Personal Can Mean Productive

Let’s try this again..

What I Have Learned Being Unemployed

1.) Waking up is next to impossible if you don’t have a reason to wake up. This may seem like common sense psychology, but really it’s even worse than you’d think. Combine this all with a typical bedtime of no earlier than 3am and the fact that very little sunlight enters my basement bedroom in the morning, and you have the perfect storm of sleeping in, every fucking day.

2.) It is very easy to spend an entire day reading the Internet, and yes I mean an entire 8 hour plus day. You have your 40 or so daily links to check on, plus the various reloads of those links, the following of new ones… and even just skimming articles of interest, time can pass very quickly. At the end of the day, you don’t entirely feel like you wasted your day, but aside from being up to date on political news, and a wee bit smarter on some other few random subjects, you basically spent an entire day reading magazines. If I had any money to spend, I would be an advertiser’s wet dream. Now do that every day for a week, or a few months, and you’re starting to get an idea. Also be sure to take a break every once in a while to play Halo 3, or maybe make yourself another peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Drink just enough caffeine, maybe too much a few times a week so you go into a 1-2 hour caffeine fueled shutdown. At night, watch some TV, and get sucked into a mediocre to decent movie on cable, eat late, eat sugar late, and try to talk yourself into waking up before 11 the next day.

3.) The longer you don’t work, the harder it is to even imagine working again. The list of things you think you could actually do gets shorter, not longer, and even the idea of fritzing with your resume, seems potentially impossible.

4.) The last thing question you ever want to hear from a friend, even the close ones or family, is “So how’s the job search going?” Best to just screen calls from immediate family and close friends likely to pose this question.

The Biggest Idea

Is the one that leads to all others. To invent your own philosophy. To not wait for the self-help book you would have never read anyway to suddenly appear and fix all your problems. To write it yourself instead. To craft one’s own philosophy to reflect the values and wishes for ones life that you have already come to understand. For this definition to be both solid and infinitely flexible for when life deals you different understandings.

A personal constitution.

despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it

Laundry is still going. I haven’t taken the opportunity to do anything else, I guess Laundry gets to be my accomplishment today. So be it.

The above is of course a now well worn Obama quote. And while I have been so immersed in politics and campaigning, in the back of my head I have been bookmarking the idea that there is a deeper bit of thinking to do on much of what Obama has been preaching for this country. Mostly it is a acknowledgement of what place hope does or does not have in my life, especially as it pertains to my future, and to my extraction from the shallow and sad state I currently occupy.

Ironically I think it is entirely coincidental that now has appeared a politician I have found I can really believe in is one who’s mantra is Change and Hope. I can think of no greater prescription for my life, no solution more simple.

On Headaches and False Starts

So I’ve just spent an hour or so getting this set up, which is a classic delaying tactic I have employed as many times as I can remember. Having the perfect plan, route, or tactic spelled out clearly so as to be be impossible not to follow. This time it’s writing about it like this, but let’s try not to be so cynical in the opening frames. Needless to say, I have a headache – or at least that waterlogged why-don’t-I-just-quit sensation. Soon the distractions will appear, ones much less connected to task at hand as this one is. But start I still must.

I have written on my giant whiteboard (spans-the-entire-wall Giant) what I want to begin to become the general ideas for my latest and undoubtedly final rebuild. The first encompassing idea I’ve added is probably the most difficult one I ever deal with. Order.

And so since that is the Big Idea I am so often crippled by, it is where I need to start before the other pieces try to find their piece. And that means cleaning and organizing. First I need to do pretty much every piece of laundry I own, which, save the time, is totally within reach considering the $60 in quarters I picked up yesterday. Let’s try it.

The ReBeginning

So I think I have had enough time to think about not thinking about getting my Life back together. Four months, maybe 28 years, that seems like a good amount of time to take to get it – everything – together. And So this time, in an attempt to be a This Time Is Different, I am actually going to try out a blog like concept, with all the pressures of publishing, the perceived sincerity of having an audience to cater to, even if it is only anonymous. And the subject is Me. The plot is my attempt to find a way, or 1000 ways, to successfully end my life as an underachiever and avoid all the challenges and continued tragedies of such a trajectory. To be the born-again me, one who has a real shot a day to day life I can be routinely proud of. And a future in something other than mediocrity.