gunn.

The Drunken Bathtub

Apparently there’s a world of judgment for the person at the grocery checkout who asks the clerk to unlock the liquor cabinet and hand her the cheapest vodka the store sells.

Even as we made our way to the glass case I could feel the eyes of the other patrons boring a hole in my back. I felt their eyes widen when I asked, “Are you sure this is the cheapest?”

A toothless, disheveled old man flashed a big gummy smile at me on my way back to the register. I guess he thought I was his peer now.

But darn it, I was not going to let dirty looks from strangers get in the way of trying out the most ingenious cleaning technique I’ve ever heard of--cleaning with cheap vodka (thanks Kirstie Alley and Oprah). It’s almost odorless, non-toxic and kills germs! Seriously, I would clean a lot more if I found products that didn’t make me feel like I was shortening my lifespan when I use them.

So how well does it work? Not too well on soap scum, but really well for tile grout and general surface cleaning.