Julie and Julia and J.R.

To all of my regular readers, an apology. I have been home with my family in Kansas for about two weeks now. Other than being in the midst of getting my financing together for graduate school, I have had little on my plate, and little worth blogging about. But aside from feeling that an update was in order, I decided to write tonight to announce a new project I hope to work on in the coming year or two.

Today, my family and I met up with some old friends to see Julie & Julia, a new film about one woman's quest to cook her way through Julia Childs' Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year. Played to perfection by versatile actress Amy Adams, Julie Powell sets off on this quest after a horror of a reunion with frenemies from her college days. Julie is stuck in a job I can only describe as the tenth circle of hell--handling complaints from 9/11 families in the aftermath of that great tragedy. Once upon a time, Julie had dreams of being a writer, but she gave it up after half-completing a novel that, needless to say, never came close to being published. When one of her frenemies, a central-casting workaholic yuppie type, announces that she is now writing a blog about her work in the heady world of New York real estate, Julie decides to write one of her own about her own favorite topic, cooking. She settles on trying to cook her way through Julia Child's cookbook because she fears she has never completed anything she has started and needs to give herself deadlines.

As you might expect from the title, Julie & Julia deals equally with the lives of Julie Powell and of Mrs. Childs herself (expertly portrayed by Meryl Streep). The film's portrays the period in Julia Childs' life from her arrival in France with her husband, an American diplomat stationed in Paris, to the publication of her aforementioned 1961 bestselling cookbook. It turns out that Julie and Julia share a number of things in common. Both women embark on major projects when they find themselves needing a project to fill their lives. Both have to staunch the snarks of friends and relatives who cannot understand why on earth they have chosen these projects. And both, in the end, not only beat the tests they have set for themselves but proving to others the value of being absolutely fearless.

In many ways, I find myself in a similar situation to these ladies. I have been casting about forever for some project to occupy my life. Although I am entering Penn in the fall, I know that my studies there will not consume all of my time; moreover, I am still a little uncertain in what direction I hope my studies may lead me. My original plan with this program, as my regular readers know, was to become a foreign students' advisor in a university, but I have also given some thought to using my degree to go on into applied linguistics--briefly, the branch of linguistics concerned with enhancing standards of language teaching.

Which leads me, at last, to the substance of my project. Having recently decided to take up studying Portuguese (more on my motivation for this later), I am settling myself a goal of achieving a reasonable fluency in the language within 18 months. I have yet to work out exactly what standards I will set for assessing this fluency; most likely I will base my assessment on the criteria set by the Common European Framework for Languages, a project of the European Union. As I work my way through Portuguese, I will try to write frequently--weekly, if time permits--about my project in this regard, on a new blog, the link to which will be sent to you as soon as I settle on a name for it.

More to follow swiftly.