What To Do

First of all, if I sit with this laptop anywhere on my belly, the baby kicks it. I think he's drawn to warmth. Either that or he's trying to tell me that he's allergic to it, like a mogwai or something. I don't think I would want a mogwai for a child. They're cute and all, but you couldn't bathe them unless you wanted a quick and painless way of getting more children...which, given my current pregnancy status, might not be a bad thing. Sorry, I have no idea what I'm talking about. That was weird.

I watched "Julie and Julia" at the hospital and was kind of intrigued by Julie Powell's idea that "I can blog about something and it might turn into a career." But I don't see myself as a writer or this blog as anything that I will ever get paid for. In the simplest terms, I started this blog so I could write about stuff and communicate with people that I know. There is no expectation of it going anywhere. But then, she wrote a blog about cooking a lot of stuff, and I know that other people write about...well, nothing really, if you look at Hyperbole and a Half (which I do, all the time, because it's phenomenal) and it got me thinking: how does one get a gig like that? How do you get paid to blog?

I don't write every day because I know people don't expect me to, but if someone were paying me I'd write at least once a day, if not more. Every time Jezebel has posts about internships opening up I wish that I wrote daily or that I lived in New York, since most of their writers are city-dwellers. I've been getting positive feedback about my writing style from people who matter to me, and whose opinion I trust, although I just feel like I write what I think and this is how it comes out. Maybe some of it is my attention to grammar or these ingrained rules that I cling to as an English major. But I'm getting off topic again.

The reason I've been thinking about this is because I'm wondering about my future. I'm not going back to teaching next year, and with a new tiny human to take care of I don't know how much of a break I'll be taking or where I'll be in my life when I get back to the workforce. There's a song in Avenue Q called "What do you do with a BA in English?" I've always liked it because, well, that's my degree. I knew from the time I was in high school that I wanted to be a teacher, and this is the first time I've actually stopped and looked back at it and said "Well, is this what I want to keep doing for the rest of my life?" It's as if I've realized that I have options! I could go to pastry school! I could write! I could go to grad school and become a professor or a lawyer or something that actually pays a decent wage!

I think for now I'm just going to allow myself to focus on being a parent. Or, well, hopefully not being a parent for a few more weeks. The longer we keep the baby in, the better his chances of being a football star when he grows up!