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Unemployment

04:43 / 27.02.02

I just received a job offer after over half a year of being unemployed. I should be thrilled, but I'm not. I've wasted well over six months of my life, sleeping late and lashing out at everyone from friends to total strangers.

Can someone offer me some survival tips for being unemployed, just in case my drug test reveals unacceptable levels of carboxymethylcullulose sodium? (It would be just my luck to be disqualified for taking cough syrup.)

What should I have done to make my life more bearable? How have you survived unemployment? What are the tricks to hanging onto your self-esteem while you're economic deadweight? How long can you stay unemployed and remain psychologically healthy?

05:12 / 27.02.02

Work is renting your brain out to a capitalist for 8 hours a day and expecting to get it back at the end of the day in the same condition as you offered it. Bad idea. (Misquoting Utah Phillips here..)

Anyway, I try to get about by not doing any "real job". I haven't since 1996, and that was an internship.

Study grants, defrauding the European Union, some freelance, some social service, some loans from parents. Skipping, stealing, squatting.

You get by, it's more fun, and you get to do what you want.

This is just a proposal, I am very aware that not everybody can live like that. But I think more people could do it. Most just find it easier to continue adhering to the ethics of enforced labor in order to "make a living".

quote: What are the tricks to hanging onto your self-esteem while you're economic deadweight?

I'm not. My immaterial, participatory and communicative labor adds to the General Intellect of my society, so I'm as much worth as anyone else. So I should get the same salary.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

08:57 / 27.02.02

Best way to deal with being unemployed? Live with people who are unemployed. The best years of my life were those in which I was signing on (and sad though that may sound, it's actually TRUE- I had more fun AND did more creatively- writing, editing zines, doing music- than ever before or since).
Now though, I'd hate it. Unless all my friends were made unemployed simultaneously. THEN we'd have some fun... oh yeah, and do some creative stuff, too.

08:58 / 27.02.02

The main trick in being unemployed is not to be unemployed at all. In fact the best trick is to be *partially* employed - whereby you barely have enough money to live on, but you have more spare time than before to think through. After a while it becomes hard to let go of.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

08:58 / 27.02.02

That's the trouble with unemplyment- the hours are fantastic, but the pay sucks.

12:29 / 27.02.02

(Cue background music: "The Deadbeat Club," by the B-52's.)

Hanging out with fellow slackers would have helped a lot, I must admit; the primary reason I was so miserable was because I felt everyone was looking down on me. (Gas station attendants looked down on me. You can't get much lower than that.)

Yeah, part-time work would have helped, but I couldn't find any that didn't remind me of the job I quit before. Maybe I should have sold a psychiatric advice from a curbside booth for a nickel per session. I heard that Van Pelt girl did it for decades...

12:48 / 27.02.02

One thing I would do if I were you Traz is go over the past six months and give yourself credit for any good stuff you got out of there.

BTW I've been unemployed by choice for the last eleven weeks, and last week I turned down a job that would have paid an insane amount of money. Next Monday I have to go back to the temp agency and take all those humiliating tests that I always only get a seventy percent on.

But I think the first four weeks after I left my job, I was asleep for 14-16 hrs per day. Remaining hours spent whining about being asleep so much, until Husb. finally said Would you just shut up and sleep? You're sleeping because you need sleep.

One of the other things I've been doing in my time off is taking the time to set myself up for the time to come when I'm working again and don't have time. Happily this involves many trips to the office supply store. But seriously, we moved into this place & then hit the ground running for two years straight, and the amount of time and stress wasted because we couldn't find the spare keys or lost the energy bill in one of the scattered piles of envelopes all around the house.

And taking off the time in the middle of the afternoon to read is a treat that make me feel like a kid.

00:42 / 28.02.02

Thanks, 'sephone. Good advice.

Yeah, I've been enjoying my sleep and the opportunity to read a whole book every day or two...and leaving my old job was like shrugging off a backpack filled with cement, after wearing it non-stop for nearly a decade.

My sabbatical has been both good and bad, I must admit; my fault for overlooking the former.

01:33 / 28.02.02

Yeah, well. Today I got the official bong email from the job that I *wanted* ...it had been so long without hearing, I already figured I didn't get it. Because I'm smart, and I don't need yr stupid opposite-of-affirming email to tell me what I already figured and to make me feel bad.

<kicks dirt>

autopilot disengaged

01:33 / 28.02.02

i'm unemployed. again. fired in latest of long line of temp jobs. best thing is, its finally given me enough hours next to one another to finish my latest play, which has been bugging the fuck out of me since xmas.

reckon i'll be exploring some new office this time next week. all air-conditioning and strategic plants...

until i get fired again, obviously.