So I'm thinking about joining the military

And I'm getting pretty serious about it.

I graduated a year ago with a BA in English, hoping to find a job as an editor. Unfortunately, most of those jobs are in New York, and I simply don't want to go there. Nor do I want to teach or write. Truth be told, I'm not even sure I want to edit anymore.

While I was in college, I took a couple photography classes and a few different languages, dabbling in Spanish, Latin, Greek, and a very little bit of Japanese. I really loved being in all those classes, more than I enjoyed my English classes, and I was usually better at them. That really should have been a tip-off.

Since graduation, I've been doing the same thing everyone else is doing right now: looking for a "real" job. And so far, I'm coming up empty. I have found two jobs, one as a secretary for my dad and the other at a department store, and while those have allowed me to live on my own, I can't say they're exactly fulfilling my career goals. There are pretty much no jobs here in Indiana for English majors, and very few anywhere else, and I simply don't have the training for a photography or linguistics job.

But every time I looked on job sites for jobs in publishing, photography, or linguistics, the Navy came up with a bunch of listings. At first I just ignored them. I've always been more what you might call the academic type. I did well in school without having to put a huge amount of effort into it, but while I played a little bit of softball in elementary school, that's about where my physical prowess ended. So while I've always admired people in the military and supported it, I never really considered it for myself.

Until one day I did. I'm not really sure what changed. One day on my way to work, I was thinking about my employment predicament, and I thought, "Maybe I could join the military. No, of course not. But maybe." I started looking into the jobs they offered, especially the linguistics jobs. From there, it's snowballed from "don't be silly, I can't join the military" to "Navy or Air Force?" I've talked to recruiters and done more research than I did for most of my college papers. I've read pretty much the entire, very extensive, article at usmilitary.about.com and scores of message boards at military.com (both extremely helpful resources, by the way). The more research I do, the more confident I feel that this would be a really good move for me.

So I will keep thinking and researching and talking to people about it, and I guess we'll see.