Unemployed

Greetings from the world of curlers, cold cream, fuzzy slippers, soap operas and secret afternoon drinking. Though these days, unemployment consists more of anxious internet searches than it does the melancholy consumption of bonbons and whiskey sours on the couch at two pm. Still, the depressed housewife image is kinda fun. I've been sending out applications for adjunct teaching and avoiding packing up my office, an avoidance made possible by the wealth of online shopping opportunities, not to mention downloadable music, available via high speed DSL. I've also been racking my brain to try to figure out how it could possibly make sense to borrow 40K a year to attend a law school whose graduates average a starting salary of 50K working for the city and public interest. Unfortunately, it does not make sense, hence the adjunct applications. I'm willing to borrow 20K a year and go/work part time, which sucks because it is hard on both ends, but a girl has to draw the line somewhere.

Thank God for the newspaper. The New York Times, in case you haven't figure this out yet, is a fantastic way to spend hours a day pretending you are actually working. Makes for great conversation, too, when you go out with people who are actually too busy working to read the ENTIRE paper every morning. Get them to confess in shamed tones that they only have time to read the 20 Most E-Mailed Articles, and you've won a small victory for the bohemian lazyass lifestyle you'll be wallowing in (between bouts of anxiety and feelings of worthlessness) until some of those letters and cvs and transcripts from 20 years ago bear fruit, and you find yourself facing row upon row of doubtful faces once more, all of them waiting to see if you're stupid or smart, nervous or confident, easy or hard, just another bullshit shrill pathetic attention-hungry geek or a sensible person with a clue. You get to be visible to them but invisible to other faculty, a discrepancy you leave them to figure out. You get to stretch your paycheck and fantasize about the job list and mull over your life choices and change-of-career possibilities. You get to explain to your girlfriend why being unsuccessful with dreams is better than being successful with none. You get to face another year as you, as the person you were becoming and still might be, whoever that is.

Until then there's June, July, and August (the "Three Best Reasons to Teach," remember?). There's the internet, and maybe the beach, and always, always the New York Times. And so we dream on, we bonbon bohemians, drifting through the whiskeycherried afternoons of summer.