Julie & Julia & Taylor

It doesn't have as nice of a ring to it with my name thrown in there. :)

Tonight Abby came over, as I'm home for break, and we watched Julie & Julia. We put it in at about 11:30 or 11:45, paused it around 12:30 to run to the gas station to buy some mountain dew for my aunt (and got rightfully side-tracked picking out ice cream for ourselves and stealing a traffic cone from the middle of 25th St.), came back and resumed our positions on the couch, ice cream cones in hand, traffic cones in car. We finished the movie at 3:20, and we had no idea how this happened until I realized it was Daylight Savings Time, which, I feel, changes every year. I was thinking about it earlier today and sincerely thought it was in April, right after Easter, which I feel is just as confusing and is never the same weekend of April. It must be in March sometimes.

Anyway, now it's 3:30 in the morning and I'm not as tired as I should be, but I'm looking forward to some sunshine tomorrow. Thoughts:

1. Meryl Streep is incredible.

2. I stained my shirt with chocolate from my ice cream.

3. Julie's blogging made me feel I should do this more often. I'm much like her. I need a deadline, or I never finish anything.

4. The look on Julia's (Meryl's) face when she receives her published cookbook in the mail made me tear up. And then it made me feel guilty for not doing anything about my dreams to be a writer. I hardly even blog. I wrote a short story for my fiction writing class on Thursday and didn't even hand it in to the contest the assignment was for on Friday. I missed the deadline, which won't affect my grade, but I didn't even bother trying for the contest. Which made me decide my 5th thought of this late night/early morning/what time is it anyway? moment:

5. I am going to write a novella. A memoir in fact, based off my experience this Thanksgiving. It sounds dull now, but it was kind of a crazy one. Interestingly enough, I've always had a weird experience on Thanksgiving. Sometimes terrible ones. But I'll just zone in on this one, these four days, and go for it.

I need a deadline, or I'll never finish.

Here's some math:
One page on Microsoft Word with 1" margins hold about 700 words, depending on the amount of paragraphs. A novella is about 100 pages. So if i write 700 words a day, I could finish a short novel in 100 days. Which would be June 23, 2010. 3 days before my birthday. I'll give myself a few days due to a wretched finals week and a weekend of moving home for summer that will cross over my time period, and I'm going to finish this on my birthday. So, to be not-OCD, I'm working on a countdown of 103 days.

Wish me luck.