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.

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photo credit: The Library of Congress

Your Unemployed Daughter finds herself in the awkward state of being, suddenly, rather employed.

Trust me, however, this will change nothing. Well, it will only change things for the better, because now you’re going to get to read me all over the GD place, and don’t we love that? (If you don’t love that, refrain from comment, please.)

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photo credit: splityarn

Few things make me more cranky than waiting for money that’s due to me. I’ve trained myself not to even expect a check until after the first 30 days post invoicing, but when someone tells you it’s going to be sent on one day, and then it isn’t, it’s even worse than if they’d told you it was going to be 60 days in the first place.

That said, I realize companies have their own systems of paying you, and I’m sure those are highly intricate and complex machinations, but God, man! I have my own needs for the money I’ve earned (past tense) from you.

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Having a prescription refilled, you would think, would be an easy task. I mean, it’s not brain surgery—it’s just the medicine you take after your brain surgery.

The hard part should be snagging an appointment with the doctor of your choice, or the interminable wait in one of those cold rooms wearing a very last-season paper gown and trying not to get caught as you rifle through the cabinets, or maybe convincing the doctor that you need whatever it is in whatever dosage and then trotting that scrawl-covered snip of paper over to your local pharmacy.

Once you’ve done that, you’re golden … Right?

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photo credit: jcalyst

Here’s an interesting tidbit:

According to research from the Center for Economic and Policy Research analyzing self-employment in countries ’round the world, Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: lotu5

I got an email today (actually it went to spam, gotta fix that)…from an organization I used to belong to back in my full-time freelance days. (And which I will likely rejoin at some point down the road when the COBRA runs out, as they offer a multitude of health insurance offerings, a 401(k), and intriguing subway ads, among other things.)

From: Sara Horowitz, Freelancer’s Union

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photo credit: Dark Botxy

We unemployed people are in a precarious position. On one hand, we’re free as the bees’ knees; without jobs to go to the next morning, we can party and dance on bars and drink and stay out late, sleep til 2 the next day, no problem, no worries. And some of us do.

We also desperately crave attention and conversations and people interactions, particularly if we are, say, former managing editors. And we do not get those things when we are home alone working on freelance item #7 or blogging all day. It is a vicious circle. Some might say we have become needy exhibitionists. That is the worst sort.

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