Your Unemployed Daughter

photo credit: babyruthinmd

Today has been one of those difficult-to-focus types of days. I have a million little things to do and follow up on, and so I flit from item to item on my list and don’t accomplish much of anything, except thinking about everything a little, and that’s a kind of progress, no?

While washing a portion of my dishes, I noted that this is, in fact, one of the strange benefits of being unemployed/working from home.

Everything you do is essentially “good”—and I don’t mean that in a moral way, I mean, if you’re not sitting on your butt watching the Real Housewives of Orange County marathon, you’re doing things that need to get done. (Or maybe you are doing that, but you’re doing it so you can write about it, in which case, more props to you.)

At any rate, the order with which you do things is less important than the fact that you’re doing them at all.

This newfound flexibility can be hard to deal with. That’s why I don’t even turn on my TV during the day, so I’m not sucked into Charmed episodes or cajoled to sleep, perchance to dream, by the masterful vocal stylings of NY1’s Pat Kiernan. (I follow him on Twitter and that’s enough for me.)

Some less understanding types might say, you’re without a job or you work from home, you must laze around all day. Nothing could be further from the truth. Because when I’m not job-searching or writing, I am doing the following:

• Washing dishes (dishes get dirty a lot when you’re home to keep eating off of them)
• Making my bed (I do this daily, Mom!)
• Using my handy-dandy Hoover Wet/Dry HandyVac, which really has changed my life and I got virtually FREE by using points from my credit card. (Snap!)
• Taking my dry cleaning/laundry to the laundry guy
• Picking up laundry/dry cleaning from aforementioned guy
• Going to the gym
• Reading posts and blogs and news stories online for more things to write about. And following Twitter for the same reason
• Returning emails/calls
• Sending emails/calls
• Tweeting that I returned and sent some emails/calls
• Food shopping and cooking
• Advising my friends who still have jobs not to quit, or how they might quit, if that is what they choose to do
• Spending an hour on a conference call with a client who doesn’t know what she wants or needs, and refraining from coming out and saying that
• Brushing teeth
• Watering plants
• Generating ideas
• Scheduling next work opportunity

See what I mean? Busy day! All of this can take up 8 hours or more—as much time as you give it, in fact. Which makes the whole “jobless” thing seem more like a state of mind than a state of employment, at the end of the old day.

Of all the jobs you have in life, your life should be the most important one of all, don’t you think? And yet, when I am in an office doing work, I get way less done. Imagine that.

And now for a bonbon or two, followed by a sudsy and—dare I say romantic?—candlelit bath.