April 24, 2003

Today is the day to wish Nathan Rabin a happy birthday.

I have a new article on CenterStage Chicago on How to Have Fun When You're Sober.

I am becoming a better unemployed person day by day.

You see, when I was first laid off, I was a terrible unemployed person. The first Monday I was job-free, I woke up at eight in the morning, applied to about twelve jobs, went to the gym, read, and got to bed by midnight.

What kind of jobless person is that? I mean, that's demonstrating diligence, responsibility and hard work rarely even shown by the employed, not to mention a leeching, non-working member of society such as myself.

Since then, my success has skyrocketed. Take Monday night, for example. I laid down at midnight for a 'brief nap' (those who know me know that a 'brief nap' usually is not incredibly brief. Also, I coined the phrase "one more minute" when it comes to the snooze button. As if that minute is the difference between bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed and rings-under-your-eyes, about-to-break-into-tears exhaustion.) So, of course, after hitting my snooze alarm every 9 minutes beginning at one a.m, I finally rose around 6 a.m. to wash my face, take out my contacts, brush my teeth and half-change into pajamas.

I suppose I could have just stayed awake-six hours of sleep is a fairly respectable amount of sleep. But since I am Unemployed (now it's capitalized, because I'm doing it right), I decided that I deserved to go back to sleep.

One problem with this; my allergies tend to kick into high gear in the late evening and early morning. So, I popped two Benedryl.

My feelings on Benedryl are the same as my feelings on NyQuil. It really does nothing to stop your symptoms; it merely knocks you out so you can't feel them. Once I was at a boyfriend's house with his extended family and extended extended family and my allergies were irritating me. Took some Benedryl, and blamo, I fell asleep, probably mid-sentence, amongst cousins, aunts, uncles and the like. "Well, she's agreeable, but not very talkative," I'm sure the family said about me.

Anyway, I slept until noon.

If you count that up, that adds up to twelve hours of sleep. Now that's more like it, for an unemployed person.

But that's not all. I've not been going to the gym as much as I should. I suppose technically, if I were one of those crazy addicted-to-exercise people, I could easily spend four to five, maybe more hours a day at the gym. I don't really have any good reason not to go, when I don't. I obviously have the time, and with the twelve hours of sleep, I'm clearly not too tired. Just rack it up to Good Unemployment.

Of course, the one place where I cannot afford to really slack off is in job application. Here, you must apply to at least five jobs a week in order to receive your weekly check from the government, and I do, usually more. But my pace has slackened lately. Yesterday I put an application in the mail that could have taken me about a half an hour to put together, but this one took a week. A day to read the job description, a day to write my cover letter, a day to adjust my resume and print it out, a day to get together my writing samples, a day to address the envelope, a day to lick and seal it, and a day to think about it.

This is how unemployment is. I know it's jokey that the cliché is that we're lazy and everything (and if you are my parents or potential employers, all of the above is lies and ha-ha…even as we speak I'm scheduling hundreds of desirable job interviews and doing crunches), but in a sense, being a little Unemployed is good for the unemployed. After all, when you finally do get a job, odds are you'lll probably regret just a teensy bit not relaxing.

And I won't regret that at all. (Oh wait, I mean, a little bit. With all the work I'm actually doing, outside the context of this fictional piece of writing.)

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