Career Choices

I've been thinking about employment a lot recently, mostly because of my complete lack of it, and I've come to the conclusion that every English Lit graduate does at one point or another. I have exactly two career paths open to me. I must now either write a book or become a teacher. The fact that writing anything over the length of a shopping list (or, on a good day, a particularly piquant Facebook comment) makes me want to set my eyes alight (consider, not only the obvious pain involved here, but also the exhorbitant cost, owing to the current petrol shortage), makes the first option seem unlikely. In four years at university I wrote roughly twenty essays, and on only one of them did I ever manage to break the word limit. The most I can hope for is a short story or two. A novella at best.

So I look to teaching. When someone finds out you're doing an English degree they invariably jump to the same conclusion. Why studying literature should automatically mean I want to talk Lewis Grassic Gibbon at some little idiot in a woollen sweater with chewed cuffs is beyond me. To my mind, a lifetime of sitting in a room full of bored teenagers, pretending not to see them whispering or eating Skittles or dry humping behind the overhead projector would be hell. But... the holidays. I know career choice shouldn't be based on how much time is spent not doing the job, but according to my reliable source (ok, Wikipedia) pupils only attend school for 190 days a year. Despite this, I can almost guarantee that for those 190 days, I would wake up feeling that same attraction to the jerry can and the eyedrops.

At least if I was writing a novel my eyes would be on fire in the peace and comfort of my own home.