I've been meaning to start writing this blog for...a while. How great will it be to chronicle being laid off, I thought--the girl who's been working constantly since she was 14 is suddenly, unexpectedly, disastrously laid off at 31. Ha-ha! What a delicious new life experiment! I had early posts all planned: my new relationship with the mail carrier (my Banana Republic bill with a side of human contact!); how funny that one episode of 30 Rock is where Liz is at home because she sexually harassed someone; discovering all the other people who are home during the day--I'm developing nicknames for them, and soon we will have our own society and I will be queen--but then I kind of never got started. I guess I kept expecting to get offered a job, thus rendering the blog unnecessary. I was waiting for "life laid off" to turn into "life stopgap employed." Maybe even, "life gainfully employed." I've been on two interviews, both for jobs I'm overqualified for, where my competition was a good decade younger than I. I've sent out tons of application packets and heard zippo. Suddenly, what started out feeling new and exciting and liminal is starting to lock down and feel routine. Get up, make coffee, look for jobs. Write cover letter for job. Rewrite educational philosophy. Send application packet. Spend rest of day obsessively checking for e-mail or phone messages. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
This isn't the tone I wanted to establish, right here at the beginning--where all all my funny, snarky insights about living life laid off? They'll come, I'm sure; maybe not when I'm sitting here, staring down my to-do list for the day, wondering where this is all going. So I'm going to get started for the day. I'm going to take advantage of being home and make myself some slow-cooking steel oats for breakfast. I'm going to put on fluffy socks--it's amazing the difference fluffy socks can make in a person's outlook--and I'm going to get writing. I might be rolling a rock up a hill only to have it roll down again, but I am going to roll the heck out of that rock. I will put my hands to its surface and feel there the shape of this task, this thing I must do, this sole employment for the unemployed.
