Unemployment Woes

I've been going through old blog post drafts and I think I'll start publishing them every so often. I have no idea why I didn't pull the trigger on this one from January 2012 - I probably had more to say. But...here goes! Unedited.

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Unemployment does weird things to a person. I may not be fully qualified to talk about this seeing as I've only been without a job for 3 weeks, but..here we are.

You can fill your days and fill your days and fill your days and yet somehow, there are so many hours left. You can sleep until almost noon, run all the errands, power through half a season of Mad Men, apply to jobs, call your grandma, and there's still time left.

We all wish we had more time. We fantasize about what we would do if we didn't have these pesky JOB things to go to every day. And then suddenly, the wish is granted. You realize that these paltry unemployment payments don't do anything as far as allowing you the lifestyle you imagined for yourself and so...more Mad Men episodes. But then you wonder if maybe you should cancel your Netflix subscription because, you know, budget reasons. The same reason you don't have a job anymore.

Unemployment is lonely. There are no coworkers to interact with and your communications between 9am and 5pm become relegated to a series of gchats from people saying, "Soooo what are you doing with your day?" The fact that you no longer have an official THING to do all day suddenly makes everyone want to know what on earth you're doing with your day. The irony. And so you spend a lot of time thinking. Thinking and worrying.

All the minor things that maybe didn't bother you before now bother you because a) you have all the time to dwell on them and b) all your problems seem magnified a million times when you're worried about money. Your printer runs out of ink and there's a dire printing situation because the unemployment website wants you to print this information RIGHT NOW because if you don't you'll lose it forever and so you run to Staples and drop $20 on ink and then you panic because that $20 could have gone to something better. Or you go to sleep not having done something on your to-do list and instead of your usual, "eh, I'll do it tomorrow," you beat yourself up over it because WHAT DID I DO ALL DAY THAT WASN'T THIS ONE THING. It probably wasn't even that important but you have this compulsion to do at least one really productive thing every day because you can't possibly tell someone that all you did was wake up at 11:30 and then watch TV all day. Even if you have the worst case of bronchitis you've ever had in your life, you still feel compelled to at least leave the apartment to mail a letter, even though you're going to practically cough your lungs up by the time you get to the top of your 2 flights of stairs on your return.

There's another compulsion you have when you're unemployed - the compulsion to drink. Going out and having a few beers makes you feel like a person again. Because you may not have an answer to the "So, what do you do?" question at the moment, but you can at least still be social and see your friends and let loose. And there's nothing you have to wake up for in the morning so sure, I'll go see this random cover band and come home at 3:30am on a Tuesday night (you do this, of course, with your other unemployed friend). And as unhealthy as the sentiment may sound, the ability to really enjoy your social life kind of makes not having a job totally worth it.

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It's pretty weird to read that now, knowing that this was the first 3 weeks of 11 crappy months of unemployment. While this post doesn't address how unemployment makes you feel like the scum of the earth, and while I would hardly call unemployment "worth it," I think this is a pretty good summary of what the rest of those 11 months were like.