Before I talk about LA, I want to get this off my chest. I think I've figured out what this blog is for, and some other things, and it starts, embarrassingly, with a Cure song.

"No I won't do it again
I don't want to pretend
If it can't be like before
I've got to let it end
I don't want what I was
I had a change of head
But maybe...someday..."

It also involves some new friends. One of the many things I love about the Boston area's craft brew crowd: you can hang out with people frequently, have many deep conversations, know personal things about their political viewpoints, life history, countries they've visited, and their families, but not know, for months, what they do for a living. Isn't that refreshing? Usually "And what do you do?" is the first question in adult social discourse. I love these guys.

So in September, someone I'd been hanging with on and off since April asks me what I do for money. I answer, "I write about business and technology."

"You don't sound too excited about it," he replies.

"Excited?" I say, "Like deeply passionate? No. But it's interesting enough, I'm good at it, and it pays the bills."

Back up a bit. Now I'm driving to Boston Career Link with another friend this summer, neither of us knowing what, if anything, a career center could do for two overeducated, under-employed former dot-commers who never once said, "I want to work in technology when I grow up." He drove, and I told him, "I just don't know how to job hunt. I graduated into a good economy. I was never in the rat race; I just sat there and people fed me cheese." His reply: "We *all* just fell into this." Didn't we?

Rewind to June 1998. I'd just quit a my first, last, and only full-time job. There are many reasons I did this, but one of them was that I didn't want to write about technology anymore. I went to a recruiter, showed her my resume, and said, "I don't want to be a tech writer anymore. What can I do for a living?" She told me I would make an excellent administrative assistant or office manager. I cried right there in the office.

Fast forward to a job interview in December 2002. I give the usual, essentially true speech about why I want [insert full-time biz/tech writing job here]. "I started writing about technology before the boom, and I'm still writing about it after the boom, and I like it and I'd like to keep doing it." But something must ring false there, because I never, ever get the job. It's starting to ring false to me, too. Didn't I already quit technology writing once? Should someone who hates the business world as much as I do really be chronicling it? Finding this stuff kinda interesting isn't enough in this job market. You have to love it. With excitement and passion.

Do I want a full-time corporate job? Deep down, no, I just want the benefits and stability. Do I want to remain a freelancer? No, because the handouts are over and freelance writing has become what it gets taxed as: a business. I swear to god, I never wanted to run a business. I never wanted the rat race. I'm not sure I even want to be a rat.

I have a few small contract writing jobs left. I'm glad to be writing for a living, at least part-time...I mean, aren't I? Shouldn't I be? I'm a writer, right? That's what I do, isn't it? That's what I wanted to do since I was 14 or so, it's what I'm good at, it's what everyone tells me I'm good at, it's maybe the only thing I'm good at. It's a justification of my overpriced liberal arts education. It means I get a certain degree of status and respect not generally accorded to, say, secretaries and janitors. It means my parents, who still brag to the neighbors about an out-of-print computer manual I co-wrote in my early 20s, have something to be proud of. It means my friends who majored in comp-sci can't tease me about "fries with that." I always thought I could go to my high school reunion and call myself a professional writer. It means something. Maybe, for the last five years, it's meant altogether too much.

Media Grok and Media Unspun, the job(s) I liked most because they combined free-form snarkiness with a steady paycheck, are really, permanently gone now. No more free cheese. It's time to ask myself some questions. Now what? Whatever happened to writing for fun? How can I get a living-wage paycheck while avoiding that brass ring like the plague? Am I ever going to be able to retire? Does it matter? Most people in the world do tedious crap for money, so what makes me so special and more deserving of personal satisfaction? If I'm having a mid-life crisis at 28, does this mean I'm only going to live to be 56?

Now go back even further, to the late 80s and early 90s. Do you really have to suffer to write? Maybe, since the last time I felt truly creative, I was 18 with a suitcase full of personal issues. But maybe I had something right back then. I wrote because I liked to, because it got things off my chest and was cheaper than therapy, because it amused my friends, because things kept me up at night if I didn't get up and write them down. Those were miserable times, and I don't want them back, but where did that fire go? Maybe blogging is the 2003, grown-up version of the high school literary magazine. Maybe it's not about the size of the audience, and right now, it's definitely not about whether I get paid -- because nothing has taken away my love for writing more than doing it for a living. It's time to concentrate on writing for fun and do something else for money, even if it means that all those "fries with that" smart-asses were right. I've been enjoying my catering jobs more than my writing jobs lately. I think that means something's wrong.

Then again, the Cure have been threatening retirement since the 80s, and they're still kicking around. So I'm not making any grand pronouncements like I foolishly did in 1998, and I'm keeping the clients I have (I'm competent at this, whether I like it or not, and I like to follow through on projects I start). I just don't know. I do know I'm burnt out, and I need to fix it. I expect this website will play a part. Watch this space.