Your Unemployed Daughter

photo credit: Tara Spalty

Boxing Day! For many, this is the Day After Christmas, aka the Day for Poor People to Give THEIR Gifts, or the Day to Return Crap You Never Wanted But Got Anyway, or the Day for Churches to Take Your Money, or the Day to Be Nice to People Even if They Drive You Completely Bonkers.

For me, it’s the Day that I Return to NYC. I have some mixed feelings about the whole thing. First of all, being the 30-something-year-old single daughter in an otherwise coupled-off family can screw with you a little. And/or make you revert to certain childish or insecure behaviors that you thought you licked long ago. And then there’s simply going from your adult, independent, all-about-you life to living with your parents again (and they like to talk!) for five or six days straight. There’s an adjustment there.

Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: Robert Banh

You’re hardly even sposed to tell people about your dreams, much less write about them, but I have had such a bizarre collection of REM-thought in the past few days that I can’t help it.

1.) In this one I was the child in a terrorist family. They were all about to commit ritual suicide, but I wasn’t ready to die. So I escaped out of the second-story window of a house that looked much like that of my childhood, and began to roll down hill after hill. Except they weren’t so much hills as broccoli, and I was rolling over the tops of huge broccoli trees. And then I woke up.

Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: Dan Dickinson

If you are like YUD, you may have wondered at some point in the last, oh, 8 and a half weeks: Am I really unemployed?

Well glory be, here’s a little test that can resolve that conundrum—as well as some of the other burning questions OTE (of this economy). And unlike that bizotch who may or may not have canned your ass, The Unemployment Quiz does not discriminate against brunettes, redheads, or those who eschew jaunty little leather jackets.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sweet (blog) dreams

Dear blog,

I dreamed about you last night! What does that mean?

Read the rest of this entry »

Make a wish, bitch!

An alternate tagline for Your Unemployed Daughter, if one found “the halcyon days and sleepless nights of a formerly high-powered media exec” to be lacking in some way (Are they not halcyon? Are they not sleepless?) could very well be “a lifetime overachiever copes with the fact that she was fired.”

Not as good a ring, I know. That’s why I picked the other one.

Read the rest of this entry »

People are slowly starting to trickle in for the wedding, and there are now two distinct groups: the groom’s friends, who all went to UVA (a school our groom’s Harvard-educated bride loves to disdain, although secretly I think she may be jealous of the aplomb with which they wear their caps and tackle the rocky terrain) and the bride’s friends, a mixed bag of highly educated, tall-tan-and-terrific semi-employed (in conglomerate) peoples including me, another woman, and her husband.

We all know that Your Unemployed Daughter is sans job, but so is this husband, who was a producer at an ad agency, has been out of work for a year, and has gone back to school to learn HTML and Flash, and “dabble in Java and PHP.” (PHP? Your Unemployed Daughter shows her ignorance with the assumption that that was that drug we learned about in 8th grade, you know, the one that makes you jump out of windows and bend steel pipes with your bare hands? Aka angel dust? Or, is it what tires are made of?)

Drugs or not, going back to school does seem a legitimate, even wise, pursuit in this media moment, and, in fact, the fellow’s wife urged him to do so when he was laid off, as they recount. Might as well take this moment to learn something new, boost your experience, expand your opps in a seemingly opp-less-time. Better to learn something potentially useful than become a master at Guitar Hero, no?

Read the rest of this entry »

Hire me, please?

Here is a conundrum for you. When you’ve been a rather anal, overachieving, people-pleasing workaholic for most of your adult life, and suddenly, presumably through no fault of your own, you are canned, do you … Try immediately to find another job, whatever it takes? Take time to sit back and figure stuff out, reevaluating your past and examining your future, to come up with what you truly want to do next? Get frequently, excessively drunk? Go shopping ’cause you finally have time? Burn your apartment down and collect the insurance?

And, if you go the first route, predominantly (with bits of the others mixed in for flavor), when a job opportunity comes up that you feel is beneath you in terms of pay, responsibility, geography, or the like, do you … Take it anyway, ’cause who knows what’s going to come up next and it’s a recession, haven’t you heard? Hold out for something better? Take it and quit when something better comes along? Ask the job offerer in a tone of deep insult, “Do you know who I am?”?

Read the rest of this entry »