Blogging Unemployment

Post 2! On consecutive days! Woohoo!

I've actually been thinking what to write in this blog post most of today, not really coming up with anything definitive, but here goes nothing.

I've been unemployed for about a month and a half now, and I've come to a few realizations. The most important one is Thank Gd I am not an alcoholic. Unemployment sucks. It's fairly monotonous and depressing. Thankfully, I saved a good deal of money from my last job, but the fact that, much like the stock market, it's in a bear market is not particularly comforting. The second thing that I've realized about unemployment is that it spawns lethargy. It's not like I'm a lazy person in general (okay, maybe sometimes), but unlike having a real job, when you are only home and awake for a finite amount of hours, forcing you to block out your time efficiently (side note: while going on Dictionary.com to look up a word that meant something somewhat different than I thought, I noticed that today's word of the day is nefarious. Thought you'd like to know that. Aren't I considerate?), there is always later or tomorrow or the day after. Now, you might say: “Mike, why don't you force yourself to go out and do something? Get fresh air, play tennis, go for a walk, anything besides sit in your room all day.” I'll tell you why...Because I can always do it later. I don't have any plans. Also, I live in Gaithersburg, MD. Now I'm sure Gaithersburg is a perfectly nice place to live, and probably a good place to raise your children. But, pardon my Spanish, Es una puta mierda de lugar. (If you know me at all, you know I'm half Spanish and speak it fluently. It will frequently infiltrate this blog, lie in waiting, secretly hoping to take over and force all the English to convert to Spánish. See, it already planted an accent mark.) I mean, there's nothing to do here. I live in a townhouse with no furniture minus a card table, two folding chairs, a George Foreman grill, and a 42 inch HDTV. I mean, I know college apartments that are hooked up better than that. I know no one in the area, and have no clue how to meet people which is fine because I want to leave here as soon as I can and move into DC. So again, there is always later to do something because I am bored out of my fucking mind.

I know I wrote before that originally I thought it would be a neat concept to blog unemployment, talking about everything that happened on a daily basis. There's one issue with that which is that I can write the contents of that everyday of that blog right now:

8:30-9amish: Wake up (Why do I wake up at 9 am you ask when I could sleep in till whenever? That's a good question. Ask my brain which feels that it should wake up more or less the same time everyday, regardless of what time I go to sleep.)

9 amish plus 1-10:30: Eat breakfast, watch Mike and Mike in the Morning and and First Take until First Down downstairs at the card table in HD.

10:30-1: Go to my room, watch some more TV, either ESPN or the History Channel/TLC/Discovery Channel, read my book, read McSweeney's stories, play some guitar. I also generally take a shower sometime in this time range, but not always. Lest we not forget, I putz around the same few web sites, namely ESPN.com, CNN.com, Facebook, and Gmail.

1-1:30: Lunch at the card table again.

1:30-7: See time slot 10:30-1. I'll also check Craigslist and the Washington Post for job openings (I haven't found anything particularly interesting in a while.), play my Wii. Occasionally I will run errands. For example, yesterday I went to Barnes and Noble and bought two books, Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison which I'm currently reading and quite enjoying and Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk who also wrote Fight Club if the name sounds at all familiar, and I went grocery shopping. Today, I watched No Country for Old Men which I also enjoyed. Most of the time I either watch TV or read.

7ish-8ish: Figure out dinner. Now, I like to cook, and I'm actually not that bad in the kitchen, a talent passed down from my mom who is probably the best cook that our friends know. This should seem like a perfect marriage right? No job so time to cook and get better. See Shitty Thing about being Unemployed Point 2. So, instead I make something quick and easy, and tell myself that I really should take the time to cook new things.

8ish-≥10: Watch any of the basic cable shows. For whatever reason, my TV doesn't get the signal for the standard channels well, so I have to watch that downstairs on the floor. It's not particularly comfortable but more so than the metal folding chair.

10ish-12:30: Mostly TV, occasionally some reading or guitar playing though I try not play late since I don't know if my roommate can hear it while he tries to sleep.

12:30-9ish: Sleep

Rinse and repeat. It is very important to rinse and repeat, otherwise the cumulative effect of Unemployment does not set in.

So there's the Unemployment blog entry. It's not particularly exciting, but it is reality. Hopefully it'll change soon. I'm supposed to hear soon from this one very promising job. However, they had problems getting in touch with 2 of my references so I get the awesome task of waiting even longer. I am so psyched about that one. Sorry it's so long, but I can be long winded, plus I like this idea of writing all the time. Come back tomorrow when I write reviews for two books I read recently.

Hamburguesa Man (One of several American stereotype apodos my friends in Spain gave me)