It’s also kind of making me think about what I want to do with my life. Miller told me that his dad, a physician, complained that “Doctors help people… writers only help themselves.” I think I responded with something halfway bogus like, “Writers help people. They inspire them.” I guess that sitting here at a desk trying to change the face of American education for eight hours a day is having the inevitable effect of making me wonder if indulging myself in my own writing and then trying to convince myself that other people need it, that the world needs it to be something… more beautiful or something… and trying to figure out a way to make a living from it… I wonder if that’s really the best thing I can do with my life, if writing novels or poetry is really the greatest contribution I can make. I hate asking myself these questions because I know that writing and just writing makes me happy, but maybe I shouldn’t worry so much about what makes me happy. Lots of things make me happy. Maybe I should use my writing and other skills to make non-artistic, tangible changes in the things that I find wrong with the world, starting with the state of education in our country and moving onto one or more of a myriad of other problems: women’s rights, gay rights, animal rights, immigrants’ rights… who else needs rights? Coalminers? Or did they get all their rights already? Migrant workers still need rights. Patients’ rights…. Um.

Oh, and the environment.

I think what I probably have to do is find a way to make money fixing problems, and then I’ll have the freedom to write on the side. Or make money from writing and have the freedom to fix problems on the side… hm. Maybe I’ll be an accountant or an insurance salesman or some corporate such-and-such and then write and fix problems on the side. That would kind of suck though.