Your Unemployed Daughter

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.

photo credit: jaymzx

Here’s an Unemployment Mix submission from one D.H., who recently moved up to the big city from down South and has endured his own bout with unemployment, most irritatingly being turned down for work due to “lack of NYC experience.” Which is not very constructive, potential employers!

At any rate, D.H. has since prevailed and joined the ranks of the employed, and now has taken some time out of his busy workaday schedule to put together a list of tunes for the rest of us.

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photo credit: digital_monkey

You know how yesterday I was all moans and groans about my freelance gig for the next two weeks? All, Woe to the weary freelancer! So tiring, being in an office all day long! So hard to fit in your blogging, your workouts, and your social time! How do the employed do it?

It does take some getting used to. I am working on a theory about this, but I think it’s because it’s unnatural. People were not meant to sit in tall, heavily air-conditioned buildings staring at computer screens and reading Gawker all day long, listening to loud, plummy-voiced fellows talking about how to get relationship dish from underaged, inexperienced actors at film screenings. People were meant to be active, and enjoy life, and make a difference—do something good for themselves, and each other.

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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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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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Last night several of us former employees of TK Co. gathered to send off one of our dearest, K. It was a good night at Peter’s in the WB, with jokes ’round the picnic table, baby pageant dancing, delicious quarter-pound chickens, and Kanye West impersonations.

(Go there, unemployed peoples; the food is delicious and cheap, the accommodations outdoorsy, and the staff kindly, except for that one girl who told me after my 4th glass of wine that they “were going to have to carry me out.” Um, do you even know me?)

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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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photo credit: Ed and Lex

An interesting side effect to being jobless: I suddenly have the endurance of a twentysomething (and if the bouncers at the bars I visited last night are to be trusted at all, I look like one, too).

Seriously, remember when YUD would sip herself into a coma splitting a bottle of vino with you? She was always so quick to finish her drink, and get another, and then another, but all of a sudden her eyes would get all hooded and cloudy and she was putting her head down on the table or losing her purse in heavy traffic. She was fun at first, but then you had to put her in a cab and send her on her way.

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photo credit: Joe Shlabotnik

Then I have all the money in the world!!! Drinks for the bar!!!

Heyyyy…wait a minute. That’s not right.

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I just ordered some books on Amazon. I know, I know…there are libraries. But those books always smell kinda funny. Peed on or something. Call me prissy, call me “baby unemployed,” but I hesitate to bring them to bed.

Plus, there’s something so quaint and fulfilling about buying books; whole worlds opening to you for the price of one fancy cocktail! And ITE*, might as well help out a few fellow struggling writer types. It’s the least I can do with my future babies’ college funds. (Let’s face it, ITE, those kids are going to community college anyway.)

The first book is about unemployment during the dot-com collapse. The second, research for a post I am composing on a secret affliction soon to be exposed widely as “Blogholm Syndrome” – oh, just you wait! The third and fourth, well, I figure I better learn about staying alive and being stylish on the brink of depression. And unionization, for that matter.

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