You can tell a lot about a profession by the fantasies of its members. Academics, I have found, secretly want to be freelance magazine writers. For a long time, while I worked on my doctorate in English, I suspected as much. But once I became a journalist myself, I attracted sotto voce confessions. They want my job.

Does this mean they want the financial risk, the rejection, and the uncertainties of the market? Of course not. They do, however, want the romance of writing, the freedom of freelancing. Some of my friends from graduate school, now safe in tenure-track jobs, tell me they wish they knew how to write, because they want their ideas consumed out of love, not obligation, and they want their research to matter in the world. I understand that perfectly well. That's why I do what I do.

Other professor friends love to hear what I'm working on now; I wish I could figure out a way to live off their need for vicarious thrills. And when I interview academic experts for a story, inevitably I hear about their desires to write for magazines, usually the ones they have sitting on their coffee tables. I don't extract such confessions; they're freely offered. I feel like the nun in Don Delillo's White Noise, who maintains the trappings of her faith so that her secular, cynical contemporaries are freed from belief.

Perhaps the biggest surprise came in a conversation I had with my dissertation supervisor more than a year ago. It started out as a debriefing on my experience on the academic job market in 2000, right after I defended and graduated. That year I had some interviews at the Modern Language Association, a follow-up phone interview, and an invitation for an on-campus visit, which I had turned down. After five years of teaching while I wrote my dissertation, I needed a break, and I didn't want to move to the hinterlands of Colorado, even if you could cross-country ski to class.

And more than anything else, I wanted to write. I was taking a risk, financially and psychologically, but I felt I couldn't stand in a writing class and encourage students to stretch their language, play with ideas, and put their personal investments on the line if I hadn't done so myself, and for stakes that really mattered. I didn't want to be a hypocrite.

I told my dissertation supervisor all the news, then described what I was doing. "Just hang in there," she said. "You can go out again next year. Something will turn up, I'm sure."

"But I really like what I'm doing," I told her. I was learning to battle the learning curve in areas far from my own expertise; I was becoming professionally curious, and national magazines were paying me for it. I also had an agent in New York City, who was encouraging, even if only mildly so. It was all penury and industry, as a friend put it, but I was traveling, reading widely, and meeting people. And I hadn't abandoned my dissertation topic, either -- an editor was interested in a piece about the future of linguistics.

"I don't know if I want to go back on the job market," I told her. "I'm having a good time doing what I'm doing."

She paused. "Well," she said, "I've always had a fantasy about myself as a freelance writer. You know, go out there and be able to write whatever you want."

As a graduate student, you keep so much under wraps about yourself, for fear that if anyone found out, your professional credibility would be lost, particularly if that person had the power to dictate the shape of the rest of your life. She knew that I wrote, but she considered it a hobby, I thought. Suddenly I realized: I was a threat.

I remembered the time I gave her a photocopy of my short story that the North American Review had published. For some reason I thought that academic colleagues spread the happiness of publication with each other, so I scribbled a note of appreciation to her on the top of the story and gave it to her.

She took the story. Her eyes flashed over it. "What's this?" she asked. Eventually she managed a look of mild pleasure, but I never found out the reason for her restrained reaction. Perhaps this wasn't protocol after all. Or maybe, as a graduate student, I didn't quite count as a colleague yet. Once I heard her secret fantasy, however, I had a better idea. Was she restraining her envy?

All these confessions are not simply cases of greener grass, I believe. Instead it's a symptom of a delirium that's endemic to the profession, particularly in the humanities. Only now do I see it clearly. It's a version of that deep need that crops up among academics, the need to prove that what one does is relevant in the world. It's a fear that what one spends all one's time doing does not, in the end, matter.

In that sense, the rhetoric of the "public intellectual" and the "intellectual entrepreneur" is one way that academics try to professionalize this fear. They do not acknowledge the fear, and they do not conquer it. They merely paper it over.

And what academics do not know is that journalists have a similar fantasy, except it works in reverse. As I've met more journalists and other news-media types, they express surprise that I would actually leave the academy. A fellow magazine writer once asked me, Why would you leave something you're good at? Some journalists I've talked to want to teach someday, to see an audience face-to-face, to change them, to really have an impact on the future. And to be able to write and study one topic in-depth for the rest of your life? Now that's a job I'd like to have.

I am sitting in a cubicle, talking into a telephone headset, asking rote questions of people who have applied for life insurance. Today it's a woman, mid-20s, somewhere in New Hampshire.

"Occupation?"

"I'm self-employed."

"What industry do you work in?"

"Entertainment."

Her obliqueness is costing me money, because I get paid per interview. But I play along. "Who do you entertain?"

"Men."

"Men? Or gentlemen?"

I could hear her smirk. "Gentlemen," she replied coolly.

I held this job for six weeks in 2002, at the start of the bleakest period of my writing career. When I wrote my first column for this site about leaving academe and starting to work as a freelance writer, I felt like a shiny quarter, bright with promise. Life was rosy. Then life became not rosy. Then difficult.

I didn't yet have to strip for my supper, but I needed a gig that would provide a hard revenue stream -- money from my freelance writing was too soft, too irregular. So, here I was, spending eight hours a day in a cramped cubicle, asking a list of required questions about intimate aspects of health, finance, and habits. Did you smoke? Why did you declare bankruptcy? Are you an exotic dancer or a topless dancer? Does the difference matter? (To the insurance companies, it does.)

I wasn't supposed to deviate from the list, which led to bizarre exchanges, such as the time I asked someone's sweet 85-year-old Georgian grandmother if she had ever been skydiving.

"Oh, no," she laughed.

"Do you have any plans to?" Just doing my job, ma'am.

"Oh no," she said. "The only time my feet will leave the ground is when the Lord comes to take me away."

If you could have wheeled some device over my skull that interpreted the electrical patterns in my brain, you wouldn't have seen me regretting my decision to leave a traditional academic career. I knew that was the right decision for me.

Yet you would have seen me a bit puzzled. After all, I had taken my own advice from my first column: I built relationships, I wrote with clarity, I put a lot of research into my freelance proposals. I had passion and a Ph.D.

So what was the problem? As I would eventually realize, I needed a better business model. That brain-reading device would have shown clumps of neurons groping blindly toward each other, hoping to trigger an insight that would get me one of those models.

A business model? In one sense, it's exactly what it sounds like: the way you bring in revenue. There's more to it, of course, but for me, the first step was realizing that this wasn't a race; that I had to plan and measure my success according to sustainable parameters. Moreover, I could set those parameters; I wasn't being judged from the outside. What I jettisoned first was my assumption that all of my income had to come from writing, or any one source. When I realized that I needed a mixed revenue stream, that was the beginning of getting a business model.

You don't have to be a writer or an entrepreneur to have a business model; we all have one, most of us tacitly. The business model is the plan for how you integrate the parts of your life. It combines personal philosophy with economic facts; it's the set of assumptions about how you want to be in the world upon which you make decisions. For me, the following factors were important: I had to decide whom I wanted to write for and whom I couldn't afford to write for anymore. I had to decide if I was going to craft myself as a specialist in some area or write about many topics. I had to think about how I would leverage my Ph.D. to enhance my credibility, or whether I would leave it behind.

I knew I was a "freelancer," but I construed it one way, as a monolithic autonomy, when in fact there are dozens of ways to be entrepreneurial. Each of them, however, involves articulating the assumptions about your preferences and talents. Your friends with "regular" jobs get to leave those assumptions unspoken. (What seems so offensive about tenure is that it enables the ultimate tacitness: the deliberate ignorance of the future.)

Things got much worse on my way to a business model, however. While I worked the cubicle job, I was revising some old fiction and still writing pitches, calling editors on my bathroom breaks. Finally, one of my pitches succeeded, and I was off to California and Missouri to write about a federal prisoner who was resisting medication to make him "mentally competent" to stand trial.

With that assignment in place, I announced at the insurance company that I was quitting, and became a minor hero. I had gone from a bumbling trainee to someone seizing his destiny. As I walked out those doors, life looked rosy again. Then it became not rosy. Then difficult.

And then things improved. After some struggles and some waiting, I began piecing parts together. I found a half-time job working as an editor at my old alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin. Now I spend every afternoon there editing grant proposals and research articles written by faculty members, and consulting on writing-related curricular issues.

Being able to have a job where the work comes to me, rather than my having to hunt for it, is an immense relief. It also gives me what a friend once called "institutional juice": health benefits, library access, gym access.

Most important, I have enough time left over to write, and more than half my monthly income comes from writing. I am writing about a broad array of topics for top newspapers and magazines. I am able to write about what interests me -- right now I'm on a jag about religion and technology and am fascinated with theories of social capital. Luckily I don't have to write articles about the fastest way to sexy abs, and I don't have to grind out stock reports (a job done increasingly by software, which I am also writing about).

I've traveled some, interviewing interesting people in various fields. And my work is getting read by millions of people, a thrill I'll never lose.

My most exciting news -- and the biggest sign that my business model is working -- is that my agent is shopping my proposal for a book about verbal blundering, tentatively titled Wonderful Blunderful. That's the goal I've been working toward: the opportunity to write about language and linguistics (which I studied in graduate school) for a mainstream audience.

My business model has allowed me to create continuities between what I studied as a graduate student and the issues of the day, between my doctoral expertise and my ex-academic identity. I have also realized something valuable about myself: I need to write for multiple audiences, and I want my writing to do multiple types of work in the world, from teaching to persuading to entertaining.

When I wrote on this site back in 2002, I boasted that former colleagues seemed to envy my path. "Other professor friends love to hear what I'm working on now; I wish I could figure out a way to live off their need for vicarious thrills," I wrote.

People still inquire, but I can't claim to know their motives. I'm too busy trying to keep this thing off the ground, to see how far I can go.

It’s a couple of days after Mel Gibson’s Mayan fantasy Apocalypto opened in the United States, and my wife and I are following a young Mayan man, Agosto, through the Yucatán jungle. A tour guide and biologist, he’s showing us a group of spider monkeys that live on the Punta Laguna preserve run by his village. It’s late afternoon, and while rain clouds gather, Agosto offers to show us around so the other guides can go home. As we walk down the slippery paths, he tells us about the place in a Spanish that’s remarkably easy to understand, probably because, as for us, it’s his second language; his first language is Yucatec Maya, the language that’s notoriously used for what little dialogue there is in Gibson’s bloody confection.

Yucatec Maya (or simply “Maya” if you’re in the Yucatán) is spoken by a million or so people on the peninsula, in Belize, and in northern Guatemala. As we travel, we notice it everywhere: in the markets, the hotels, even written on the plaques at Mayan ruins along with Spanish and English. (In other parts of Mexico, the signs appear in Tseltal or Nahuatl, other local indigenous languages.) Because we’re traveling for nearly a month, I figure wouldn’t it be cool to learn some words of Maya, to be able to bust it out while buying fruit or asking directions, not out of necessity—we can do everything we need in Spanish—but because of all the things one encounters as a traveler, language leads to some pure, real connections. Buying something? In my mind, handing over currency always reinforces who’s a tourist and who’s not, who has money and who doesn’t. Simple greetings and politenesses? That’s real, but anyone can do it. Kissing? Out of the question—this is my honeymoon.

I ask Agosto the Maya word for monkey; it’s something like maax (pronounced “maash”). I ask the word for “howler monkey,” and he says something else. Which is when I encounter the first of several difficulties in my adventure in Maya: I didn’t bring a notebook, and I have a memory like a sieve. Ten feet down the path I’ve forgotten the word for “howler monkey.” And if I did have a notebook, now’s not the time to whip it out, as wet limestone ridges and tree roots block the path we take with our eyes to the trees, hoping to see a monkey chuckle across the sky through the branches.

A lot of the Apocalypto press describes Yucatec Maya as an “ancient” language, which isn’t accurate. Though it’s a descendant of the Classic Mayan spoken by the inhabitants of the empires whose ruins we admire, it’s a very contemporary language, beset by all the problems faced by indigenous languages in Mexico and elsewhere in the world: Young people opt to speak the dominant language; the government doesn’t support indigenous-language education; the indigenous language carries a stigma. This is the next set of obstacles I encounter in my Mayan learning plan: It’s not a language that native Mayan speakers seem to be happy to have outsiders speaking.

At one museum bookstore, I found Maya For Travelers and Students, a remarkable book published in 1995 by the University of Texas Press and written by linguist Gary Bevington. When he describes how to learn Maya—not in classrooms, but in the field, where everyone’s a teacher and no one will cut you slack—he knows what he’s talking about. He set out over multiple summers (many of them in a camper) to learn Yucatec Maya. The book is a lucid guide to the language itself, its grammar and its sounds, which include some interesting consonants pronounced with a popping sound. Because no Yucatec Maya word has a dominant stress on any syllable, speakers have a fluid, singsongy, swishing quality—it’s attractive sounding to my ears, a language you want to hear more of, not less.

Culturally, Maya speakers tend not to go for big, empty promises, Bevington explains, unlike Mexicans or Americans do, so if you want to learn Maya, it’s not enough to say, “I’m really interested in the language.” You have to show people that you’re not just gawking. “Remember,” Bevington writes, “that from the native perspective you are an odd thing that dropped from the sky into the middle of their well-ordered and busy world. You are disruptive and confusing because people of your ilk are expected to be remote and generally disdainful of their world.”

Even if we were planning to return to Punta Laguna, it turns out that we need much more experience in how invested a person is in his or her indigenousness, and what situations will call it forth. Bevington warns against trying to speak Maya with hotel help at tourist resorts, and “anyone who sees himself or herself as official or important or sophisticated” should always be addressed in Spanish. Because Agosto also speaks English and Italian, and works for an Italian primatologist, we assumed we were dealing with someone Western and metropolitan. Someone like us. A person, that is, who understands that pimping out one’s tourism with some words from the language poses no threat.

But Punta Laguna didn’t make that so easy. It’s also an “alternatour” destination for ecotourists from Tulum and Cancun, who are attracted by monkeys, descriptions of ruins (indeed, there’s a small temple on the preserve), and the chance to see and meet real, live Mayas in their houses. One feature of the tour is talking to a Mayan shaman in the jungle who will, under the sacred ceiba tree, demonstrate traditional rituals. Unlike the ecotourists, we camped in the preserve. Early the next morning, Agosto came to wake us so we could see the monkeys moving. As soon as we popped our heads from the tent, we saw two male howler monkeys swing on branches over the road. He promised more spider monkeys, so we followed him on another trek through the jungle, and under the ceiba tree we bumped into the shaman, a man in his 50s with a deeply creased face, sitting near a fire. He also turned out to be Agosto’s father. Agosto introduced us and pointed out the altar, and we talked about the sack of copal, the aromatic tree resin, that he burns for ecotourists.

After we walked away, realizing that we’d just seen a sacred aspect of Maya life tricked out for tourists, I should have just said, in Spanish or English, thanks for introducing us to your father and showing us the altar and the ceiba tree, we’re honored by that. Instead, wanting to compensate for having seen a sacred aspect of Maya life, I said in Spanish to Agosto, “I’d like you to teach me how to say in Maya, ‘I’m pleased to meet you.’” (Because I should be prepared to meet a shaman in the jungle, right?)

Agosto stopped, turned to me, and quickly rattled off a long string of words, what sounded like 20 or 30 syllables. I lamely repeated a few syllables, left in his verbal dust. He rattled off the string again, just as quickly, then gave the Spanish translation. I shrugged. There was no following what he’d just said, and he wasn’t repeating. It occurred to me he might have been annoyed: It was 7 a.m., he’s a biologist, not a language teacher, and the question is ill-timed, a distraction. I was still confused, though. We thought we’d been having a genuine interaction with him. But the dark waters of the tourist sphere, in which the real and authentic are performed and sold, lay closer than we thought. People in Punta Laguna charge admission to their houses, so why not to the language, too? Or was the language where they drew the line? Agosto became chilly and left us behind to look for monkeys on his own.

We talked about Agosto for days, puzzling over what we’d encountered, even once we had reached Tulum, a Caribbean coastal city, to spend some time on the beach. I was going to take a few days off from asking about Maya; once we got back on the road, I’d resume. I still listened, and thought I heard someone say something in Maya that could have been “thank you,” but I wasn’t sure. Later that night, in a group conversation under a darkened palapa that served as the lobby of the hotel, the clerk, a young man named Jesús, asks me if I speak Spanish.

Yes, I say, then joke: “Do you?”

“Sort of,” he says. “I speak more Maya.”

I perk up—this is my chance. “How do you say ‘thank you’ in Maya?”

He whirls around. “Who are you? Where are you from? Why do you want to know?”

I’m from Texas, I say, and I study languages, and we’re traveling in Mexico for a month, so I’ve been picking up some Maya words. He explains that his grandmother taught him that he should guard his language, because it was a secret. Then he tells a story about his uncle, a farmer, who had found a Maya ceramic that he had to hide: If the government knew he possessed it, they’d take it away.

I’m not a missionary, I say, and I’m not looking to buy artifacts, either. I’m just interested in the language. After he’s stated his position and I’ve stated mine, he says he thinks there are powerful intelligences on the planet that we don’t know anything about, and that he believes he is a holy man. He’s a little crazy, but the air seems to clear as far as Yucatec Maya is concerned, and a few words dribble out of him. He’s sitting with a stray puppy on his lap and offers that the word for “dog” is peek’.

“Peek’,” I say. Where’s my notebook? It doesn’t matter. Somehow, I think that one will stick.

“Yes, peek’,” he replies.

Now, I think to myself, we’re getting somewhere.