My Experiment

So I've been thinking about the movie "Julie and Julia". The one where the girl with a lousy job in NYC starts a blog and cooks her way through Julia Child's cookbook in a year, posting about it all the while. That seems to have worked out well for her. She's in her early thirty's and already had Meryl Streep make a movie about her. Don't ask me how I know, and please don't make me take down the poster.

Anyway, I want to do that. Not the cookbook part, but the part where you blog every day about something interesting enough that people start reading it and telling their friends who tell their friends and poof! Magically a million people are reading your silly stories and Meryl wants to make it a movie.

I began blogging on May 24th and have been posting pretty much every day since then. As of today I've posted 21 blogs in 21 days! I don't know how readable they are, but I'm not too worried. I figure that my blog alienates approximately 94% of the world because of its wildly depressing and unabashedly self-centered nature. But that still leaves around 360 million people who might not hate it. Although, if you counted only English speakers in developed countries we might be down to like, 11.

My theory is that my personal collapse will force me to process through a spectrum of universal questions and emotions that I have heretofore ignored. If I commit to a rigorous path of intellectual and emotional honesty, keeping my faith in God, love for my wife, and desire for personal wholeness as my three anchors, perhaps I'll eventually emerge with peace. I'll also keep my ironic humor which Danielle says is kind of dark and some people don't get.

So here's the plan. I'm attempting to continue posting at the blistering rate of one-per-day. I won't kill myself when I miss here and there because let's face it, it's gonna happen. But all in all I intend to be relatively prolific. I'll always try to express/explore/process something raw that will lead me toward wholeness, and I'll gradually share my story as time goes along. I expect that throughout the year I'll become more optimistic and less self centered; I may even mature along the way.

Secretly I hope that strangers everywhere will identify with my angst enough to tag along for the ride. Maybe somehow it could encourage them to ask their own questions, or at the very least remind them that they aren't alone. Who knows, maybe at the end of 12 months (the time I'm allotting for this project) I'll have compiled enough stuff to publish a book. I could call it "The Onerous Rants of a Perpetually Pessimistic Soul" or something catchy like that.

It will be a bestseller because the title makes you want to snap it off the shelf. Inevitably Robert Redford or Meryl Streep will read it and want to make a movie. I think they should give the lead to Robert though because there will be scenes of me typing in my boxers and I'm not sure if Meryl has the legs for it.