Your Unemployed Daughter

photo credit: Mayu ;P

Some of you may know this already, as my identity is not so anonymous as I might like it to be, but I went to high school (5th grade through 12th, in fact) in a smallish-to-midsized Alabama town called Decatur.

Yes, there’s one in Georgia, too, and Illinois, for that matter. But my dad (a chemical engineer who’s now back to work after retirement, congrats Dad) was transferred to the one in Alabama to help manage one of the big chemical plants.

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photo credit: smlp.co.uk

Before YUD became an unemployed media professional or, as some say, a “freelancer,” she was an employed media professional. And before that, waaaayyyy before that, when she was a very young person living in New York City on a very small salary and in a very small 3-bedroom apartment which she shared with 2 other girls, she worked at an advertising agency.

In those days, she was scrappy. Life had not cushioned her to the extent that she could afford $300 shoes, and then taken it all away again. Her rent was about half of her monthly take-home pay, and the other half did not go very far. She got by, largely, on off-brand macaroni and cheese (it was $.33 per box, she recalls, $1 for 3), free drinks and canapes at work events, and the change that would fall out of her date’s pocket when he would fall asleep on the couch.

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