When this week ends, I will be unemployed. Having been unemployed once before, I'm really looking forward to it. Somehow beer just tastes better when everyone else you know is stuck filing TPS reports.

My wife, however, is not upset. This time, unemployment has nothing to do with my accidentally totaling an employer's Jeep (by the way, all that stuff that TV commercials would have you believe about four-wheel drive -- lies). In fact, she will soon also be jobless.

Rachel likes to say that we are leaving the Bastille.

That phrase comes from my good friend, Jim Landrith. Once, when someone asked him for the definition of "ennui," instead of running to a dictionary he chose to perform a one-man vignette:

"'Ennui' is a French word. Or at least it should be," he said. "So, imagine some dark, miserable prison cell. In the corner, perhaps wearing a beret, is a weary Frenchman. His hair is greasy and he's got those gloves where your fingers are exposed and he's smoking a cigarette. Suddenly, a fellow prisoner throws open the cell door.

"'Frenchy! They are storming the Bastille!' shouts the fellow prisoner. 'We must go! You are free, Frenchy! You must flee!'

"But Frenchy doesn't move. He just sits there. After a long drag from his cigarette he says: 'Non, mon ami. I cannot go. For I am paralyzed by ennui.'"

The drunken and anachronistic ramblings of a journalist are perhaps not the strongest foundations for a life philosophy, but my wife works with what she is given. After all, she is married to a man who is gleeful about unemployment.

She is one of those annoyingly optimistic people who believes that you can accomplish something if you really try. She also believes that you should try; and that you should try doing something fulfilling -- there is no reason for a person to be stuck doing things that make him or her unhappy. It's an attitude that has worn off on me and frequently shows up in my columns.

Usually when I write columns like that, it comes off as a bit soft-headed to some people and I get e-mail responses that go a bit like this: "Why don't you shut your cake hole and go hug a tree, Granola Boy? Some of us work 65-hour-a-week jobs because we have to. We have responsibilities to live up to."

That's the Bastille.

I went to university in England 10 years ago, and I have wanted to return to the United Kingdom ever since. My wife has always wanted to live in another country. I have always wanted to pursue something that is actually meaningful to me. In a little over a month, we will move to Wales and head down the road toward following those dreams.

Every person who's worth talking to has dreams. Countless books and movies are sold about people who just pack up and follow them. But for most of us, it isn't that easy. People have families or mortgages or car payments or all kinds of stresses, major and minor. The Bastille is the day-to-day things and the fear of failure that keeps us from chasing after our dreams.

You see what I mean about writing sappy columns? I can sense you rolling your eyes at me. This "never let go of your dreams" crap is the stuff they shill on daytime television to people with an underdeveloped sense of reality.

"Sometimes life gets in the way," fellow columnist Scott Wilson once told me.

And Scott's right. It does. Getting to this point took several years, and even as my wife and I pack up our things -- setting everything right for our happy little life in Cardiff -- I wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweats. I am dragging my wife off to some far away place where everyone talks funny. Shouldn't I be building a family? What if this all falls apart? What if we achieve nothing but insurmountable debt?

What if? What if? What if?

With all due respect to my benevolent soon-to-be-former employer, I didn't really enjoy my job. But I didn't hate it. And I have enjoyed the company of my co-workers. And I earned enough to live in relative comfort -- I had ESPN. My Bastille is not all that bad, and maybe if I were to stay employed, I could have spruced things up a little bit -- Rachel and I could have bought a house; we could have had ESPN 2.

But these damned dreams of mine would have made me miserable if left unfulfilled. So, I've got to try.

There are always things to hold you back. But you have to try. And if, somehow, the door to your cell opens, you have to be willing to leave the Bastille.

Chris Cope is married and does not have any children. He will continue to write columns every other Tuesday while he is off cavorting in Europe.