When I began this blog a couple of months back, I mentioned that I was inspired to learn Spanish by an offer I learned about via one of my favorite podcasts — a special price on the Rocket Languages course this particular podcaster swears by — and by the encouragement of mi hermana, Lupita, whom I met a little over a year ago and hasn’t ceased impressing me ever since. These truly are my inspirations for learning la idioma de español.
The inspiration for blogging about the adventure, though, came mostly from another source altogether. (Sorry, Lupita. Sorry, Tom.) Several years ago, mi esposa querida, Josie, y yo had the pleasure of watching a delightful “chick flick”, Julie & Julia. The movie recounted the true story of two women tackling challenges in their respective lives. The first was a frustrated writer, Julie Powell, who decided to cook and blog her way through 524 recipes of Julia Child’s in 365 days, because she loved cooking and loved writing. The second was Julia Child, herself, and her adventure learning to cook French cuisine while living in Paris with her husband in the 1950s.
The Characters
The role of Julie was played by delightful and talented Amy Adams, and Julia’s role was played by award-winning actress Meryl Streep. Both actresses were very convincing in their roles, and the supporting cast was excellent, as well.
The reason I included “(esp. Julie)” in the title is that the Julie character spoke more to my current ambition — that of chronicling my progress in accomplishing a task. In the case of the actual Julie’s blog, it had been in existence for a few years before her engaging on the Julie/Julia challenge. In the movie, however, the blog’s advent concurred with Julie’s beginning the challenge. That’s more the case with me.
The Point
Apart from seeing the movie as simply enjoyable, however, Josie and I also took note of what we’ve heard said by more than a few modern-day inspirational speakers (for lack of better term, though surely there must be one): that, in the Internet age, there are no gatekeepers between a writer and her/his ability to succeed — only talent and determination. I.e., one can surely self-publish, whether in the form of a blog, an e-book, a print-on-demand book, or any other form of expression of which she can conceive.
Thus it was that our first project, whose name I’ll omit, but whose point was to follow our attempt to learn Objective C and create our own iPhone app was born. It was born, and it died a few blog posts later. Then it was briefly resurrected a year later, but again met its demise. Developing apps, we determined, was likely beyond our scope of attention, considering we were both working, and my job actually required quite a bit of overtime. Learning something as complicated as a programming language was not as appealing to us as it had sounded at first, as we found as soon as we began really digging into it.
Still, the thought of learning something, or creating something, or just doing something, and sharing it with those of you interested (or bored?) enough to follow the journal of my progress, still appealed to me. I just hadn’t figured out what that something was going to be, until recently. As I mentioned in my first post, as well as in my bio, the thought of returning to the study of Español had long been in the back of my mind, and it had been moving ever nearer the front when the generous offer from Rocket Languages was introduced to us a while back. Moreover, learning Español seemed (and still seems) to me to be a lot less stressful, not to mention less related to my day job (technology work). That really appealed to me. (¡Me gusta!)
J&J Revisited
Just a few nights ago, Josie and I decided it was time to dust off the DVD and watch it again. Sometimes that’s a disaster. That is, we often remember a movie we watched long ago more fondly than it deserves. In this case, however, we found that its appeal to us had remained evergreen. It’s not yet so dated that it seems quaint. The acting, direction, and dialog were, as I mentioned previously, quite good. The experience was such that I feel very comfortable recommending it to you, mi amigas y amigos, whether or not you have any ambition to follow the path of either Julie or Julia (or Joaquin) upon seeing it.
My affiliate link for it at Amazon.com is http://amzn.to/1OlKZog. If you do decide to rent/buy the movie and enjoy it, I would certainly appreciate your using that link to make your purchase. (The link provided directs you to the Amazon Video version, but purchasing the DVD after following the link will also give my affiliate account credit.) I’m not quite to the point where this blog could ever rescue me from “the tyranny of the day job”, but every little bit helps.
Muchas gracias, y ¡Hasta luego!
