The B-More Dad Blog

On my first day as a substitute teacher, one kid upset the whole class with loud raspberry sounds, one girl kept whining that her stomach hurt, kids’ names flew in and out of my head, and I kept wondering who was in charge when in the room with me was a math specialist, a full-time assistant and a student teacher.

Despite having absolutely zero teaching experience, I realized who was the boss: me.

Yikes.

I always imagined a linear career path: small paper, big paper, Pulitzer, book deal. My ladder turned out more like a jungle gym, however, as I went from dot-com drone to newspaper reporter, wire editor, graduate student and then freelance writer. It took me years to realize that journalistic glory means less to me than raising a family. And in nine years as an at-home dad, choices my Lovely Bride and I made allowed her to risk and soar professionally – and not worry about whether we’re out of milk.

After friends’ countless suggestions – and wringing my hands over it for months – I applied to become a substitute teacher in my local public schools . I know, who’s the number one person on whom people try to pull a fast one? The sub. (I flash back to 7^th grade band class and switching seats and instruments. Or to poor Mr. Bradley, the middle school sub who would get so angry he would bend a yardstick over his head until it almost broke.) But I figure that if I return from the trenches wanting more – despite the difficulty of dropping into a different situation almost every time – then maybe I should look into the expense and schooling required for what I’m now old enough (awk) to call a midlife career change.

It turns out all you have to do to be a sub in Baltimore County is attend a two-hour orientation, have no criminal record and pass a fingerprint check. I’m in! They didn’t even ask if I speak English. A college degree or credit earns you higher pay, and you have to attend a 2-hour orientation session which mainly teaches you about the sophisticated “Sub-Finder Express” automated phone system.

It lets you can slice and dice your availability and choose from five zones in the county in which you’ll take assignments. Or you can opt for high school only or to teach only French. Then the computer will phone you with available jobs the night before – or the morning of – and you pick and choose on the spot. You can also comb online listings, which gives you the leisure of pondering a 7:30 start time at a school 30 minutes away.

Of the 8,000 public school teachers in Baltimore County, between 700 and 1,200 are absent each day because of illness or meetings or a variety of reasons, said the woman running the prospective sub orientation. In the course of a child’s 13 years in school, that adds up to one full year of not having a teacher. Sheesh. And you’re not the content expert, the orientation lady said. You’re there to keep the class on track with the curriculum so the permanent teacher doesn’t have to go back and repeat what you as the sub failed to complete.

And with 3 percent of substitute vacancies going unfilled each day, she said, there’s plenty of work to be had.

So with the Oscar-winning music playing in my head, and imagining the movie to be made about my life spent broadening young minds, I arrived at my first assignment having dressed for the part. With sportcoat, necktie and freshly-shined shoes, I looked like an administrator (a tip from orientation lady). I arrived early and was barely in the classroom five minutes when the teacher across the hall said her sub cancelled, and could I stay a few extra hours? They loved me already! But it was much harder than I expected to get a roomful of squirmy 3^rd graders to calculate perimeter (it’s easy: add up the sides) when I don’t know what they do and don’t know.

The gig I stayed extra for that day might as well have been in a different school. It was a 5^th grade gifted and talented reading class, run by a student teacher who led the perfectly orderly class through an hour-long discussion of The Hobbit (which I never read, because the 100-page introduction was too boring). She let them work in pairs, then together as a class, and she hardly had to raise her voice. I functioned as the extra adult in the room and tried out the principle of management by proximity (another tip from orientation lady) by wandering the room with my arms crossed and looking official.

I’ve had six or eight sub gigs since, and they’ve ranged from the most unruly first-graders ever who fought over pencils they snatched from each other to another class I had twice and remembered most kids’ names. Most recently, I fancied myself as Mr. Schuester from Glee when I subbed for a music teacher. She left a music-related crossword puzzle, which bored the kids and bored me, too.

At supper that night, naturally, I turned for advice to my own first-grader on the critical topic of exactly when students are allowed to sharpen pencils, which they seem to do almost as often as they want to go to the bathroom.

Carla: “Well, you’re supposed to start the day with four sharpened pencils, Dad.”

I have so much to learn.

My kid has asked to get an e-mail address when he turns 10 next week. I’d prefer to wait until he’s older, like 35.

I’m strong enough withstand/ignore the argument that all his friends have them.

Because they don’t.

And I get the chicken-and-egg aspect – nobody to e-mail to because none of his pals have e-mail addresses. They just talk big. Like when they brag about their late bedtimes, which may or may not be true.

I don’t want Eddie to be the kid left behind, which is partially why we got a Wii a couple years ago. I wish the thing had never entered our house, because it often is just one more thing for Eddie and me to butt heads over.

Ditto the iPod Touch he got last fall. Bought the darn thing himself with money he had saved up for a year and a half. He thought we would keep with the house policy where Mom and Dad pay half, but I quickly hedged and said that only works but so far. Certainly not on a $200 piece of electronics I was convinced he would lose or break. So he nabbed a Black Friday deal and got a $40 Target gift card to boot. I’m proud that he achieved a goal, and my Lovely Bride (of exactly 15 years, today) suggested it function as one more tool in my carrot-and-stick arsenal.

I took to calling it “that thing,” and it quickly devolved into…

“Give me that thing and go do your homework.”

“Did you ask if you could play on that thing?”

“If you don’t turn that thing off right now, I’ll take it away for three days.”

“No, you can’t run all over the yard to make movies with that thing.”

“No, you can’t trust a 5-year-old to hold it while you run all over the yard to make movies with that thing.”

“No, you can’t play on that thing for an hour before you do your homework.”

“No, you can’t go check the weather because then you’ll get distracted when you need to get dressed, make your bed, brush your teeth and go to school.”

No no no no no.

Ugh with the no.

We ultimately fashioned a broader screen-time policy where homework assignments must be written in the school-provided planner, papers must be inside folders (not just jammed in the binder) and there must be no notes home from teachers for Eddie to get screen time each day. And for the record, not once has Eddie lost or broken that thing. I’m almost disappointed, but I suppose I’m really glad that he’s responsible enough to take care of it.

Aside from anticipated fatigue of no you can’t borrow my phone to check your e-mail every nine seconds, no you can’t check your e-mail until you do your homework, no you can’t check your e-mail because it’s a gorgeous day now go play outside, I really worry about Internet safety.

Sure, I could keep his password or copy all his e-mails to my account so I know his comings and goings. But it would be just one more thing for him to nag me about. And more butting heads. And really, I need to teach Eddie how to navigate the Internet and avoid predators on his own.

Oy.

Looks like Lovely and I have some discussing to do.

After puzzling for years ‘til my puzzler was sore over how to pursue gainful employment – without pawning my kids off on a patchwork of friends, neighbors and sitters and relegating the family to countless convenience meals – I’m thinking of becoming a teacher.

I do it with mixed feelings, wondering, wondering, wondering…

Will I be any good?

Will I get those Oscar-winning moments of illuminating young minds?

Will it be as family-friendly as I hope?

Will the household fall to pieces and our lives get infinitely more difficult if I go back to work full time?

I’ve struggled for years to figure out how to return to journalism. I heard once that if you can’t support yourself with something, then it’s a hobby. Considering that I’ve written a maximum of six or eight articles annually for the past nine years, making no more than $4,000 a year, that makes journalism a hobby in my world.

Ever since I wandered into the offices of my college newspaper more than 20 years ago, I have considered myself a newspaper reporter. Sure, I worked for a news website in the 90s and was a wire service copy editor for four years, but I’m a reporter. I gather and sift information. (When a reporter told me, as an editor, that I sounded like his 8^th grade English teacher, I realized I’m probably a better editor than a reporter, but I don’t change gears easily. And whether I pursue editing versus reporting gets a little much for nonjournalists.) The most confusing part is that in the past decade, the journalism industry has crumbled and changed without me.

When we moved to Baltimore in 2004, and I became an at-home dad, I expected an eventual return to full-time newspapering. To keep my hand in, I wrote freelance articles for trade rags, newspapers, magazines, websites and whoever would pay me. A Baltimore Sun editor once told me that given my limited reporting experience (two years in the late 90s at New Jersey newspaper that’s now a shell of its former self), I would need to log a year or two at one of the newspapers an hour away from Baltimore.

She was right.

My weekly fantasy reading comes in the form of trolling for work on journalismjobs.com. But with the fantasy comes the cold reality – reporter hours stink, and editor hours are worse. (The pay isn’t so hot, either.) One copy editor job is 60 miles away, and the shift is from 4 p.m. to midnight. I’d never see my family, and the commute alone would kill me.

A neighborhood friend with kids the same ages as mine confirmed my fears when we had coffee a few weeks ago. She reported for The Sun for about four years before she became an at-home parent, about the same time I did. Now she’s returning as a features editor – they get a known quantity, and she gets a day shift. She and I agreed that the only path for me to get to where she is was to take the faraway job with the tough hours and enormous strain on the family.

“You think your becoming a teacher will put the nail in the coffin of journalism, kid? How many Pulitzers ya got, huh?”

Twenty-two years after I wrote my first news story, I’m starting to think that maybe I’m not, in fact, going to be a newspaper reporter forever. I want a healthy-happy family more. But I feel like I will personally be responsible for kicking the journalism industry into its death spiral – like in “A Christmas Story” when Santa boots Ralphie down the department-store slide. I feel like I’m giving up on journalism. And then there’s that nasty saying, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” I feel like it means I can’t cut it as a journalist, and my resume doesn’t even give me the street cred to teach journalism. Then again, I know more about journalism basics than a number of other people who might teach journalism to high schoolers.

One thing that points me toward teaching is that people I know keep telling me they think I’d be good at it.

Just because I laminate hand-drawn posters of a school bus with feet, that means I should be a teacher?

Even a stranger in Staples the other day when I was laminating a poster to help encourage walking to school in my neighborhood.  “Are you a teacher?” she asked.

Huh.

The biggest inspiration is that a number of my children’s elementary school teachers have either been knock-it-out-of-the-park outstanding or so disappointing that I’m sure I can do better.

When I had my annual quandary over what to do with my life a few months ago, my Lovely Bride gave me a pep talk about why she holds the job she does. She went to law school to learn to write international peace treaties. Instead, she matches up philanthropists with doctors and scientists doing groundbreaking research.

She (usually) likes the work because:

1. It gives her a paycheck.
2. It does more good than evil.
3. It keeps her brain happy.

I talked it over one day with my daughter’s teacher – just before I helped her Chinese student who speaks hardly any English – and she said I wouldn’t be turning my back on an expensive education. I’d be applying it in different ways, given how important writing skills are. She trained as an ESOL teacher, and now she’s in a first-grade classroom. Things change in life, she said, so why not give it a try? Later that morning when I spread an arc of paper piles on the floor in the hall so I could collate a bunch of workbooks, one of my son’s teachers walked past and sing-songed “You look like a teacher…!” (That teacher, in fact, was an inspiring long-term substitute filling in for a woeful, sad sack of a teacher who has ruined science and social studies for the entire fourth grade at my kids’ school.)

I started thinking about this when I came up with Fun Camp two years ago. It was the last week of summer, and my children needed something for the dead part of the afternoon when there’s simply nothing to do. The kids are tired of the pool and the library, and it’s too hot to do anything else. So I threw together some ideas, and Fun Camp was born. I invited a dozen neighbor kids, and one day we had Laptop Lane. We borrowed a half-dozen laptops and tablets and drew websites out of a hat from a list of county schools-approved sites. Another day, we used a pile of giant sticks to construct whatever the kids wanted – space ships, sling shots, mouse houses, whatever. (This flopped; glue dries slooooowwwwwlyyyy.) We did science experiments, culminating in the diet-coke-and-mentos geyser in the back yard. And the fourth day, we chucked my plan to do home-made musical instruments (toilet-paper-roll-and-wax-paper-kazoo, anyone?) and went to a tiny amusement park.

At the end, my friend Sandra asked, “So, are you ready to get certified?”

“Oh wait, or might that make you certifiable?” she quipped.

So maybe I ought to dip my toe in the water by becoming a substitute teacher.

Stay tuned.

A vacuum that will last longer than a Congressional term — is that too much to ask?

Dear Vacuum Cleaner makers,

I only want one thing from you: a vacuum that’s good at hardwoods AND carpet. Is that too much to ask?

Okay, I really want a second thing, too: make me a vacuum that won’t break in ways that leave the machine operable but irritating because of minor deficiencies. Make a vacuum with the cord rollup thingy that still works after more than two years. And one with that plastic door over the little accessories that (a) stays shut and (b) doesn’t break off and let the little accessories scatter to the four floors of my rowhouse. And if you can make one with a handle that stays up when it’s supposed to, well – you’ll have earned the undying gratitude of a lifetime customer.

As vacuums go, I’m a Kenmore man.

My mom always had a Kenmore, and my father bought me of my very own from Sears for my 25^th birthday. I lived in Brooklyn, New York, and dutifully drove to New Jersey to pick it up. (Dad gave Mom a microwave oven for her birthday in 1980. She cried.)

Over the years, I’ve tried to branch out. Those Dysons look so zippy with that wind tunnel and the little roller ball that lets you get behind the sofa legs in one swift motion. But tell me it gets dog hair off the rug, and I’ll tell you there’s a bridge for sale in New York. And the Dyson costs about the same as the bridge. Or maybe I should change to an upright? How great would it be not to have to buy and change those stupid bags – which I only figure out are full after I vacuum the entire house and wonder why it still feels dirty. Not like I’m going to change the bag and then vacuum all over again.

I tried checking Consumer Reports, source of all impartial knowledge of consumer goods, but they gave Kenmores a so-so rating, so, ironically, I didn’t trust them.

A few years ago, I saw a friend’s new Kenmore that he swore up and down was good on rugs AND floors. Kinda like the feeling you get when some other guy’s new cell phone makes you want one, too, I got vacuum envy. Got a deal on the floor model at the Sears Scratch-n-Dent, and I was sold. I vacuumed my way to happiness until I ran out of bags and found that the stupid store doesn’t sell the type my machine takes – after I drove across town to get some. Plus, the bags they called for looked way too big to fit in the chamber, and the salesman couldn’t explain how that was in fact the right bag.  I resigned to ordering them online – but when my last bag is full and shipping takes a week, I resort to sticking my finger inside the full bag to fish out the unearthly mix of cat hair and dirt to make room for more.

Ick.

My current vacuum cleaner’s accessory panel door was last seen in the living room sometime in 2010. The cord hasn’t rolled up since October, and if I crack the thing open in an effort to fix it, it will never work properly again. And my old vacuum’s handle – which is supposed to stand on its own when the little thingy clicks – hacked me off so much that I replaced it, even though it sucks like crazy. Never mind that the damn thing was sized for a woman – with a handle built for someone only five feet tall.

Dear Dad, please don’t buy me a new vacuum cleaner.

And Dear Vacuum Makers, please make a machine that’s strong enough for a man and not made for a woman.

Back when my Lovely Bride and I were newlywed New Yorkers, we cooked together three nights each week, got held up at work two times and ate out twice. One decade and two children later, we dream of just randomly going out to dinner. We have to dream because we can’t remember actually doing so.

Wouldn’t you like to peruse the possibilities from this pleasant perch? Me: no. Lovely Bride: yes.

These days, Lovely combs cookbooks and plans menus for five nights a week, figuring leftovers or pizza the other two. It’s one of her ways of contributing to the care and nurturing of the children. She enjoys curling up in our yellow upholstered swivel rocking chair with a stack of cookbooks and a hot drink. I enjoy avoiding the agony of deciding. Like whether to have sweet-and-sour pork, pork with black bean sauce or grilled pork chops. I don’t a rip, as long as she tips me off when something needs to marinate before I open the fridge at 5:30. (Sometimes I don’t get the message, so spaghetti Bolognese turns into mac-and-cheese from a box.)

As Lovely moves into the annual Fall Crazy Time at work, it occasionally falls to me to pick the menu. She’s busy finding and hiring three people while doing the work of the ones who moved on, plus orchestrating six events in five weeks – oh and starting to plan for Winter Crazy Time at work – so I don’t mind flipping through the cookbook.

I don’t like deciding on the spur of the moment what to fix. I like a plan. Except then sometimes I have to figure out what to fix with what. Broccoli with fish? Tortellini with chicken? Ugh, somebody just tell me what to fix.

So this week, I threw it to the children.

I knew what we had in the freezer, and I know what they’ll eat. So I divided it into three columns: meat, vegetable, starch. Some Real Simple article about dealing with picky eaters mentioned letting the kids pick the menu for a night. I tried that once, but Eddie and Carla bickered about it instead.

This time I opted for multiple choice. Oughtta make for happy kids and happy control-freak Daddy.

The kids just looked at me.

And blinked.

“Kids, do you think your friends get to pick what’s for dinner?” I asked. They just sighed. So much for adding a little democracy to this family dictatorship.

“It’s simple,” I told them. “Just pick one from here and one from here and one from here. Except if you pick lemon chicken, then we have to have rice. And chicken and dumplings have to go together. That’s Mommy’s Law. Oh, and if we have corn, we don’t really need rice the same night. Too starchy.”

Great, now I’m sucking the joy out of a joyless activity by imposing all these conditions.

They started to squirm.

“Okay, let’s start with what kind of chicken – lemon or with dumplings?” I asked.

“Lemon chicken!” Eddie said.

“Okay, now pick a vegetable from this column…” And then it went okay from there. Except nobody wanted asparagus, so I’ll just fix it as a second vegetable one night.

Woo-hoo! Menu planned with only moderate pain.

August 26, 2012

Dear Eddie and Carla,

Tomorrow is a big day. Fourth and First Grade… Wow.

When I was a kid, there was a girl in my class named Florence.

Florence looked a little different, and she wore funny clothes. She walked funny. Florence didn’t smile much, and she was prone to emotional outbursts. Kids teased Florence a lot, which made her head hang low. I never told the other kids to stop.

I avoided Florence, and I tried not to talk to her. I never invited her to sit next to me at lunch, or to play with me at recess. It made my face feel hot with shame when she sat and played by herself. She must have been very lonely.

I still think about Florence. I wonder if Florence thinks of me?  Probably not fondly.

I think that God puts people in our lives as gifts to us. The children in your class this year, they are some of God’s gifts to you.

So please treat each one like a gift from God. Every single one.

Kiddo, if you see a child being left out, or hurt, or teased, a part of your heart will hurt a little. Your mom and I want you to trust that heartache. Your whole life, we want you to notice and trust your heartache. That heartache is called compassion, and it is God’s signal to you to do something. It is God saying, Eddie and Carla! Wake up! One of my babies is hurting! Do something to help! Whenever you feel compassion — be thrilled! It means God is speaking to you, and that is magic. It means he trusts you and needs you.

Sometimes the magic of compassion will make you step into the middle of a bad situation right away.

Compassion might lead you to tell a teaser to stop it and then ask the teased kid to play. You might invite a left-out kid to sit next to you at lunch. You might choose a kid for your team first who usually gets chosen last. These things will be hard to do, but you can do hard things.

Sometimes you will feel compassion but you won’t step in right away. That’s okay, too. You might choose instead to tell your teacher and then tell us. We are on your team — we are on your whole class’s team. Asking for help for someone who is hurting is not tattling, it is doing the right thing. If someone in your class needs help, please tell me, kiddo. We will make a plan to help together.

When God speaks to you by making your heart hurt for another, by giving you compassion, just do something. Please do not ignore God whispering to you. I so wish I had not ignored God when he spoke to me about Florence. I remember him trying, I remember feeling compassion, but I chose fear over compassion. I wish I hadn’t. Florence could have used a friend, and I could have, too.

Eddie and Carla, Mom and I do not care if you are the smartest or fastest or coolest or funniest. There will be lots of contests at school, and we don’t care if you win a single one of them. We don’t care if you get straight As. We don’t care if the girls or boys think you’re cute or whether you’re picked first or last for kickball at recess. We don’t care if you are your teacher’s favorite or not. We don’t care if you have the best clothes or most light sabers or coolest fairy dolls. We just don’t care.

We don’t send you to school to become the best at something. We already love you as much as we possibly could. You do not have to earn our love or pride and you can’t lose it. That’s done.

We send you to school to practice being brave and kind.

Kind people are brave people. Brave is not a feeling that you should wait for. It is a decision. It is a decision that compassion is more important than fear, than fitting in, than following the crowd.

Trust me, kiddo, it is. It is more important.

Take care of those classmates of yours, and your teacher, too. You Belong to Each Other. You are lucky kiddos… with all of these new gifts to unwrap this year.

I love you so much.

Enjoy and cherish your gifts.

And thank you for being my favorite gift of all time.

Love,
Dad

(Okay, so I borrowed heavily from some first-day-of-school letter to children that my Lovely Bride found floating around the internet. But Florence is real. She lives in a little apartment in Fredericksburg, Va, and she works part-time at Goodwill. After our 20^th high school reunion last year, I gave her a ride home.)

My Lovely Bride turned 40 this summer, and it’s my turn soon. Throw in my children’s imminent return to school plus my having been an at-home dad for eight years – and you get my annual “What Am I Doing With My Life?” quandary. Whoopieeee!

Am I wasting my expensive education by not working for pay? Would full-time work wreak havoc on my family? It’s been a coupla years… could I hack it? Do I even want to be a reporter, or maybe I’m a better editor instead? Or should I turn my back on journalism and the industry’s unending, gut-wrenching change? Carla’s kindergarten teacher inspired me every time I volunteered last year, and every interaction with Eddie’s 3^rd grade teacher convinced me I could do better. Maybe I should try teaching?

Sigh.

My Lovely Bride is always the one who puts it into perspective. This is the woman who wanted to write international peace treaties and interned one summer for Madeleine Albright. Now she’s a fundraiser for a hospital-university. She likes coaching a team of seven people as she matches up philanthropists with scientists to fund groundbreaking medical research.

Is it what she set out to do?

Absolutely not.

But one morning she said she’s figured out that three things about a job are important:

1. It gives her a paycheck.
2. It does more good than evil.
3. It keeps her brain happy.

So, what about teaching, then? It would work with my children’s schedule, and I wouldn’t have to load them up with nonstop camps in summer and babysitters during the school year. But there’s more to it than calendar convenience.

I just love Ms. G. Not only does she don a mask in a museum for the benefit of her class, she hams it up like the star she is.

As I volunteered in Carla’s class twice a month. Ms. G ran me ragged. Two and a half hours of cutting and stapling and folding and collating and opening snacks and leading craft activities. But every single time, Ms. G’s enthusiasm and skill made me want to be a teacher. Maybe a kindergarten teacher – another place to break the gender barrier, like being an at-home dad – or maybe at another grade level.

And last summer, I came up with Fun Camp. In an attempt to thwart boredom during the last week of summer vacation, I invited a dozen neighborhood kids to come over for two hours in that dead of the afternoon when there’s simply nothing to do. One day I borrowed a half-dozen computers and had Laptop Lane, where kids drew out a hat to choose websites from a school-approved list.

Fun Camp Day 1: Laptop Lane

Another day we did science experiments, including making a geyser out of Mentos and Diet Coke. Build-Things-With-Sticks Day flopped, but we righted things the next day by scrapping my plans and going to a one-roller-coaster amusement park.

After that, my friend Sandra rubbed her hands together and said, “You know, we oughtta get you certified!”

“But then,” I retorted, “I just might be certifiable.”

Sooo… should I enroll in a midcareer transition-to-teacher program? Maybe I ought to try substitute teaching first? Sub jokes aside, I figure getting dropped into a strange class on a moment’s notice would be a really quick way to see if I really want to teach.

I’m such a perfectionist-defeatist, however, that I talk myself out of it before I even try.

Part of me wonders how I would ever keep my patience with a bunch of other people’s kids when I almost never manage it with my own. And I feel guilty for yelling at my own kids when they do stupid things (i.e., simultaneously age-appropriate and irritating), which I’ve reminded them a thousand times to do or not to do.

As for journalism, once upon a time I realized that I just might be a better editor than a reporter. When I reminded a writer that a compound sentence must be separated by a comma AND a conjunction, he told me “You sound just like my eighth-grade English teacher.”

I took it as a complement.

But there’s no glory in copy editing. Really, can you name a single famous editor? Maybe Anna Wintour or Tina Brown. Or E.B. White, whom you probably know better for “Charlotte’s Web” than for one of my favorite books, Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style.”

I’m not sure The Baltimore Sun would take me as a full-time reporter or editor – one editor I’ve written for is only about 30 and has more full-time experience than I do, as does any 28-year-old who’s been at a smaller paper since finishing college. Another Sun editor told me over lunch that I’d probably need to log a year or more at a small paper an hour away. (I didn’t like what she told me, but I know she was right.) The commute would kill me. And forget about feeding healthy food to my children or getting them to sports practices and doctor’s appointments without logistical headaches. I know dual-working-parent households pull this off all the time, but it strikes me as utter drudgery.

I’ve been thinking about calling up my local weekly and offering my services as a copy editor. It’s actually a decent paper, but tell me what community newspaper couldn’t use a little help on the editing desk. Any weekly seems to have the lede (that’s not misspelled, for you non-journo-types) buried in the sixth graf about half the time. I can fix that. Plus, I like doing layout, and I’m good at it.

I have moments of thinking I’m throwing my life away. And my education, too – I went to Columbia Journalism School! My former classmates are writing books and reporting from West Africa for The New York Times. I think a couple of them have even won Pulitzer Prizes by now.

I once got a job offer from The Philadelphia Inquirer!

The Philadelphia Inquirer!

This for the guy who was rejected for reporter jobs at The News-Record of Harrisonburg, Va. (circulation 29,000), The Winchester Star (circ. 23,000) and even my hometown newspaper, The Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va. (circ. 46,000), which wanted a minority candidate. I’m all for that, though it does cross me off the list.

The Inky offer came when I was finishing journalism school and trying to figure out how my wife would keep her job in New York and I would work in Philly. I took the train to the midpoint and wondered whether we could endure the commute. I concluded one thing: I cannot live in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Every now and then, for fantasy reading, I troll the website journalismjobs.com. I imagine myself as a fulltime reporter or an editor, except the jobs are an hour away and advertise hours from 9-6. Or night editor jobs from 3-11, which means I’d never see my children. And I’d be tired all the time.

I’ve been mulling all this for months, ever since my last paid article.

In February.

That was the month I got really fired up when I attended my first journalism conference since the Clinton administration. I worked up a couple story ideas and pitched them to no avail. (No, we don’t want your exposé about nursing home violations, one magazine told me. We get a lot of advertising from nursing homes. Journalists everywhere gagging in unison.) Maybe the weekly newspaper copy editing would lead somewhere. Or maybe it would just fit into my schedule needs (being available for the children outside school time) and commit occasional journalistic good.

Or maybe I should try teaching…

Or maybe I should revel in my at-home-dadness and spend September on the backyard renovation and luxuriate in house projects for a month…

Or maybe I should get off my duff and gin up some more freelancing…

Or actually put in some effort at becoming a better father…

Or figure out how to make a buck off this blog…

Or maybe…