For the past couple of years I've been struggling with the idea that I'd like to be a farmer. Don't laugh. Okay, go ahead. It is sort of funny. But, I am serious. I've read numerous articles in Organic Gardening, Martha Stewart Living, and even the local newspaper about raising chickens or heritage animal breeds, or about people who have given up the 9-to-5-grind for the honest, wholesome work of raising organic crops, and they grab me by the insides and pull hard. I believe that small-scale local farming, especially organic farming, is environmentally necessary, economically beneficial, nutritionally superior, and even morally imperative. The idea calls to me in part because of my love of gardening. I want an excuse to stay home and work outside, and to have enough work to keep me busy if I were to stay home all day. I want it to be meaningful and productive work. I want to spend my time with plants and animals. I want to get up and look out at vast fields at sunrise, to smell hay, to make my own composted manure, to eat fresh eggs from my chickens, to have a barn with animals of some kind in it. My heart wants to be a farmer, while my mind and my body scream, "Are you freaking kidding, Girlfriend?!" because there are certain realities which my farm fantasies ignore, like animal pests and diseases, and the intense labor and long hours required.
Because you see, I am an intensely lazy person --physically, at least. I always have been. I liked bike riding as a child, but not too fast or too far or uphill. I didn't really like playing games that required running, like kickball or tag. I was sort of jealous of people who could do gymnastics, so I was proud when I could muster enough courage to be able to pull myself up on a bar and hang upside down. But I don't know if I ever did manage to cross those sets of parallel monkey bars on fancy swing sets. If I could do one or two I was usually pretty happy with myself.
I preferred indoor activities. I liked playing pretend and drawing and coloring and painting and jigsaw puzzles and writing and more than anything else in the world: reading. What I remember most was playing house, playing librarian, playing teacher, and reading, reading, reading, reading. I LOVED going to any library. Even as a child I loved the hushed solemnity and the smell of all those books. I wanted to quietly browse for hours and pick out dozens of books to take home and read or reread. I loved searching in the card catalog and writing down call numbers. My favorite was the towering Morris Library on the SIUC campus, filled with not just rooms but FLOORS full of books. When I was somewhere between 5 and 7 and my dad was in grad school, he would take me with him. In awe, I would follow him up the wide, echoing stairwell, and then settle myself on a high stool at the tall tables near the card catalog to use the little tiny pencils and scrap cards for notes as I pretended I was doing some sort of important library work. I would sometimes look through the card catalogs there at the incomprehensible titles, or browse through the shelves of academic tomes and wonder if someday any of those books would be interesting.
And now I profile those books for a living. My 7-to-5-daily-grind involves working for a corporate business that sells those books to the very same library that enchanted me as a child. I hate working for a corporate business. This is not what I ever wanted to do. I wanted to be a writer or a teacher or a librarian, and instead I became a teacher, got fired, had already indebted myself for the rest of my life getting a master's degree to be a teacher so I couldn't afford to go back to grad school to become a librarian, and managed to land my current job out of luck and desperation. In some ways, it is the best job I've ever had. In other ways, not so much.
One major drawback is that I don't feel like I'm making a difference in the world. As a babysitter and then a nanny and then an early childhood teacher I was helping to raise interesting, loving, fascinating children. At the law library, well, the law library was a fun job because I was working at a library and socializing and/or flirting like a mad fiend. But I was helping people in a variety of ways, and learning about library work at the same time. It was that experience which impressed my current employers when I applied for my job. But now? Now I commute 2 heart-shriveling hours a day to essentially churn out sales for a company that doesn't pay me what I think I ought to be making for the amount of intelligence I bring to the job. It doesn't even make good use of my intelligence, and it doesn't allow for much variation in my duties, so I get bored and frustrated frequently. And there's no moral compensation that at least the world is a better place because I do what I do. This is not the adult life I had planned.
It wouldn't be accurate to claim that I was a really happy child. I was a precocious, opinionated, backtalking, quick-to-anger little girl who was always right and was obsessed with fairness, but who also had bouts of debilitating shyness and often thought she was unlovable and unloved. I did know that many people loved me and many people liked me. I did know that despite the fact that I could be a horrid brat, there were still many people who thought I was funny and admired my intelligence and talents. And I wasn't a morose child. I just lived in my head more than many people probably do, and I never felt quite normal. But that was okay, because someday I was going to grow up and life was going to be everything I wanted. Not that I would necessarily be rich and/or famous, just very well off in every way doing something fulfilling and sort of impressive.
I've come so far away from those visions of childhood, and it makes me sad. I still have most of the character flaws and the same frustrations with the world, but I've lost so much of the ability to enjoy myself which balanced things out. I've been out of school for 8 years, and I feel like my brain is rotting away. I don't have time to read for hours on end. I don't go to libraries anymore. I don't paint or draw or color. I don't write except for these entries. I don't even have a bicycle anymore. I don't play. Everything is about responsibilities and worrying and doing the unpleasant things that have to get done, or avoiding doing them by doing something else that is really sort of a waste of time, like sitting on the couch in front of a movie. Okay, I spend a lot of time on garden fantasizing and planning, but I could get away with spending a lot less time on that so that I would have time for other things.
But this goes back to me being an essentially lazy person who lives predominantly inside her own head. Some people work full time, maintain the small farm where they live, write books on the side, and still find time to raise a family, go to church, and do volunteer work. And some of those people even do it with less money than we make. I have NO CLUE AT ALL how these people do half of that, let alone all of it. And quite frankly, I'm not sure I want to know how they do it. Or at least, I'm not sure I could ever truly understand how they do it. I still have big ideas and big hopes, only now they tend to be about throwing in the consumer towel and forging a simpler life with honest, back-breaking work and sacrifice. But I don't honestly think that would make me happy, either. Just where is the soul-fulfillment that I seek? Does it require a massive change or can I find it within the conditions which already circumscribe my life? Can I even break the habits causing the problems in my current life? How? And when?
Will I ever own chickens? Will I find time to go to libraries once again and revel in the experience of just being there? Will I stop spending all my time and money on plants? Will I ever use my watercolor paints I've ambitiously kept around for at least 10 years now? Will I ever write a book or even a post more than 3 other people read? Will I ever again look to the future with more excitement than aversion? Will I ever stop writing this post and go to bed??
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