Advice for Day 14: Call a Spade a Spade and an Ugly Baby an Ugly Baby

I don't know why the people get so offended when you call an ugly baby ugly. It is not even their kid and they start defending the obviously unattractive baby's better features i.e. it looks better when it is sleeping, it is cuter with clothes, and my favorite, it will grow out of it.

Well of course it will grow out of being an ugly baby and grow into being an ugly toddler and then a ugly child and so on until the adjective ugly will be so obvious that people won't even need to mention it. And when that ugly baby is an ugly adult it will probably have ugly babies that it and all the people around it will call cute.

But they are lying- the baby will be ugly. But by lying they are missing the point; it is ok for the baby to be ugly. Let's admit it: most babies are rather ugly.

But they are also beautiful in the symbolism they stand for: new beginnings, clean slates, brighter tomorrows. Plus they have that great new baby smell which even trumps new car smell.

Yes it is ok to allow some ugly into our lives. Some ugly even makes our lives a little better and a little more interesting. Besides, most babies, and most ugly, really do grow out of that weird bug-eye, sunburned look and into semi-normal and occasionally beautiful look.

That is what being unemployed is like: it is an ugly squinty-eyed, cone-head, sticky-out ears job hunt that you know is going to turn into a 40-hour-a-week, health insurance and 401K full-time job and maybe, just maybe, eventually that better-than-disney-land, it doesn't even feel like work, who needs to retire when you have this job, kind of a job.

But for now let's just call a spade a spade: being unemployed is an ugly baby.

[p.s. thank god i am not Oprah or Ellen or any other personality so important they only need one name because i would get truck loads of hate mail for this. Seriously people why can't we just love our ugly babies?)

Advice for Day 12: Shedding the Unemployed [Undisclosed Amount] Weight

Four years ago, there was the freshman 15 (or closer to 40 in my fried-food-loving case). Now there is the Unemployed-I’m-too-old-too-admit-my-weight weight gain.

The inevitable weight gain makes sense. There are similar conditions of unemployment and the first year of college: sinking self-esteem, mass consumption of comfort food and mindless hours of reality TV marathons, all a recipe for an extra little layer of fat.

Two months into my unemployment journey, I suddenly realized I have a child-size inner tube inflating around my waist. More than just being a result of my LOST and Mac&Cheese binges, my extra few pounds signal my digression to a defeatist lifestyle. I have given my life over to cheese and Chinese food.

But all hope is not lost [nor weight gained]. Here are my new Unemployment [Undisclosed] Weight Gain Resolutions:

1. Food is not an event to anticipate. Your morning should not be consumed by whether you are going to have Mexican or Thai for lunch. Your dinner selection should never be a topic of discussion at lunch. There are other events- like yoga, book readings, workshops, volunteer events, or trips to the coffee shop- that actually make up a life worth living.

2. Addiction to food is just as powerful as addiction to crack, or at least it seems like it. Once you put sugar and red meat into your body, your body will want more of it. Taking away the crackalicous unhealthy food will be painful for a week or two but after, your body will adjust and, like a crack baby reborn, you will be addiction free.

3. Jogging is way cheaper than anti-depressants, especially for the uninsured. A slight depression seems to come with the jobless territory but jogging gives you your fill of free endorphins plus a good hour not taken up with worry.

I want to be clear with myself: this is not a diet. Mainly this is not a diet because diets never work and I refuse to ever utter the phrases: low-carb, fat-free, or Jenny Craig. No this is not a diet; it is me regaining control of the bulging belly and hopefully my life.

Advice for Day 10: Self-Deprecation Doesn’t Equal Funny; it Equals Sad

I like to blame it on Midwest; a place where confidence is cockiness and self-deprecation is akin to godliness. It is the Midwest that infused my resume and cover letter with self-deprecation, humorous and occasionally LOL self-deprecation, but still pathetic and un-hireable self-deprecation.

This weekend, while watching a local band bash themselves on stage, I realized that self-deprecation isn’t really that funny; it is actually just kind of sad… and unprofessional and painful to watch.

“The only one to come see us play is our mothers,” cliché, untrue (your sister and girlfriend were there as well) and pathetic.



“I swear we sound better after a few drinks,” cliché, untrue (I had a few and my friends had a few more and none of us thought you sounded any better) and very pathetic.

“We are drunken-live-my-our-parents-high-school-dropouts who can’t give up the dream of smoking pot all day and writing songs about smoking pot all day. Thanks for coming to see our show.” OK so they didn’t say this last one but they might as well have because that is how they appeared to all three of us in the audience who weren’t somehow related to them.

And that is how I sound when I joke about my awful Spanish accent or getting bailed out of jail. It is not so much funny as it is cliché, untrue and very, very pathetic.

Because the truth is I rock. In fact I kick ass. I can report, write, edit, re-edit. I am talented, professional and worth hiring. And no I am not being cocky, you killjoy of the Midwest; I am being honest.