Advice for Day 22: Delayed Birthday Gifts can bring supervicial smiles to us all

Being unemployed is really starting to get in the way of my irresponsible consumerism. With $60 to my name and that number quickly dwindling thanks to yoga classes, Chinese takeout and gas station cappuccino, I am beginning to become the most hated player in the US economy: the frugal spender.

But luckily thanks to my mom's "3 months late is better than never" attitude, I have once again joined the ranks of useless spending and become the proud owner of a ridiculously overpriced MAC purple case for my baby.

And let me tell you, it is beautiful, and it did make me happy, if only in the very superficial and fleeting moment of glee. I will take what joy i can get these days.

Advice for Day 21: Find Zen without Losing your Hygiene

First let me make a disclaimer: I love hippies, really i do. I love their avantgarde approach to halter tops, bangles and tie dye. I love their hand-inked butterfly/flower/fairy tattoos placed strategically on the ugliest and most noticeable part of their bodies. I even love their silly annual parades to that weird shaped green plant called mary.

That said I do not like their "au naturual" scent; that distinct order they seem to have copyrighted as organic (as if they could put a sticker on their armpit and sell it for twice its market value). From the unwashed dread to the unwashed unmentionables, hippies need to find a shower before they find their inner peace.

But luckily the WASP's have gentrified hippyhood the same way they do to any dignifably ugly neighborhood and turned it into YOGA Inc., my zenarific 45 minute noon power stretch.

Every Tuesday and Thursday I am welcomed into the studio with a sign asking guests to consider their hygiene for the comfort of other guests. That is how WASP's say no effin' Hippies allowed. We may be embracing the religions of the East but we will never forget the 1st commandment of the West: politeness is next to godliness.

And so i enjoy 45 blissful minutes of the gentrified skeleton of ancient yoga that the Green Bay area has so finely honed over the course of the last 3 years. And I walk out feeling good and smelling even better thanks to my all-powerful Secret deodorant.

But beyond knowing i just participated in an ancient religious practice watered down for and then steroided back up to appeal to the "i want a hot ass and inner peace" American, I feel like i did something i little good for myself.

I took 45 minutes and realigned my spine and my priorities. I folded my body in half, rested my nose to my knees and didn't think once about the my impeding insurance-less doom. Yoga may be too hippy for WASPs and American Yoga may be too WASPy for hippies, but I say light the effin' incense and find zen my friends because neither side is having much luck these days.

I am starting to see I may be a WASP but I may be a Yogi as well. Really the only difference is a little more deodorant and a little less stick up ass.

Advice for Day 19: Advice from Reruns

Sabrina Spellmen and Rory Gilmore are now my sole sources of advice.

Today, as i was watching the cable i swore i would unplug yesterday, the two wholesome TV role models leaped from their respective wholesome college careers into their respective wholesome real worlds; Rory with an internship at a small local newspaper and Sabrina with a job at a hip music magazine. Neither was their dream job- working, of course, at the prestigious New York Times- but both sucked it up and made the best of their new jobs.


Of course i don't have the help of a talking cat or a caffeine-hyped ADD mother, but really if the Spellmen's and Gilmores of the world can learn that lesson in an hour, then i really should have caught on by now.

So I'm swallowing some of my burdensome pride and asking the cyber space gods to send me an opportunity, any opportunity, before I run out of reruns to get life advice from.

Day 18: Reality TV is my Sunday Reality

My mom told me that when she was younger she used to hate Sundays. She loved the weekends, especially going to see whatever long-distance boyfriend she was currently canoodling with, but she dreaded Sunday: the day before reality.

The anticipation of going back to school or her job or whatever her real life was at the time ruined the entire Sunday and therefore half of her precious weekend. That always seemed a little ridiculous to me. Why ruin a perfectly good weekend with the fear of the inevitable return of reality?

Here is where my mom and i differ. I never feared the reality of Mondays; reality, in fact, was a welcomed break from the usual insanity of weekends. Mondays brought back the structure and safety of routine.

But Sundays now are different because they aren't followed by a healthy regiment of the predictable work and class schedule but instead by the frightfully free time of unemployed Mondays; Mondays where nothing "has" to be done but everything "should" be done. My Mondays are now just as dreaded as my mother's were 30 years ago.

Usually on weekends you can rest guilt-free knowing you will be back to work in a few days. You can allow yourself freedom to be unproductive because that American 40-hour-productive work week lays right around that lazy Sunday. But when weekends are not followed by the productivity of the "work week" then weekends become a hideous reminder that no part of your life is productive; that you have no reality to return to on Monday.

So instead of face the fact that by life is embarrassingly useless, i submerse myself in Sunday reality TV show marathons. I usually get hooked when I click on the TV for some background noise and find there is yet another ANTM marathon. I now know just about every winner of the show- including my girl Whitney, season 10 winner and first plus size model at a whopping size 10. I try to take solace that if Whitney's pant size is ever a question on Trivial Pursuit, i will kick ass...but since i haven't played Trivial Pursuit since I was 11, it isn't much consolation. I am still left living my Sunday reality through reality TV marathons.

It is just that somehow watching others live their reality, makes me forget that I don't have a reality waiting for me on Monday. The bliss of mind-numbing reality television is the escape from my reality-less existence.

Maybe my mom and I aren't so different. Maybe we both hate facing our Monday realities: her's of a low-paying social work job; mine of a non-reality unemployed existence.

Yet maybe if my mom had had reality TV back in the day she could have blissfully lived in someone else's reality for a Sunday instead of her Monday-fearing Sunday reality. And maybe if i could disconnect the cable I could get busy living my Sunday and forget the reality of TV.

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.