Your Unemployed Daughter

photo credit: Zeusandhera

Today I’m feeling a little bit Monday. Chalk it up to being away all weekend and, yes, maybe drinking a bit too much and working out too little, but I woke up sleepy, cranky, and generally out of sorts. Even though, really, life is not so bad.

Still, when some overweight middle-aged goon tried to hand me one of his “Obama as Hitler” pamphlets, I nearly kicked it out of his fleshy paw. I managed to control myself, however, offered him a murderous glare, and continued the trek to my sometime office, where I got an ice coffee, dialed in for a conference call, and crankily listened for my 5 minutes of the status report.

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All in all, this has been a pretty good summer for skies, hasn’t it? I mean, yes, often they’ve been cloudy, or grey and swamplike, or pouring rain for so many days we start to stockpile wine corks for our ark, or weirdly red and tornadoey, or even shockingly Ghostbusters-esque … and every so often, rather pretty.

But they’ve never been … boring. And at the end of the day, can you ask for more than that?

For your viewing pleasure, here’s TGMTU #8, “The sky looking like a painting after a storm.”

P.S.: I’m harboring hopes that June is the new April, July the new May, and August the barest hint of a willowy wisp of June, with jackets only being needed sometime around Thanksgiving. There you go, climate change in a nutshell. So prepare for a nice, long unemployment summer—there’s tanning time yet! As they say in the biz, it’s not over ’til the fat, bikini-clad lady sings. And even then it’s not so much over as just time to go.

Alas! It has come to my attention that we have but 3 more weekends in August, including the one that starts most immediately, as soon as we can leave our places of business (or non-business) and get things started.

There’s nothing better, in YUD’s opinion, on a late-summer Friday when the sun’s still out and the duties are done than a cold glass of rosé, particularly sipped al fresco, and when the sun goes down, by candlelight. Even if it is a White Zin and comes with a Bud Light chaser.

Who am I to judge? I drank cold, 2-day-old coffee mixed with vodka and flat club soda last night. And I liked it.

In anticipation of our upcoming weekends, to making the most of what remains of the Summer o’ Love ‘09, and to Derek’s latest TGMTU, please raise your glass. Or can.

photo credit: Hello Simon Swatman

Recently, a friend hacked into another friend’s Facebook account. (Friend 2 had been on Facebook at Friend 1’s apartment the night before, so the hack was a punishment of sorts for the second friend’s forgetting to close out. As such, it was not so much a hack as opportunistic maneuvering, but I digress.)

Friend 1 decided to change Friend 2’s status. What to say?, she thought. What to say? As many of us do in those moments, she turned to … William Carlos Williams, man of multiple employments and enigmatic phrasings. More specifically, to this poem:

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How does an unemployed mannequin feel? Stripped down and nude, adhesive taped to chests and thighs…heavily discounted…headless and forced to stand in a crowd of skinny biotches… It must be mortifying!

Derek has captured another one of his beauts. He says, “A store was liquidating and these mannequins were on sale. Who will they become?”

Who, indeed, Derek? Do they have resumes? And where is Kim Cattrall?

Interesting, if creepy, aside: this fellow loved mannequins, but he was the unemployed one. Short story writers take note!

Derek Ivie, the legend behind TGMTU, shows YUD Fashion Director Lindsey Hunter Lopez the upside of dressing down (in a down market) at a midtown lunch near his former place of employment. While the suits strut the street in hot, wooly cocoons, Derek breezes around NYC looking casual cool.

LHL: Derek, what is the key to your unemployment wardrobe?

DI: Comfortable underwear. I spend most of my day rolling around in bed thinking about what I am going to do with my life. I don’t want anything too tight, otherwise things will get hurt in the rolling process. Cotton boxer briefs from the GAP really seem to fit the bill for me.

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Happy Wednesday! Here’s a pretty, pretty picture from our dear Mr. Ivie, who says, “My neighbor’s rosebush. Always reaching to the sky.”

Just like us!

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Another mouthwatering TGMTU from Derek, who’s off this week enjoying sunny Puerto Rico (good pics TK!).

Of this latest installment, he says, “They came with our Pad Thai! Delicious!”

By the way, in case you were wondering, “King of the Carrot Flowers” is a song by Neutral Milk Hotel, an intriguing and sadly defunct band whose “Holland, 1945″ always makes me cry. Check it.

In addition to the washout of June finally starting to seem like a distant, damp memory (fingers crossed, people, fingers crossed), here’s another something to be happy about.

Things Getting Me Through Unemployment #18:

This suncatcher wind chime, in both sound and color!

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Things Getting Me Through Unemployment #s 26 and 27:
Gwen Stefani, from the third row at the No Doubt concert.

Derek, I think those boots are getting me through unemployment.

But where oh where is Kingston?

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