Your Unemployed Daughter

Lots of drama last night. Remember the bed-burner I wrote about just yesterday? Well, she’s at it again. (The above is a not very good picture of my building surrounded by firemen, you know, those dudes with the reflective stuff.)

To recap: I went to the gym yesterday around 7, stayed for yoga until 9, and then came home, showered, and started to make dinner. I smelled something funny when I came in the building, but it was faint, and they’d been working on one of the apartments upstairs, so I figured it was related.

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photo credit: Nitro101

I have a new guilty pleasure. I have been watching the new 90210 again, after swearing off it last season when it just seemed too stupid and the girls were too skinny and it didn’t compare at all to the classic.

(Brandon, Dylan, Brenda, Kelly … you really had an impact on me. That is, before you went to college and moved into the beach house and everything got a little silly, what with David on a mix of uppers and downers and Brandon dating the chancellor’s exhibitionist daughter, and Dylan’s dad blowing up but not and Kelly and Donna surviving endless fires/rapes/stalkers/cults…)

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photo credit: Tundra Ice

Day 2.5, Chatham, Mass.

The weather has been absolutely gorgeous—I caught Dad calling it “summer,” and it’s the best kind there is: sunny, warm, no humidity, clear skies in which you can see for miles. A perfect day, in fact, for a 26.5 mile bike ride on the Cape Cod Rail Trail.

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photo credit: subsetsum

Suddenly it’s 5 pm and I’m eating cold pasta out of an old (cleaned, I swear) plastic container that once housed sorbet. This is what happens when one doesn’t consume a drop of alcohol from Monday through Thursday, and then goes on a drinking spree with former coworkers to celebrate Thursday night. There’s something to be said for having a “base level” of booze in one’s system at all times, despite what my personal trainer might tell you.

At any rate, headache has largely subsided at this point, and pasta has been restorative, but I am certainly glad that today did not involve having to enter an office building. I am not sure I would have had the strength.

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Why, oh why? Is it not enough that I have been laid off, but now, I am faced with a rodent in my apartment? The perils of working or “working” from home – you may see things you do not want to see. Also, carpal tunnel.

I had a feeling. Ever since I came back from a March ski trip and saw the pellety indicator that some small mammal had been digesting near my sink, I have known that my mouseless existence was a tenuous situation. I am scarred, a bit, as my last apartment was riddled with holes, and some band of party-hardy mice found their way in, only to organize various raves underneath my stovetop for a series of days. They were so loud I had to close my bedroom door to sleep. They ate no poison. They ventured near no traps (for which I was actually grateful because what do you do once it’s trapped? Ew.) Finally, I plugged up all the holes I could see in my apartment with a caulk gun. And they never returned.

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Hello, Land of Screened-In Porches

Greetings from Florida! I’ve adjusted to the time difference already!

I’ll stop with the Jon & Kate after this, I swear, but whaddya know, they air that show here, too, and I watched the MOST DRAMATIC rose ceremony EVER (I mean, the FIRST TIME THEY FACE EACH OTHER after Jon’s supposed affair and all that tabloid nonsense) last night, and it was … ho-hum.

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shoes, aka, WMDs

Perhaps the worst thing about getting fired (ahem, laid off!) is the other (employed) people thinking the event has been so devastating that you’ve taken to your couch in tears, or worse, aren’t getting out of bed at all … that you are self-medicating (whiskey? Klonopin? Cutting yourself with the sharp edges of your severance agreement?) among pizza boxes and your own human detritus … that, in fact, you’ve suffered something so near death that they can only look at you with lowered, basset hound eyes, pat you on the shoulder, and whisper “Sorry” in low tones when you face them in the bar. (Aside: How many of these people have bought me a drink? Priorities, puhleaze! If I needed a therapist, I’d pay one.)

The worst fear in these well-meaning but misguided souls’ minds is that you, dear Unemployed Personage, will NEVER fully recover your lost earning potential and that you just might take matters into your own hands and be done with it all. Bullshit! Their worst fear, actually, is that they’ll be next. That’s why they have that hangdog expression when you get near, are prone to hugs and cliches, and leave the party early claiming “work the next day” under their breath. The truth: They’re not so sure they want to be associated with the taint of the unemployed. They can smell you (so can I – just cause you’re not working doesn’t mean you don’t need a little reg soap & water, hon).

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