For the unitiated, a sinecure is a job that pays a great deal while demanding very little. I first learned of the term - WARNING: obnoxious anecdote coming - while strolling through Paris with my friends B and K. We'd devised a silly game whereby we tried to work in obscure words and phrases into our conversation, a harmless way to pass the time as we worked our way through Paris and its outskirts. 'Sinecure' was one of the words (for the record, 'Peruvian students' was another one, an homage to our seedy hotel's management. The hotel, notably, had been forced to white one of its two stars out at some point before our arrival.

Sinecure then became the title for our working dream publication, which we imagined would be, as every wannabe magazine editor/publisher does, 'a magazine for people like us.' Who we were at the time was slightly different than who we are now (this was 1998). At the time, B and I were in the midst of working for nascent dot-coms, imagining that our stock options would make us comfortable, if not wealthy (though we held out hope for the latter). Flush with the youthful egotism - OK, arrogance - of the time, we imagined a world that our ilk ruled, and that vision came to pass shortly after that, if only for a little while.

Our idea for Sinecure then was as an online publication that would showcase movie reviews, book reviews, some travel writing, all geared toward our demographic. or what we imagined it to be: an upwardly mobile, youthful and adventurous group that had stumbled into an appreciation of the good life well before our time.

That era has given way to a more realistic time. Gone are our jobs at thriving, sky's-the-limit high-tech companies. As several friends have noted, many in our loosely defined generation are waiting it out, biding our time in less fulfilling gigs and clinging to the hope that work can again be close to as fun and inspiring as it was for that one shining moment (with apologies to the NCAA basketball tournament).

Today's Sinecure, then, strives to be a repository for observations that may represent the clinging and the biding. Or whatever. We'll see where it takes us.