This is what I wonder. What is better. To have a job that does not require you to think often, but only do, such as my former job as a library clerk; or to have an occupation that requires you to rely on your independent intellect and where there is no guarantee that what you are doing one day will be the same as the next, such as, perhaps, a job a teacher would have.

This is the thought I have while reading a book (Virginia Woolf's Flush, a biography on Elizabeth Barrett's dog) which I have to give a presentation on tomorrow in class.

I have come to an impasse. I do not know what I want to do with my life. I thought I would want to be a professor, but for various reasons which I have in some manner already written about on here, I am no longer so sure.

For me, both conditions that I stated are not good for me. I don't want a mindless job that is safe and secure but I also don't want the total uncertainty of a teaching position, nor the beauocratic hassle that comes along with it. I love literature and the theatre, but to actively engage in both in an academic settle is unnerving. To depend on grades, to sit in a class for two hours, to listen to other people talk, to not be inspired, saps all the joy out of either. I guess what I mean is that I don't want to deal with the bullshit. But then life is never so easy...blah blah blah, whatever other defeatist attitude people like to make up.

Most of what I know about literature and what has helped to bring me where I am today - in grad school, in London -- are things I taught myself. All of my knowledge about Elizabeth Barrett and her husband Robert Browning I did not learn in class, but one summer when I happened upon their letters in my undergrads library where I worked. I read all of them, then biography's and Elizabeth's Aurora Leigh. I still remember lounging on my futon while doing so, a summer wind coming through my windows next to me, the sun shining in. The first book that inspired me, Jane Eyre, I read, for myself, alone, in my family's summer home near Erie. Before then, I did not care for literature. I would probably still not care for it if I had not come across it, or something like it. Although I had read Austen's Emma shortly before that which did not make me particular warm toward literature, mostly because I didn't understand what was going on --I thought Mr. Knightley and Mr. John Knightley were the same person and couldn't understand why Isabella's husband was making advances toward her sister.

What I mean to write is that my love of literature has mostly come from myself. If it wasn't for my middle school English teacher who had told us to buy one 19th century book and read it, then I would not have had Jane Eyre in my possession, but if it hadn't been my choice to read past the first page three years after I bought it (I pretended that I had read it for class) then I would never have found what I thought was my vocation in life, to explore and love literature.

I don't know what the hell I'm getting at. I should get back to reading about Elizabeth's dog.