Life Without Pity

Today was the first day of classes at Colorado College, my very recent alma mater, and about three weeks from the day that I found out I no longer have a job. Today was a real juncture in my life. Do I envy those who are returning to the land of three hour classes and four day block breaks? Or do I scoff and pity them for how little they know about life, then pat myself on the back as congratulations for my own maturity, independence, and handling of adult-like situations?

I can't exactly bring myself to do either. As I said, I have no job and over the past few weeks have felt consistently unmotivated to get one. I have made a few freelancing connections, though, one being at KRCC and awfully close to campus. I left the building today and saw a few token hippies playing frisbee or something in the sunshine on Yampa Field. How fucking carefree. I immediately felt sick to my stomach.

As I drove home, I had the following thought: Why do we have to work? Or more specifically, why do I have to work? The world appeared to me, in that moment, as composed of billions of little worker bees, all toiling away in their offices or restaraunts or hotels or Disney Worlds or in their cafes on their iBooks, just making the world go round with their communal enterprise of capitalism. But also in the vision, the world looked gray and dreary, just as how I visualize communism.

When I got home, I looked up 'unemployment'. A long list of ugly sounding office links came up. I revised my search. 'Being unemployed'. If I had no immediate plans to look seriously for a job, and unemployment seemed like too hard of an option, I would plan to practice the style of being unemployed.

Several blog entries came up. The Confessionator described herself as an "out of work journalist" which I later found meant "never found a job in journalism" after graduating five months before. Well, at least I'm doing better than her. There is a difference between never having had a journalism job versus having one for two months and never being able to find one again. It's a small matter of pride.

Another one was more fitting - this blogger described being busy with freelancing for a few months, and then realizing she was utterly jobless and developed an addiction to thirtysomething. Then she applied for a job at Banana Republic and got rejected. Yes, eventually she got a job, and then left it for a better job, but at the time she wrote this entry she was facing unemployment again. But I figured out that this blogger also blogs for Go Fug Yourself, which is absolutely genius and they have got themselves a book deal, which I learned via Gawker. Gawker makes me feel well informed, and not feel bad for this chick no matter her past desperation at the feet of Banana Republic.

The thing about unemployment stories is that you come to expect a certain sort of happy ending - "And then I got a job!" For me, a happy ending would be, "... and I found out that I would never have to work again!" Not because I was marrying into money, or came into a lucky inheritance. But because I had decided to sucumb to my true desire to run off into the woods, living off the land, hunting for food, tanning buckskin hides for clothes, starting fires with sticks and stones, and fending off beasts in a desperate kind of survival. In other words, avoiding the daily grind.