While on the one hand I look forward to going back to work, the challenge of, say, taking a shower before 9 a.m. does seem rather daunting. I wonder how ever shall I do it.

Nap, you say. Well then Chelsey has time to write, doesn’t she. While he naps.

Yes. I thought so too. I opened my laptop, the document I’m working on, all nine sources I’m using, and wrote a paragraph. ONE WHOLE PARAGRAPH. And then the Boy Who Barely Slept awoke. This was repeated twice throughout the day. Otherwise, if I tried to work on it while he was playing with his toys, he’d invariably fall, or bonk his head, or try to do dental work on the dog who is generally quite long-suffering but has her limits.

This is why freelance writing and stay-at-home-motherhood are incompatible. If I had childcare or even a child who napped in long, solid blocks — which, I believe, are a myth visited upon us by sadistic writers of sleep-training manuals — then yeah, I’d be productive. As it is, I have to wait for a break, which comes in the evening when the husband gets home, but first we have dinner, and then I leave to write, but I have to be back within an hour and a half for Cranky Genius Bedtime (still nursing), and by the time the Bedtime Ordeal is over and the little Evil Genius is in bed, yea, asleep, well by then it’s almost eight o’clock and I’ve been up since five-something and the words go onto the page, but when I see them again in the light of the next day, I know there’s no way in hell my editor wants to see this linguistic concoction.

So that’s how the freelance thing is going.

And in related news, do you know how much health insurance costs? TOO DAMN MUCH.

Internets, I have a hankering to discover the world. Sooner rather than later, preferably. So my plan is as follows:

1. Sell our house, preferably for about $10k more than we paid for it (ha, ha?) in order to break even, what with fences, hardwood floor redoing, landscaping, and other miscellany we’ve done to it, plus closing costs. I don’t know if this is even possible, but judging by what other houses are going for on our street and in our part of town, it seems plausible.

2. Loan Lucy to my parents. We’d miss her terribly, but she might not be the best traveling companion.

3. Give Trollop back to the devil, from whence she came, and Orwell to my parents or any other nice home where he’d be welcome to hide under a bed all day. Every day. For all his life.

4. Sell or store our junk, including our car and pickup.

5. Renew our passports and get vaccinations.

6. Once steps 1 through 5 were secured, we’d quit our jobs. This would be painful, as we both have jobs we enjoy, and income is always a bonus, but it’s the last thing tying us down, and a necessary step.

Aside from our mortgage, which we would no longer have, we don’t have any long-term debt obligations. We could leave our 401ks dormant, withdraw from savings and put the cash from our house sale in the highest-interest-yielding account possible. Then we’d kiss our mothers goodbye and go see the world.

But.
Just “seeing the world” isn’t a good enough reason for me. It’s fine for others, but I’m not content being a tourist-consumer — I hate that feeling. (That also explains why we never get gifts for people when we travel. Just see the claptrap of a tourist shop makes me shiver.) I envision being more of a tourist-worker, even if it’s not for pay, because I want to not just see new places, but see who lives there and how they work. Specifically, I would love to do agri- or eco-tourism. And when I’m done, I can come home, live in a tiny house on a river with a big garden and composting toilet, and officially apply for hippie status. I may even grow out my leg hair which, come to think of it, could be Matt’s biggest reservation with the plan. (Easily solvable problem: I’ll let him grow out his beard.)

But in my current state, I am not a bona fide hippie or environmentalist. I fell off the biology bandwagon in college (curse you, chemistry, my nemesis!) and have regretted not working with hands and plants and animals ever since. (People are just so fucking complex, you see.) Fortunately, there are organizations willing to take and train people like me, which is good since I’d like my husband to go along with this perfectly logical, well-thought-out scheme. Organizations include:

• WWOOF.org, the Worldwide Organization of Organic Farmers where we go live and work on farms for short stints in exchange for room and board. Imagine getting to learn how to build and live in sustainable shelters and grow organic products for free or at a very low cost. Plus you can do this all over the world!
• the7interchange.com arranges eco and social volunteer projects around the world. Some range from several days to a year (maybe more); some require you to know local languages, and some don’t; some are exotic, some are in the U.S.; for some you need specialized experience that we wouldn’t qualify for, but for others you just need hands and a brain and a willingness to learn.
• Then there’s voluntourism.org, another site that coordinates volunteering in short, vacation-length stays. This organization seems a little more lengthy in its application process and I’m not sure it would work very well for traveling from one destination to another, but it might.

And I’m sure there are others.

Voluntouring would be the catalyst for moving from point to point; we could take side routes on the way, work cash jobs here and there if we could find them, and take a few days to see around the areas we’d be working. But voluntouring would make the trip all the more meaningful. We might not have fabulous trinkets when we get back, but I bet we’d have great stories and ideas.

What if…
There’s always the insurance question. Sure, we’d no longer be paying auto, home, or other normal insurance policies, but what if something happened in the course of our travels? Emergency appendectomy, lost tooth, etc.? There are companies who cover that type of occurance. I’m sure it’s slightly more expensive, but one quote I got from World Nomads was six months of insurance for $260 per person. It doesn’t cover everything, of course, but it can provide emergency help — which is all you really anticipate.

Traveling
Traveling is sure to be the most expensive part of the deal, especially since it can cost a thousand bucks from one continent to the next, per person. But here, too, there are options. Courier.org allows you to fly as a passenger on courier planes (oops, wrote “pigeons” there for a second…my head got really happy with that visual) for slightly cheaper than you might a commercial plane, and I hear there’s no fee for checking baggage (not that we’d need to; I suspect this would be a backpack-type trip). You can also book multi-destination tickets for cheaper than buying them one hop at a time. For example, flying from Portland to Honolulu to  New Zealand, and to Sydney on a multi-destination ticket costs $1,000; flying straight to Sydney costs the same amount. Schedule your flights roughly two to three weeks apart, and you’re gold. If you want to leave early, you can just go on standby on the next available flight.

It won’t be cheap, but I estimate that we can do the bulk of our traveling for just a few thousand dollars each. Food and lodging when we’re not with a host will also be expensive, but hostels are cheap and relatively plentiful for our intended destinations, so I think we’ll be able to afford it. A few good books (and used bookstores wherever we go), and we’ll be able to wile away the hours in airports waiting standby.

Voíla!

Places to go
Because he is a nice person, and he may have felt terrible for having such a great time without me over a three-day, Valentine’s weekend, Matt has been accommodating my current, ultra-planning mood. He even went so far as to list his preferred worldwide destinations, with the caveat that we end up in Europe and take as long as we like (and as long as we still have money) to see every square foot of Germany. He even volunteered to learn German.

The language barrier is a huge issue, though. Unfortunately, neither of us speaks more than a little Spanish, so we thought it would be best if we confined our tourist-worker destinations to places where we would speak the same language as our host family or group. Thus, I researched countries that speak or primarily speak English, cross-referenced them with countries the U.S. State Department doesn’t recommend U.S. citizens traveling to (nothing would put a damper on this trip like being, say, kidnapped) as well as the countries where visa restrictions are problematic, had Matt rank his favorites, and came up with a map that shows just the places we may tour as workers:

It goes something like this: a couple places in the Caribbean, Suriname, Guyana, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Israel, Madagascar, the Seychelles, Israel, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Gibraltar, then Europe.

I realize that some of this is heavily anglo-centric (New Zealand, Australia, Ireland), but again — this is the map of where we might travel and work. It does not include the places we would stop at on our way. Personally, I want to see more of China, Japan, Argentina, and Brazil, not to mention Malta, Turkey, and India, which I hope we’d be able to do along the way, or on trips that aren’t too far out of the way.

We can’t see all of it, but I bet we could see a pretty huge chunk.

In the end, if we do this, I can’t imagine we’ll be worse off for having seen so much of the world. We’ll have learned skills, customs, and lifestyles different from our own; we’ll have met people and made friends along the way. Sure, we’ll be a lot poorer at the end — but so what? So we work a few more years. And anyway, life isn’t guaranteed to go on that long, is it, so why not do it now, while we can?

So I’m beginning the slow process of researching plans company by company. Today it was Regence, and I discovered just how much it costs to get old. Funny, you’re not supposed to discriminate based on sex, race, religion, and sexuality, but ageism? That’s cool.

The response I got purports to be from Instant Type Jobs (instanttypejobs.com), but really it sends you to Freelance Home Writers (freelancehomewriters.com), where you pay to be “trained” and to be given “job tips” (which are really just links to places who are hiring writers, something you could do for free with Google or legit sites like Elance.com). Surprise, surprise, there is no phone number or address anywhere on either website, just e-mail addresses. Scuttle on the Internet says it’s a scam to get monthly payments of $47 from you, and it’s hard to cancel it. The Better Business Bureau does not seem to look favorably upon this organization (it’s got a D rating). So I said scram.

But they didn’t scram — they’re just trying a different name. Because, apparently, they think I’m that stupid. Today I just got a new e-mail from a “different” company. (You’d think that it would be bad business to reply to a query using three different company names, right? Well, I think so too.) Anyway, this one is called Ocala Home Jobs and it has TWO websites, sort of, ocalahomejobs.com and earnmoney99.com (which only redirects you to Ocala Home Jobs), and — no way! — it has no phone number or address, and it just so happens to link to Freelance Home Writers (“rated No. 3 by our clients.” Yeah, No. 3 scam, right behind Nigerian Royalty and cute little girl scouts selling cookies…). It also gives you an annoying pop-up when you try to leave the site which got through my pop-up filter.

So, what am I trying to say? That the following sites are one giant related scam:

• Freelance Home Writers
• Instant Type Jobs
• Ocala Home Jobs
• Earn Money 99
• whitesmoke(dot)com

The great thing is that it only takes about one minute of Googling to find this out, but from the sound of it, a lot of wannabe freelance writers aren’t doing their homework. If these are the people I’m competing with, I feel pretty confident about my possibilities.

In other news, took my bike into the Bicycle Barn yesterday and endured excruciatingly poor, chauvinistic service, which culminated in being charged ten bucks for them putting air in my tires and not fixing, let alone listening to me describe, the problem with the gears (which is that sometimes, the pedals? they do nothing, and I find myself trying to pedal through an intersection with no forward thrust). I despise confrontation, but I’ll be marching back in there today to get either my ten bucks back or my bike actually fixed.

Someone giving me a fucking paycheck and I will WRITE BETTER HEADLINES:

• Sale(s) away: Yard sale season takes off
• Boost your personal economy with a yard sale/Recession getting you down? Yard sales can help lift your personal economy
• When ‘everything must go’: tips for successful yard sales
• Sell yourself — or at least your history: tips for successful yard sales
• From the comfort of your own home: conduct a successful yard sale
• Setting sale: Make good on your yard sale effort
• Economy down? Yard sales are up

No, they’re nothing spectacular, but I hope they’re a step above “Yard sales can benefit buyer, seller.” Sheesh.

…I need a job.

The following are my plans for getting some type of job thingy:

• Pester the writing coordinator at University A until she gives me a job
• Actually send the job application to College B
• Buy printer cartridges in order to print application to send to College B
• Think about applying for jobs at College C, but decide against it for fear that my students would be smarter than me
• Apply for anything that comes up in the local newspaper employment ads; being a barista wouldn’t be so bad…or maybe I could learn about wine and become a tasting room consultant? that’d put my M.A. to use…
• Try to drum up some freelance writing/editing/proofreading business to finance my gardening this summer

It’ll be marvelous, not having a job.

In the meantime, the whole twenty-nine days thing has become a problem because I just no longer care. I want to be done. Have rearranged most of my classes so the class does a lot of group/teamwork and I do very little lecturing or grading. And only four more books to read and one term paper to write, which is the crux of my current angst: could throw the book I’m currently reading across the room: it’s written by a theoretical physicist who, in spite of that major professional shortcoming, manages to write clearly if condescendingly about “discourse” and “textuality” and other stuff I just don’t give a shit about.

I want to be done! I want to build a fence! to read books I actually enjoy! to see my friends in London! to go to Greece and eat feta and chickpea stew and explore churches and ruins, and neverever come back!