September 2009 Archives

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.