Your Unemployed Daughter

photo credit: slworking2

Believe it or not, YUD is working for two weeks straight outside of the confines of her own home. This is unprecedented! Kinda like the old days, except with bigger muscles and less money to show for it.

Today I’m in dreary east midtown, where the rains beat the windows spanning the 15th floor freelancer pen quite mercilessly. Of all the days to stay home, this would be a good one, but here I am. Working girl’s work never done, etc. etc. And, as my cab driver explained to me today (hey, I was running late), when the economy is bad, you have to work when you can. And also, when it rains it can really ruin your hairdo.

Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: nevermindtheend

Let’s talk keyboards. See, I’m working with one—how do you not work with one? It would be almost like working without a computer, and goodness knows how we’d get anything done then!

Anyway, when you’re a freelancer you end up getting put at any number of desks with any number of keyboards. The only thing they have in common, really, is that they all have keys, unless you’re working at a really low-brow sort of institution. Oh, and they’re all dirty as hell. (I apologize for the picture and if it makes you want to throw up, cause it makes me want to throw up, and in fact I am averting my eyes quickly so as not to do so.)

Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: Sailor Coruscant

It is a strange sensation to be completely alone on the 15th floor of a midtown office building. When I arrived circa 10:30, the lights in the kitchen were still off. The toilets had not been used since their last cleaning. And it’s cold, so cold I’m wearing my coat, even though the heat is ostensibly on. There’s not even a Bert to keep me company.

Oh my God, as I wrote that, a person turned the corner and looked at me! I have never seen him before, but since I’m freelancing and haven’t been here for a few weeks, nor have I ever met everyone on this floor, that means little.

Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: Ollie Crafoord

Let’s talk unemployment attire. Or, work-from-home attire, if you prefer.

For YUD, it goes something like this: Wake up in the morning, take off pajamas as a matter of propriety, put on workout pants of some sort (usually black, once in a while gray), a sports bra of some ilk (usually black, once in a while white), a t-shirt or tank top depending on the heat in my apartment (right now it’s actually kind of cold, so I have topped the ensem with a zip-up sweatshirt with a high collar that, while made by Banana Republic in the early 2000s, might pass for something ’70s era if you squint).

Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: Andrew Scott

I have to go into the office. I have had this hanging over me since last night, and I still have yet to do it. It’s probably a 10-minute cab ride, 30 by bus, but it’s grey outside and I’m just so productive with my ass in my lovely blue CB2 chair I’m loathe to leave it. And having to do something as mundane as venture to 45th Street to move a few files from server 1 to server 2, well, it doesn’t inspire definitive action. As you can see.

Instead, I am reminded of the nice things about working from home. Such as:

Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: specialkrb

I’m heading into the office shortly, and I must say, this part-time schedule is quite delicious. It forces me to plan my days to some degree (gym at 8:30 am, for instance—my most dramatic arrival yet!) but allows for plenty of freeform behavior, all at the same time.

I may be involved in the worklife equivalent of the mullet: That’s right, business in the front, partaayyyy in the back. So to speak.

Read the rest of this entry »

Alas, returning to society today, via bus, train, and likely automobile (or MTA, should I become inspired). Boo.

Back when I was a high schooler, I always thought I wanted to be a big-time New York City lawyer, or a novelist living in a cabin in Maine. Instead I became a “big-time” (ie., small-to-middling-time) New York City magazine person. And then a New York City unemployed person.

Something in me still loves the idea of hunkering down in a little house through the dead of winter, writing mysteries a la Jessica Fletcher, but a little less Lansbury, and surviving on stew and red wine—and, of course, biking into the village to take yoga classes and shop for fresh bread and organic veggies and chat up hunky fishermen.

Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: My Standard Break From Life

Oh, fall! Today I think you’re cute. A little windy, a little chill in the air…so life-affirming!

What a difference a day makes. (Also helpful: “boxing it out” with one’s trainer, a good Gruner and a lobster roll, advice from friends, and watching Top Chef—where that guy Kevin, who reminds me of boys I went to high school with and I may have a bizarre crush on despite him totally looking like, as this site points out, Yukon Cornelius, said, upon winning the Quickfire Challenge, “I was a little intimidated by that fact that some of my competitor’s food is prettier than mine and is more sophisticated, but I realized that what I do has just as much validity as what they do.”)

Read the rest of this entry »

Somewhere in West Midtown there is a publishing universe unbent by time, untainted by this recession. There, the halls are wide, the walls white, the air conditioners cool. The lobby attendants smile and wish you a good day—even, perhaps, make a joke about “stairways to heaven” as you board the smudge-free stainless escalators that reach effortlessly into the sky, so high you just might cry, or develop one of those inopportune nosebleeds.

The elevators are pre-programmed and, with the slightest touch of your smallest finger to a computerized kiosk in the elevator bank, you will be assigned your designated mode of transport even further upward, to the, say, 20-somethingth floor, where air is crisper than ever and the EIC has a traditional corner office offering a sweeping panorama of that park we call “Central”—a view which you, impoverished and largely undeserving freelancer, can share due to the open concept of the office, which allows light, and serenity, and natural wood, and DEMOCRACY… and barely the faintest hum of a computer or whisper of a person, for all are committed to the task at hand.

Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: WindRanch

Unfairness of unfairnesses! So, I am taking in all kinds of freelance work now, cause that’s what you do when you’re a laid-off editor who still needs to pay her rent and such, and since I work on Monday (my final day of the Great Pineapple Project, whoo-hoo!) I won’t have time to meet another impending deadline unless I put a big dent in it today. Thus, I really must hunker down and get this proofreading done.

It’s not such an onerous task, but it does involve reading some 750 captions, and making corrections as needed. Which seems like something that might go on forever, particularly when the day is sunny and it’s Sunday and I might have had a bit too much to drink last night, meaning today’s focus is more on what mortifying things I Tweeted or texted or did than on, say, how to best phrase the 25 words of an already rather cryptic photo caption.

Read the rest of this entry »