happy holidays

you can still enjoy the holidays even if you are unemployed so i hope everyone is having a good time.  my new years res will be to get a job but until 2009, i'm going to take it easy for another week.  happy holidays!

progress!

i am now a 2000+ player on wii tennis AND am really close to finishing zelda: twilight princess.  the fruits of my unlabor!  you have to keep optimism somewhere, even if the job market seems so dismal.  oh, and i sent in a few applications.

options

one of the fun things to contemplate while being jobless (as opposed to watching my bank account dwindle) is what else could i be doing with my life?  this could be the perfect opportunity to explore another career (not that i really had one to begin with) or to really get into a new hobby.  the first few weeks of unemployment pretty much feels like taking a holiday without the exotic destination.  there's a whole lot of sleeping in, watching tv and surfing the internet.  then comes the anxiety and slight sense of desperation.  the minimum wage kind of jobs start looking more and more appealing.  like, sure, i'd like to work at whole foods or barnes & noble.  i could use the discount.  and then comes the realization that maybe this is a chance to be an entrepreneur.  screw this looking for a job thing, i can find other revenue streams!  this is pretty much my current state of mind, especially since the unemployment figures just keep climbing (santa's wish list probably looks pretty monotonous by now, everyone's wish being I WANT A JOB!). my top options: setting up a bake sale on the streets (baking is a great money saver during the holidays not only because flour is cheap but using the oven saves me from having to turn up the heat) or start writing my pulitzer prize winning book, which would be nice because then i can claim to have a career as an author without actually having a job.

the problem to all this speculation is that in order to even remotely have a chance of making anything happen, i have to motivate myself into believing that taking the risk to do something on my own is better than schlepping in an office and receiving a solid paycheck on a regular basis.  dreams or money?  being unemployed also seems to mean i have too many options rather than the usual straight and narrow.

day x

the idea for this blog really began as a joke (we thought that if we got some advertisers we could at least spend our days clicking the ads or getting other people to click them so that we'd make something like $9/month) but as i really don't have a job, it seemed as good as any other way to waste my time.  my friend and i live in different parts of the country and would be working in different sectors if we had jobs but we still have things in common, one of which, unfortunately, is months of unemployment.  on a recent visit, we laughed about this and that but mostly cracked on our inabilities to attain gainful employment.  we've been frustrated by a series of unsuccessful attempts despite the fact that we're both pretty well educated, get along well with others and are young and ambitious.  somehow though, we seemed to have fallen through the cracks and are now spending our days playing wii and deflecting questions by family and friends about why we can't seemed to get a job (it's not just us, it's a recession!).  while we've gotten pretty good at both those things (and a few others since wii playing does wear out your arm and we can screen calls), we still would rather do that daily grind thing if for nothing else than to get people to stop bugging us and that beautiful thing called a paycheck.  we both like to shop (and be able to pay rent) so the paycheck thing is rather important to us, especially since that nice education i mentioned before put us into debt enough for a small country.

so that's our plight.  we're not really here to whine about it but we thought if we could share some of our experiences here,  someone might get a chuckle out of it and we could say we spent 30 minutes of our day being semi-productive.  the other part of this duo is on her way to a cruise (all those jet blue points racked up during b-school and her current over-abundance of time have been good excuses to do some traveling) so she'll join this blog in a week or so.

that's it for now i think.  the arm's all ready to play another round of tennis.  the internet and technology have definitely made unemployment more palatable.