Your Unemployed Daughter

photo credit: jfer
Dear Dad,

I hear that it’s Father’s Day. As it is, I’m having trouble keeping track of whether it’s Friday or Sunday – every day looks the same when you don’t leave your apartment – so this one kind of crept up on me. That doesn’t mean I’m not grateful.

I totally would have bought you a present, but, well, I’m unemployed. And cards are so bad for the environment. That’s why I snagged this photo of one that someone else sent their dad. It’s like recycling! (You like steak, right?)

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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: bobster855

Thank you, friends, for continuing to recommend job opportunities and career paths to me in these trying times. I appreciate your concern. Just knowing that you’re thinking of me, well, it means a lot.

However, and for the last time, I do not want to be a stripper. I’m too old. I have what can only be called “cellulite.” It would be embarrassing. Plus, have you seen me dance? Point me to the audience that would appreciate the Faux Running Man, the Flugel Maneuver, or the Michael Flatley Goes to Camp, and perhaps I will reconsider.

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The exterminator just showed up. No sign of the mouse since yesterday, although my sleep was fitful and I woke to some drunk fools singing loudly and badly around 8:30 am. Isn’t that too late to still be drunk? Or too early? Is this a new side effect of the recession? Buskers outside the window? They sounded like mourning cows, honestly. I’m assuming they were drunk. God, I hope so.

As for the mouse, I have a theory he was just passing through; he certainly seemed to want to get out of here in a hurry. There’s nothing for him here – I’m home too much! He probably thought, If only she had a job, I’d have this whole space (“an efficiency,” my 80-something year old exterminator dubbed it) to my mousey self. Instead, she had to lose her stinkin’ job. Jeez. On to the 3rd floor, where that bald guy is gainfully employed 18 hours a day…

The exterminator, who was himself a bit mouselike, came early, shock of shocks. And I suppose the benefit to my being unemployed is that I could sit and wait for him if need be all day long. Yep, nothin’ pressing. I got alllllll day, baby. “When will you be home?” he’d asked. “Um…always,” I replied.

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Imagine this: Virtual shopping malls! Four-pound “notebook” computers! Bedtime stories from a [[insert ominous tones here]] … Peeee Ceeee???

We’ve come a long way, baby, from the “International Network of Computers,” as evidenced by this report from Tom Brokaw circa 1995 (thank you, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon). When addressed with concerns that people might lose their jobs on account of this newfangled technology, Bill Gates simply points out, “it does have a CD-Rom player.”

Hello, magazine industry 2009. If only someone had thought to charge for content back then.

Make a wish, bitch!

An alternate tagline for Your Unemployed Daughter, if one found “the halcyon days and sleepless nights of a formerly high-powered media exec” to be lacking in some way (Are they not halcyon? Are they not sleepless?) could very well be “a lifetime overachiever copes with the fact that she was fired.”

Not as good a ring, I know. That’s why I picked the other one.

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Welcome to my office

What’s the most jobless state? (Aside from you in your pjs at 11:33 am?)

Amazingly, New York doesn’t even make the top 10 list, even though when I got home from dinner on Sunday night the streets were packed with roving twenty-and thirty-somethings who seemed, if not unemployed, positively apathetic about Monday. Perhaps that’s just a reflection of job unhappiness? The old Drink-Til-You-Pass-Out maneuver to make your Sunday less painful? Or maybe Monday was a holiday. How should I know? I’m unemployed.

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Hey all, check out Unemploymentality.com for more funemployment news and tips … Your Unemployed Daughter just got picked up there. Mom and Dad will be so proud!

There is some serious thunder going on right now. Thunder and lightning at the same time! It’s kind of lovely, and even the more lovely for being nearly 3 am – a time when, if not still at the office or on a drunken binge to rid herself of its memory, Your Unemployed Daughter would be completely and peacefully asleep, adrift on her 300-thread-count sheets (which she bought before her recent “situation,” thank you very much).

But – what’s this? She is awake (hello, rainstorm) and neither drunk nor at all stressed about this interlude cutting into her VERY VALUABLE sleep time, as she has nowhere to be in the morn, aside from the gym, if she is ambitious, or the coffee maker, or, working for you, dear reader(s).

Just another “benefit” of being unemployed, I suppose. Priorities change. Something that was keenly important – an undisturbed 8 hours – has fallen by the wayside for, say, doing a 3 am post and listening to the rain. And rather enjoying it.

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This can be yours! (x 21.5)

Congratulate me, kids, cause YUD has received her first ever unemployment! $405, plus her $25 Federal Addition Compensation. Now, how to distribute my Hamiltons…

(Don’t worry, Mom, I certainly won’t spend them all in one place, seeing as how the payment covers less than a third of my rent.)

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