In case you hadn’t noticed, we are in an economic crisis here.

Another thing that I expected to happen, being in New York this December, was for me to be imbued with the Holiday Spirit (not like the people at my work party, who were marinated in holiday spirits).  Maybe it’s because my vision of this city prior to me moving here was heavily informed by Home Alone 2, but I sort of expected my day-to-day life to be sweeping cinematic shots of the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center and the holiday decorations on the street and trains full of Santa Clauses and shopping and carrying around bags full of wrapped presents.  But this Christmas has been none of those things, probably because it hasn’t snowed yet and I am far, far too poor to buy anyone any presents.

Sorry in advance for that, anyone out there who might have bought me presents.

So I’m not rich.  Poor people can still have awesome Christmases, right?  I guess so.  Those awesome Christmases usually involve family, or little Christmas trees that you get on clearance and which look totally retarded until you put all of the ornaments and lights on them, or standing outside some rich dude’s window and going “It’s Christmas Day, sir!” and having him throw a couple of Euros at you so you can go get a tofurkey.  Still, none of those things have happened to me.  And they probably won’t.

Really, the only feasible thing that will happen to me is that I will eventually learn the True Meaning of Christmas.  I don’t know how it will happen, but it’s supposed to snow tomorrow, and I feel like it’s going to happen in the snow, and it’s probably going to involve a kindhearted, irascibly cheerful bum who I accidentally trip over in a subway station.  Maybe it’s because this bum will have decorated the pile of old blankets he sleeps on with a Christmas tree made out of magazine clippings and old store display boxes.  Or maybe he will have baked cookies and be giving them out, even though he has nothing, thus showing everyone that Christmas is not about having or getting, it’s about giving.  I, of course, even as I accepted this universal message of love, would refuse a cookie from a bum, being suspicious of where the dude who sleeps on a pile of old blankets gets access to an oven.  There’s an 80% chance those double chocolate chunk cookies contain absolutely no chocolate at all.

I’m just saying.

So this is the most non-traditional Christmas I think I’ve ever had.  There’s no advent wreath anywhere—not on the dining room table, like when I was a kid, or at church, like when I was a teenager, or at work, like when I sang in a church.  There has been absolutely no Christmas music; no singing at all, as a matter of fact.  No Messiah Sing-Along in Graham Chapel, none of the familiar hymns, no choir music to learn.  I haven’t seen my family since Thanksgiving, and I didn’t even see all of them then, and I didn’t help put up the tree at my parents’ house, and I don’t even know if there will BE a tree there this year now that I’m not there to guilt everyone into making Christmas special.

As my brother Stu put it, I’m suffering from a case of the Christ-meh’s.  Yes, portmanteaus run in my family.

I want this paragraph to be all about how I’m starting my own new holiday traditions and somehow managing to stay connected to the things that are familiar to me.  But unfortunately, I don’t have the means to do anything that would make me feel good.  I mean, I want to get presents for everyone.  I want to be thoughtful and wrap things and put effort into this holiday and Save Christmas, which I am famous for doing in my family.  But I can’t: I’m halfway across the country, I have no money for presents—I’m lucky to have a way home, in fact—and there won’t be time for baking and being the captain of everyone in the few days that I’ll be home. Yes, that’s right, bossing people around puts me in the holiday spirit.  What’s it to you?

I mean, I know that Christmas with my family is going to be nice and special, but I won’t be able to be excited about it until I’m there and it’s happening.  The excitement building up to the day is half of the fun, and I feel like I’m being somehow cheated out of it.

But this problem illustrates a more universal problem with my life right now, which is that I don’t feel connected here yet, although I’m slowly getting there, and there’s no sense of permanence or ritual or comfort or stability that I have, previously, been quite successful in constructing for myself.  I think, while I was still in St. Louis, that I mistakenly thought a job would be that security blanket for me, but obviously that was only one piece of the pie: it was also the familiarity of my friends and family, of my environment, and the comfort of having a nice place to live.  I mean, there are worse places than my current apartment, yes, but my room smells like feet and there is no room anywhere else in this apartment for my shoes.

I’ve been told time and time again that starting out in New York is like the hardest thing about living here; adjusting to the city and to the place(s) you live, getting used to paying twice as much for a quarter as much space, getting to know your surroundings, carving out a social niche for yourself, having to shove your way through the crowds to get what you need because you need it and it’s not going to get got for you.  I guess this is how all of these things have heard about are manifesting themselves in me: I’m having a happy blah-lidays.

Stu’s was better.  But you get my point.

Next Christmas should be better: I’ll be more stable, more used to the city, and I’ll probably live in a place where I know my landlord isn’t going to knife me, bleed me dry just to sell my platelets on eBay,  So maybe, instead of getting excited for THIS Christmas, I should spend the remaining pre-holiday time getting excited for NEXT Christmas.  And I should write down all of my gift ideas this year so I don’t have to come up with all of them again next year—that will save time.

Let me take this chance to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, or a Happy Last Night of Hanukkah, or a Joyous Kwanzaa, if anyone actually really celebrates that.  From my family to yours: please send money, because JESUS CHRIST.

Tee hee.   *<|:)

Well, it’s been a while, and I owe lots of people, specifically the people who mentioned to me rather pointedly that it has been a while since I’ve written here and who would like to know that I’m still alive, an update.  Maybe I will write one entry for each night of Hanukkah.  Didn’t that start today?  Shit, I just googled it and it was yesterday.  By which I mean Friday.

I always sort of pictured a big move across the country as the next big step for me.  Even when I was in high school, I saw a move like this on the horizon.  Not that I necessarily hated St. Louis—I mean, like any place, it has it’s troubles and I certainly complained a lot about the things that bugged me (coughTRANSITcough).   The longer I was there, the more I only saw the city-rot, the urban sprawl, the chain restaurants (Applebee’s upon Applebee’s!), and a lack of a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that I always felt when I was in a bigger city like Chicago or Paris or New York, which are the biggest cities in the world that I’ve been to.

So with this in mind, I was properly primed to appreciate all of the things New York has to offer: a fucking fantastic system for public transit—I don’t think I’ve had to wait more than five minutes for a train, ever, with the exception of that one time I thought it would be a good idea not to take a cab to the airport for a 6AM flight; a vibrant arts community with awesome museums and live music coming at you from every direction at all times, whether it’s your ukelele-playing neighbors down the hall or some crazy gender-non-specific person with a guitar at your local subway station; a diverse population in every sense of the word; and crazy, maniac energy oozing from everyone’s eyes (everyone is always on their way somewhere or crossing the street purposefully or doing something real important, and they are not afraid to mow you down to accomplish this goal).  Okay, so that last one is kind of a mixed blessing.  But I should iterate that it is, in fact, a blessing: for someone whose life feels ho-hum, it’s important to be made to fight for something every once in a while, even if it is your spot in line at the grocery store.

But, and although I am loathe to admit it to the myself of four months ago who couldn’t wait to leave St. Louis forever, there are certain things that I really, really miss.  And it’s taking me time to adjust to life without them in New York.

For instance: I have lived in two apartments so far, in the less than three months that I’ve been here.  I learned a lot about myself in my first place: for instance, that I don’t want to live with anyone who is just as obnoxious sober as they are when they are high and/or drunk.  In my current apartment, I am experimenting with living in a very small space: I have share an apartment with four people and a vegan pit bull (that’s right, a pit bull who is vegan), have no common space, and my bedroom approximately 72 square feet.  Inside this very tiny room is crammed all of the stuff I could cram in from my former palace in St. Louis: my dresser, a chest, a full-size bed (which I initially bought in a misguided attempt to be prepared for overnight callers, and in which I have never hosted any overnight callers, unless you count a box of Snackwell’s and the taste of shame), a bookshelf, and my nightstand.  I did not have room for: my desk.  Too bad my only computer is a desktop; I have it set up on my windowsill and I am typing this from my uselessly spacious bed.

So I guess you could say I miss the sense of stability I had for myself in St. Louis.  I mean, my apartment could have been featured in a magazine (presuming there’s a magazine out there that does features on apartments with green walls that are covered in cat hair), and I was really set there.  Set in the way jello sets and becomes solid (well, gelatinous) and stable (ish).  Bad analogy.  But you see what I mean: I had a real apartment, where I could cook things, and I could invite people over, and it was nice.  Here the kitchen is gross and only two roommates really use it: one to microwave Brussels sprouts, which I can only assume are dog food, and the other to make a week’s worth of lunch in his slow cooker and make my bedroom smell like rack of lamb.

It was also really great in St. Louis not to have to wait in line for twenty minutes at the grocery store when all you’re getting is cookies to dip in Nutella because you’re out of real food at home and you’ve made bad choices with your life.

It doesn’t help my St. Louis nostalgia that I am on the outs with my crazy landlord.  It feels a little bit like La Bohème, actually, with so many people in this apartment and not being able to give my landlord all of the money he wants, and with a fancy coat that I might eventually have to sell to pay for meds.  The only thing that’s missing is the obscene amount of sex I’m sure I would be having were I living in 19^th-Century Paris and working as a writer or a musician or a seamstress.  Er, seamster.  Tailor.

But to get back to my original point, which was that I had a fight with my landlord this week, which occurred entirely in text message form, in which he, in (bless him) his broken English told me I should stop trying to be smart and pay him what he asked me to pay him in rent, versus what was actually written on the lease.  I will say this: for a man whose native tongue is not English, he certainly is fluent when it comes to swearing in text messages.  For all his fluency in English swearing, he has very little capacity to understand English logic.  Isn’t linguistics funny that way?

I also have to admit that I took my network of family and friends for granted while I was in St. Louis, and I’m finding starting everything over from the beginning in New York is harder than I expected.  I have friends here, definitely, but not a zillion.  In St. Louis sometimes I would be so resentful that people called me all the time to ask me to do things—that is definitely not the case here.  Instead I often wonder who I could call to come meet me for a Diet Coke when I’ve had a particularly stressful bout of text messages with my landlord.  Everyone I would normally call is in St. Louis—I can talk to them on the phone, but it’s not the same.  And I miss my brothers and my parents!

So I guess I have the usual complaints that a native Midwesterner would have coming to New York: so little space, not so easy to trust people, everything’s more expensive, nowhere gives you free refills, and your friends and family are still in the Midwest.

But I think what I have to gauge is whether or not it’s worth it.  As I recall, I had similar complaints about everything—except the free refills—when I first started college: all of my friends scattered around the country, I had to work to build new relationships with people, and I started seeing my family less and less (okay, maybe I wasn’t complaining about that in 2002, but still), and I didn’t know who I could trust and who I couldn’t.  I was also in a pretty uncomfortable living situation, as some of you may recall.

But really, it turned out okay.  I made amazing friends, I accomplished a lot, I did tons of singing, and I came out of it with a degree!  Eventually.

I think what I’m getting is that I know this is a tough time for me—it would be tough for anyone—but I think that the tougher it is the more it will pay off in the end.  After all, people move to New York from all over the world to do exactly what I’m doing, and most of the time they don’t have the luxury of a cushy job and a family that’s just a few taps on the iPhone away.  It’s hard, yes, but I’m really lucky to have what I do.

And that’s what I am learning here in New York.  I’m learning a lot about getting what I want, but more about what I had before—and how maybe those two sets of things intersect more than I thought they did.

Normally, when there are weeks and weeks in which I don’t update this blog, it is safe to assume that nothing has happened in my life and that I have continued to watch NCIS marathons and eat gummi bears in excess.  However, this is not the case this time around.

I should probably note that while I am writing this, I am listening to a report on NPR about how multitasking is a psychological myth and that people who attempt to do multiple things at once (such as listen to NPR and write a blog entry) are proven to be bad at both.  I am not sure I believe them, though: I think so far I am doing it pretty wlel (sic.).

Yes.  I have not been sitting on my couch, because for over a week I have not had a couch.  In fact, right now, I am not even in the same state as my bed.  Right now, I am in New York.  Why am I in New York, do you ask?  Well, let me tell you why.

I am in New York because I moved here.  I moved here because I got a job here.  Isn’t that exciting?  It is definitely exciting.

I mean, it’s not exciting yet, because I haven’t started it yet (tomorrow is my first day).  But the fact that I got a job after almost 9 months of unemployment: very exciting.  Even if it’s not a glamorous job, or a job I plan on doing for the rest of my life, it is employment, and it will pay me well, and I will be able to do things like purchase fancy soap again.  It also helped me to accomplish my goal of moving away from St. Louis—which was sort of an unofficial goal, because although it was a desired outcome, I would have taken a job in St. Louis if I’d been offered one.  Or even if anyone there had wanted to interview me.

So in short, I was lucky during unemployment to have a place to live and a family that could help me get by, even though things were tight.  And I’m lucky now because I’ve been able to relocate to a fantastic city and take a job that is going to be different and challenging for me.  I’m going to have to get used to living here, which could take a while, but so far it seems like it should be easy.  I mean, for fuck’s sake, there is a Target like three subway stops from me.  And it doesn’t require a 14-minute walk up or down a huge-ass hill.  Fan-fucking-tastic!

Bad things about the move include: all of my furniture, most of my clothes, and everything else I still own are all still in St. Louis, sitting in my vacant apartment.  I have not heard from the movers, who were supposed to have picked up this stuff last weekend.  Also, I have to pay rent in St. Louis in October and the rent in New York in October.  I know I’ll figure something out—I don’t know how, but I will.

So tonight is the last night in my unemployment saga.  My old voice teacher, who is like a second mother to me, always used to ask me the following question about traumatic life experiences:  What did you learn from this?  So what have I learned?

I’ve picked up on a few necessary grown-up type things, like knowing my limits financially and learning (through error) the value of saving money for a rainy day.  I’ve learned a lot about working through tough experiences, about dealing with rejection on an almost daily basis, about how to work through depressions (both economic and psychological), and about the importance of friends and family in my life.  Luckily, the friends and family lesson isn’t one I had to learn the hard way: instead, I got to learn it the cushy, easy way, but having great friends and a great family before my life got put in a blender, and still having them all when a delicious smoothie came out.

So the hardest part about leaving St. Louis by far was saying goodbye to everyone who means so much to me.  It made it slightly easier afterward to know that they were all so excited for me and so happy to see me get something so great.  But it didn’t make the proper goodbyes any easier.  So for anyone who is reading this who commiserated with me while we were both unemployed, who bought me lunch, who called me to make me leave my apartment on my worse days, who drove me to the unemployment office, who sent me encouraging cards and Facebook messages and emails, who gave me a reason to shower and put pants on, who gave me advice, who referred me to people for jobs, who looked at my resume or read over cover letters, who relieved me of household goods and furniture before my move, who helped me pack, who said “I love you” in the past nine months: thank you.  Your support, empathy, and general wonderfulness made this experience educational instead of terrible, and it’s largely because of your friendship, love, and encouragement that I was able to come out of this situation a better person, and that I was able to accept such a wonderful opportunity.  So thank you a million times over.  And of course, if you ever need a couch to crash on in the big city, you’ve got mine.

Also:  this blog isn’t dying because I’m employed.  It’s just not going to be about unemployment anymore.  Because let’s face it: just because I have a job now doesn’t mean I’m not horribly in debt.

Hello everyone.  I’m not dead yet!

My website died briefly, which probably occurred long after everyone gave up hope that I would ever update this blog ever again.  For those of you who were still hanging on to hope: I ran out of money and couldn’t pay the bills.  For those of you who are wondering how you are reading this if I couldn’t pay the bills, let me tell you: I paid the bills anyway.  And I only accrued like $150 in overdraft charges.  That’s not so bad, right?

Since my last interview in Chicago, I have had two sequential interviews in New York, both for the same position. That’s right.  I’m such an expert at interviews now that they’re asking me to come back for encores.  They are not, however, paying for my flights, so I hope that this is the last one they ask me to before offering me a job (And I hope that they offer me a job instead of rejecting me, or I will have burned up my family’s frequent flyer miles for naught.). If you remember my categories for jobs that I laid out long, long ago, this job falls into Category II: jobs I would not be totally miserable doing and might actually end up liking, but which have nothing to do with Arts Administration, which is the field I thought eight months ago that I would never want to leave but which is now the field I am considering never going back to.  (The definition for “Category II” has become somewhat more convoluted in the past couple of weeks.  But this reflects my thinking on jobs.  Category I: Jobs that I would have liked to have had in March.  Category II: Jobs I will gladly take now.  Category III:  Still retail and foodservice.)

I am not going to lie: the past couple of months have had some really dark weeks.  I had been doing an exceptional job of keeping on top of bills, paperwork, hygiene, job applications, and social commitments until about mid-July, when I suddenly started experiencing seven-and-a-half months of unemployment depression in a period of three weeks.  There were days where all I ate was gummi bears, where I never saw the sun because I kept the curtains closed and never stepped outside, and where I didn’t move from the couch, not even to change the channel from the second consecutive day of NCIS marathons on the USA Network.  I’ve seen every episode of that show now.  Dark times, my friends, dark times.

Now, by which I specifically mean the past two and a half weeks, I’ve been feeling a lot more balanced.  Which is not to say not depressed at all, but the proper amount of depressed: this means that, yes, I spend a lot of time on the couch, but I’m also happy when someone calls me to ask me to go do something with them—when I am depressed, I literally become indignant when my phone rings.  (Because if you tried calling me, and you weren’t a potential employer, I would shout in my brain: “HOW DARE YOU INTERRUPT MY WELL-DESERVED PETULANCE?” I can’t decide why I react to perfectly friendly phone calls that way, but I do.).  I’ve also started singing again—both of the groups I sing with were on sabbatical for the summer, but are now back in session—and that has helped me to feel a lot better as well.  So I feel pretty good.  I think I probably feel about as good as one can feel after eight and a half months of soul-munching unemployment.  Which isn’t maybe fantastic, but it’s better than it could be.

Anyway.  I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, but I really would like a job.  I have a good feeling about the most recent set of interviews I had, but I should temper this assertion by saying that I had a good feeling about seven of the other interviews I had this year.  And it may be appropriate to remind you that none of those interviews led to me being hired by anyone.  So honestly, my optimism is quite as meaningless to me as the words “balanced diet” (That’s right, I had dessert pizza for breakfast yesterday.  Suck it, nerds.).  Contributing to this baseless optimism: the prospect of moving to a city with a proper public transit system (while I was there last time I was on a bus, and not only were there more than three other people on the bus with me, but there were so many people on the bus that some people had to stand!  CAN YOU IMAGINE?!), and the prospect of once again having an income and being able to afford things like haircuts and produce.  I mean, nothing is for sure, and I don’t have an offer, and I don’t even know when they will email me back to hire or reject me.  And I should mention that I am fully expecting for them to cook up a very creative way to reject me. Hopefully they will get a form letter baked onto a cookie cake and send it to my parents’ house.  It could also just be a letter.  Either way, I am expecting it to happen this week, and I know it’s either going to be a job offer or it’s going to give me a good story.  So I have a good feeling.

But that might just be the coffee and pie I had a couple of hours ago.  So much coffee.  So late at night.  Also, I sang in the parking lot of a pancake shack, which always puts me in high spirits.  FUNEMPLOYMENT.

Hello my friends. Did you know it is Shark Week?  Apparently it is Shark Week.  I am too poor to afford premium cable channels such as the Discovery Channel, but I have heard about this phenomenon from Twitter.  I haven’t seen any sharks this week, but yesterday at Target I did see one of the two people who laid me off stalking through the aisles.  I was with Trish, who was similarly laid off by this person, and when I saw this person at profile about three paces in front of me, I immediately engaged evasive maneuvers and dove, grabbing Trish, into the nearest aisle: ottomans and stools.  My heart was pumping like I’d just run a mile and my mind was racing with tactics for keeping the situation from escalating.  It was, I imagine, exactly what it must feel like to know you are sharing the waters with a shark:  Did the shark catch my scent?  Do I have any open wounds?  Does it smell blood?  Why didn’t I go wading wearing full body armor?

I didn’t know what was going to happen if I ran into this person, so I thought it best to avoid the situation completely.  I mean, you don’t KNOW that a shark is just going to try to eat you, although it’s not a bad guess since that’s what always happens in the movies, but you can be completely sure that it’s not just going to ask you over for tea.   So Trish and I immediately devised a plan to continue our shopping while avoiding this person: we took extra care to poke our heads just beyond the endcaps of the aisles and to look both ways before we stepped into any larger thoroughfares, and we took roundabout routes to pick up the last couple of things on our list, always going via parts of the store where we guessed this person would never shop: Intimates and the Bargain Bins.

We arrived at the checkout lanes having avoided an encounter completely.  We were clearly nervous-looking, though: even as I got a 20 oz. bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper from the little refrigerator at the head of the checkout lane, I was glancing shiftily from side to side and I was also making sure to be aware of where the exits were in case I needed to bolt.  The cashier noticed this, and I said, “Oh, I’m not stealing anything.  I saw someone here earlier and I’m trying not to be seen by them.”

She looked unconvinced, so I added, “I’m avoiding the person who fired me.”  And then the cashier told me how she lost her own job after 14 years and that’s why she was working at Target.  Gosh bless her, she promised to double-scan everything in this person’s cart, should this person have the nerve to try to be checked out in the express lane: people with high-paying jobs don’t need to shop ten items or fewer at Target.  That’ll show ‘em.  Shark ‘em right back, baby.  Resharking.

Not much has been happening on the employment front.  I am still un-.  I recently had another interview in Chicago, and I did not get the job—at least this time I wasn’t expecting to, so it didn’t come as a surprise when I got my rejection letter.  Also new this time, the people who rejected me were quite nice—none of this calling me on a Sunday morning business—and even sent me a job description for another position open with a different organization for which they thought I’d be a good fit.  I guess I am thankful for this, because this rejection hasn’t elicited any of my usual post-interview-rejection bile.  Still, I’d rather have gotten the job—but at least they saved me some researching trouble for this week.

I’ve completely exhausted my standard unemployment benefits, and last week it was time for me to make the switch to federal extended unemployment benefits.  This means that I had to call the unemployment hotline repeatedly, because apparently there is even a waiting list to be put on hold while you wait for an operator.  God forbid I apply for this extension using an online form submission.  After about three hours of calling, I was finally put on hold for a surprisingly short period of time before I spoke to an operator—only about ten to fifteen minutes.  I gave her my name and social security number, and after three or four yes-or-no questions, I was off the phone and apparently set to go.  I’m not entirely sure that was the most efficient system for this process: I mean, if they’re making me call in to keep me from defrauding the system, they did a piss-poor job of making sure I was actually who I said I was.  I guess I shouldn’t care as long as they continue funding my mendicancy.

Speaking of mendicancy, my hospital bills are up to $2000.  I vaguely remember having sent in a form asking for financial aid and telling them I couldn’t pay anything, but apparently they ignored this and have decided to bill me the full amount anyway.  Interesting.  This merits a phone call.  Because not even a shark can shirk his hospital bills.  Not even a shark who has done nothing but sleep past noon and play 90’s computer games all week.

It’s the end of the second extremely productive week in a row for me, and I am starting to feel better about the possibility of finding a job before I hit retirement age.  In fact, I may even be able to land one before I hit my 40’s—that would be really neat.

As I was typing that last paragraph, I received a rejection letter via e-mail.  Why do those always come at the most ironic times?!

Aside from my employment situation, I am still in limbo on a number of things that are making me nervous: hospital bills, extending my student loan deferment, and whether or not I am going to qualify for extended unemployment benefits (the regular-type ones are up this month). I am worried that I’m going to get stuck with a hospital bill of like $3000 and that I won’t be able to pay it, but I am equally worried that I am going to get stuck with a bill for $300, which I still won’t be able to pay: I have visions of myself scrubbing bedpans to make ends meet.

And don’t even get me started on the student loans.  I am more than happy to pay them when I feel like it was worth it for me to have taken them out in the first place, but a great education is 100% meaningless if you’re looking for quarters on the street so you can do laundry.  So I’ve applied to extend my deferment due to unemployment through the end of the year, and am keeping my fingers crossed that it will work.  If not, THEY will have to apply for a deferment from me.  THEY WILL HAVE TO DEFER MY RAGE.

It seems the bad thing about this increase in my productivity—not that I was totally unproductive before—is that I have increased expectations for everyone else.  When I go into manic phases of cover letter writing, researching, bookmarking, taking notes, making databases, and calculating statistics, I tend to think that the people I’m corresponding with (or the people with whom I would like to be corresponding, i.e., people who will hire me) will be similarly manic.  This leads to me checking my email every four minutes and going “What the hell?  Why hasn’t anyone hired me yet?”  I mean, just because I start writing four times as many cover letters doesn’t mean the people I’m sending them to are going to care four times as much.  It just means I’m going to be four times as likely to find someone who is less than indifferent to my professional existence.  I need to remember that.

I also need to remember to do laundry.  I don’t think I’ve washed these pants since April.

In addition to feverishly applying for jobs last week, I also spent a fair amount of time compiling all of the information from my job hunt into a database so that I can share all of my ridiculous statistics with you.  I had planned on keeping these statistics private until I actually received and accepted a job offer, but given that today is the exact six-month anniversary of me being unemployed, I think it would be appropriate to share some mid-year statistics.

Since January 6, 2009, I have applied for 89 jobs.  That is an average of about 3.5 jobs per week; to keep my unemployment benefits coming in the state requires that I apply for 3 jobs weekly, so it looks like I am ahead of the curve.  Of these jobs, only 78% even confirmed that they received my resume.  Although no one has hired me yet, I have only gotten 21 actual rejections—less than a quarter of the jobs I applied for bothered with formal rejections.  I can only assume I am still in the running for the other 76%.  I have received rejection letters and phone calls on every day of the week, definitively, including Saturdays and Sundays—including one memorable Sunday morning phone call.  As of this weekend I have also received a rejection email on a national holiday.

Of the 89 jobs I have applied for, I only spoke or corresponded with an actual person in 5 cases.  My rate of return  (positions interviewed for over positions applied for) is just under 7%. I have had 9 interviews since the beginning of the year, most of which have been very successful (qualitatively speaking).  These 9 interviews were for 7 positions, one of which I applied for in December of 2008 so it doesn’t even count toward these statistics.

Ah, statistics.  The terrible, dispassionate, empirical proof of my indigence.

As I was compiling these statistics, I relieved some of my best and worst moments of the job hunt so far.  My worst interview moment, by far, was during a phone interview with a University in Chicago.  After an already rocky interview, where I totally bungled a question about what I knew about the department I was interviewing for, the HR Representative asked me, “What were you making at your last job?”

“What was I making at my last job?” I asked.  There was an awkward pause.  “Oh,” I said.  “You mean salary.  Not like, was I sculpting something when they laid me off.”  This is the only interview I have had where I did not receive a rejection letter or follow-up phone call.

Yes, I do believe that moment trumped the interview that I gave while on Percocet, with dried vomit on my slacks.  At least I thought those people liked me.

…Anyway.

So it’s been a half a year that I’ve been living on unemployment payments and looking for work.  Where do I go from here?  Recent news clippings indicate that the economy has bottomed out, and maybe even that things could start getting better by the end of this year (who knows?).  If I keep going at this rate, it seems unlikely that I will get a job offer by the end of the year—though it seems unlikely that I would get one at any rate because I do not even really have a skill set that is unique to my species of primates.  A thousand monkeys with a thousand laptops could easily do anything I can—and probably for less pay.

The cold, hard truth is that I am going to have to change my strategy if I want to be successful at finding a job.  Heretofore, my strategy has been: find a job to apply for, freak out about applying for it, agonize over a cover letter, send it in, wait in front of my computer for them to email me back, and then obsess over said job until they reject me.  In the past couple of weeks this strategy has been modified to remove the freaking out and obsessing, and it seems to have been working better (although I still haven’t gotten any interviews, it’s been working better for me emotionally).  But I think even if I up the rate at which I apply for jobs and try my best not to freak out, I may still be in a pickle when my Unemploymentversary comes around next January.

The only thing is, I haven’t quite figured out what I should do to fix my job hunt strategy beyond simply applying for jobs more frequently.  So far my best idea has been to scrap the job hunt and start an online t-shirt business: I have two funny ideas for t-shirts so far, and Wendy said she would help me put together fancy things like “Feasibility Studies” and “Business Models.”  The only problem with this, aside from the fact that it is just another one of my hare-brained schemes, is that I don’t have any money to start a business.  It’s probably better this way: the market for t-shirts with vaguely humorous slogans and 80’s throwbacks seems to be saturated already.  And getting “99% Diva” silkscreened across the chest of a XXXL baby doll tee is just not a good business model anymore.  Life’s just not fair.

According to a graph I just saw in the New York Times, the unemployment rate, although its acceleration has slowed, has peaked at 9.5%.  That’s incredible—almost a tenth of the population is looking for work right now.  And, according to the same statistics, the number of discouraged workers (those who are no longer looking for work because they believe no work is available for them, and who aren’t counted in the unemployment figure above) is almost 800,000.  It’s clear why it’s been a little tough for me to find work.  Obviously.

My last entry was a little woe-is-me, which I think is natural when you’re in a situation like mine, but I have to stress that despite the fact that I am more fucked than ever before, I have also been doing a lot to make sure I don’t stay like this for long.  I have applied for so many jobs this week, it’s crazy.  Yes, I have also already started getting my rejection letters for said jobs.  But the point is: there are jobs open and out there and I know that if I keep at it, eventually I am going to get a great one.  At this point, I would probably just settle for a mediocre one.  Possibly even a terrible one, provided it paid me enough to cover my ridiculous student loan payments (oh WHY did I have to go to a good school?!?!).  And my hospital bills.  And my credit card debt.  And…I’m going to stop there before I poop my pants: I can’t afford the laundry at the moment.

I say all that to say: don’t cry for me, Argentina.  Don’t cry for me until I have to pawn my iPhone for rent money.

Let me give you a run-down of the last few weeks of my life.  Obviously it has been a while since I put anything here, so I feel I at least owe you a few laughs.

About three weeks ago, I started feeling sick.  Two days later, I was vomiting in the Emergency Waiting Room at Barnes-Jewish.  After five hours, two x-rays, and a cat scan, a team of very interested doctors told me I had a punctured colon and an infection called diverticulitis, which usually only happens to late middle-aged and elderly patients.  They admitted me.

“How long am I going to be here?” I asked. “I have to be somewhere on Tuesday.”

“What do you do for a living?” asked one of the doctors, with his pen and clipboard ready.

“Um.  I’m unemployed.”

“Well,” he said, with a diagnostic air, “You should be able to get back to being unemployed almost right away.”

Obviously that was supposed to have been funny.  Maybe if I hadn’t had a punctured, infected intestine, it would have been funny.  Maybe if I had some kind of clue about how the hell I was going to pay for a hospital visit when I am uninsured and unemployed, it could potentially have been funny.  Because I recognize that there are certain situations in which that could have been funny, I gave him a sympathy cackle.  After all, I like to be encouraging.

Someone sent me an email recently that told me it’s been a month since I updated this blog.  Oops.

What has been going on with me?  Well, I am still unemployed, but I am not dead (which should not be confused with not employed and undead).  In the past month, I’ve come within tasting distance of a really great job in Chicago—so close, in fact, that I was actually ready to start calling landlords to set up appointments for viewing apartments—and of course, I didn’t get it.  How could I not have gotten the job?  I was perfectly qualified, I had a great interview and got along really well with the hiring managers, they started calling my references, and then I got rejected.  I spent the first hour after I got my rejection letter feeling positively murderous, then a few days being indignant, and a few days being bitter.  Luckily, my phases for dealing with rejection are fairly consistent, and after the bitterness comes the productivity.  Which probably explains why I excelled with my previous employer.

So now I’m back at the drawing board and feeling really good about things again.  This week I’ve gotten over ten applications out there for jobs that are mostly in Chicago.  I almost applied for a job here in St. Louis, but part of the application required a writing sample—I went to look for my papers for E Comp from my freshman year of college and realized I didn’t have any (and literally everything else I wrote in college was in French.  Well, everything that wasn’t a personal essay, anyway.), I know I’ve got a lot of work to do and I’m going to have to keep my nose to the grindstone and keep putting myself out there—the MO state legislature is not going to extend my unemployment benefits until I die—but I am confident that I’m going to find something soon.  And it’ll be fantastic!

The main problem I’ve been running into this week is that I’m not sure what I want to do with my life—at least not professionally.  I’ve been trolling all kinds of employment websites for administrative jobs, assistant jobs, jobs at universities, jobs with non-profits, jobs with symphony orchestras and opera companies, and jobs that involve actually using my French degree (I realized how much I miss using my French when Zazie shuffled her way from my iPod to my eardrums the other day).  It was pretty frustrating this week: seemed that no jobs for someone with my vague qualifications were out there anymore.  And then I found my calling: a job as a bilingual French/English video game tester.  Brilliant.

Too bad it’s in Washington State and I would have to buy a car.  Details details.  I’d still move for it.

Anyway, my project for this weekend is to think about what I really want from a job.  I want to be able to answer the following question: “If you could have any job in the world right now, what would you want it to be?”  And I want to be able to come up with something better than “Heiress.”  For so many reasons.