This is something I have only rarely been. Other than getting out of New Mexico by securing admission in one of our nation’s more respectable universities, and then escaping from dysfunctional grad school in back-of-nowhere Indiana by moving to NYC, my get-up-and-go has been napping in a sunny corner.

Which isn’t terrible. Especially in New York, where everyone’s very ambitious. Just being around some of these people can be exhausting. “How do you pay your rent?” people wonder. Easy: I know how to cook for myself and never order takeout. “What are you doing for work?” they inquire. Oh, this and that. And, most abstractly, someone once asked me, “What are you?”

Because I’m not an artist. I’m not in a rock band. I’m not a writer, even though I get paid to write travel guides. I’m not a journalist, out to break a huge story. It’s quite clear I am not an Arabic linguist. I’m not, like almost everyone else I know in New York, harboring some desperate, burning dream that really makes me who I am even as I labor in soul-sucking anonymity.

I’m not saying my way is the right way, although I have on occasion felt pretty smug about my outlook. I suppose you could call the attitude neo-slacker, but I prefer to reference Hemingway’s journalist character in The Sun Also Rises, who on principle never appears to be working. In fact, though, this not-appearing-to-be-working thing has backfired a bit recently, and I did get an ulcer a couple of years ago, in part due to employment uncertainty. But overall, I do seem to get a bit more daily pleasure than a lot of people I know, and I haven’t had a what-am-I-doing-with-my-life crisis in quite a few years.

But why am I talking about this, and what does it have to do with food? It’s because I just read Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, by Julie Powell. This is a fucking fantastic book, based on Powell’s hilarious blog, in which she did cook every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I read the blog a few times during the course of the year, and admired Powell’s excellent use of obscenity. But she really pulls it together nicely in the book, with a great sense of narrative (involving the love lives of her friends, as well as her cooking travails) and some wonderful meditations on feeding people, terrible Republicans, and the delicious obscenity of marrow bones.

It’s one thing when someone makes it big, and it turns out they’re a bit wealthy and well connected, or they have some exotic background that happens to gibe with today’s cultural obsession, or their life was transformed by some harrowing experience on a very tall mountain. But when someone who’s been coooking insane things and writing a blog and living in Queens gets a very juicy book deal, well… You (I) can’t help but feel like I should’ve had more of a plan. Because I didn’t think the world was interested in people living in Queens, and now it turns out they are–but maybe they have only enough interest to support one Queens-dweller, and that slot’s been taken.

The genius of Julie Powell’s blog is that she had a goal. An insane and edifying one that hooked foodies like soap operas hook listless stay-at-home moms. This goal-achieving blog concept seems to have spread too: Twenty a Day, for instance, aspires to eat at a set list of cheap restaurants. And there was that guy who documented every single thing he ate for a year…I think he made a book out of that.

These are clever ideas, and I know I should get one in a similar vein (but not too similar–I can’t very well cook my way through Diana Kennedy anymore, now can I?). I would feel accomplished and purpose-driven. But. But. But. I like not having a plan, to some degree. I like seeing what turns up. Which might just be a cheap excuse for not wanting to give up my comfy Cape of Slack in which I drape myself daily.

But that reminds me of another thing to whine about: According to numerous newspaper stories (one in the NYT, most recently) everyone in New York is on drugs. Which essentially I have no objection to, but they’re using them to work! Prescription-grade speed, a little coke, Xanax to chill out–how am I supposed to compete with this kind of white-collar doping? I’m going to drink my glass of whine–ha, purely an accident–I mean wine and mull it over. If anyone has any suggestions for fabulous feats to be accomplished on this blog, please let me know. I’ll reply to your email in a very leisurely fashion.