I'll admit it. Being unemployed is starting to be a big drag. Huge drag. After the excitement of driving out here, finding an apartment, and finding the kittens we will (one day, when they're big enough) adopt, a little bit of a break was nice. Sleeping in a little, finding our way around town, these are fun activities, and when you add to that the joy of (finally) living in the same apartment together, the girlfriend and I were doing pretty well. But the days and weeks just keep on stretching out, each emptier than the last, and we are starting to get a little sick of each other. Not all the time, not dangerously sick of each other, but starting to wish that either one of us had someplace to go for extended periods of time during the day. We mostly don't. Not because we don't want to, but because we don't have very many friends and we definitely have very little money. Really, really, a very small amount of money.
My mom asked me the other day what I was doing with my time. She thought maybe we'd be doing sightseeing and stuff like that, but these things cost money that we don't have. So I thought about it, and here are the top 5 things I have been spending my time doing, in no particular order:
1. Playing on the internet. Probably my biggest time eater, but, hey, those blogs don't read themselves! And I have applied for a bunch of jobs via the internet, as well, so it's not all wasted time.
2. Wandering around town finding stuff. This includes discovering that I am, in fact, too poor and too middle-class to really enjoy living in Walnut Creek. Any town that has a Tiffany's, a Nordstrom, and a Nieman Marcus in a 1-block area is a little too rich for my blood.
3. Obsessing about money, kittens, and/or furniture. We don't have any money. We want the kittens to come home. We wish we had all of the furniture and other things we left in Indiana.
4. Watching TV on the internet or DVD. We don't have cable. The first Sunday we had the internet, the girlfriend (being the best girlfriend in the world) found me the Colts game streaming on the internet. This is awesome. We also have been working our way through Season 2 of Dexter on Netflix and Season 1 of Xena, which I have on DVD. Don't judge!
5. Reading. I don't think I have read this many books in this short a time since I was in high school and we got actual vacations. I read Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose, which is a book I highly recommend and enjoyed. It was an excellent read and has definitely inspired me to read more books and short stories, including one by Flannery O'Connor that I really should not have read before I went to bed. It also has reawakened my childhood ambition to write a novel. I had a series of stories that I wrote in elementary and early middle school that I thought were really awesome, but I never pursued writing as a career. Now that I'm unemployed, I can continue to think I might be good at that but probably still not do it.
I also highly recommend Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynn Truss, which is a pretty funny look at how punctuation is supposed to function in writing. I will admit to being a bit of a stickler for good punctuation and good grammar (ask the girlfriend!), so I am enjoying it. Plus, Truss is a good writer and makes her exasperation funny. If you're not a grammar and punctuation stickler, you should probably not bother...
So I'm hoping to be employed at some point in the near future, if only to vary the routine a little bit. Oh, and so I can get out of the house now and then.
No comments:
Post a Comment