Wisdom from my dad

My dad was right. He always is. Sophomore year of college, we went out for lunch and he told me, “When you look for your first job after graduation, it’s gonna take you a long time before you find one. You will cry. A lot. You need to make connections. If you don’t have connections, you will never have a job ever.” I wish I had listened.

I suppose I got my first experience with my father’s supreme wisdom when I was three years old and he told me that pooping my pants is disgusting and if I continued I would never have friends. That was the last day I ever wore a diaper. I just wish I was as smart at 19 as I was at three. It's not like I'm still pooping my pants...I'm just saying I brushed off my dad's warning, and I didn't focus on the whole "making connections" thing. It certainly came back to bite me in the ass. I'm 22 with a college degree in Economics and Russian and zero jobs. No one tells you that applying for jobs, is a full time job. Except instead of getting paid with dollars you get paid with an increased sense of bitterness and self-loathing.

Which is why I've decided to make the best of it. It forces you to look for the small things throughout your day that make the day about a thousand times more entertaining. FOR INSTANCE, I have this squirrel that lives in my yard who is completely awesome. He sits on the sill outside the window and watches Price is Right with me in the mornings. He usually wins the showcase, but I don't let that ruin our friendship.

I like to think of myself as Fun-employed (none of that Negative Nancy "unemployed" business. We're about optimism here.) Every day I have 9 hours to myself while my husband is at work. After I subtract the time spent applying for jobs, time spent NOT getting called back for interviews for said jobs, and time walking/playing with my dog, I have plenty of time for my imagination to exercise itself. You ever wonder why little kids are far more creative than adults? It's because they have the time to be creative. Well, when you're funemployed you have that time again. You don't have to worry about how you're going to write 12 pages on genital imagery in Pushkin's poetry. You don't have to worry about how you're going to argue that Thomas Malthus was just a pessimist on his period. Instead, you're free to think about the important things in life...like why Vladimir Putin thinks that riding shirtless on horses is what people want to see...or thinking about what your cover-job would be if you were a member of the CIA (mine would be CIA agent...no one would actually suspect that a CIA agent would *tell* people that they were a CIA agent)...or trying to think of reasons why Seth Rogan is so popular (by the way, I still can't think of any).

It also gives me time to work on my runway walk, because if I'm going to apply to be on America's Next Top Model Cycle 15 (I missed the deadline for Cycle 14), I'm going to have to fierce-it-up a bit. Word to the wise: if you're going to work on runway walking, one of the best places to do it is in the foil/saran wrap aisle at the grocery store. It has the fewest people...and nothing says "I'm powerful and fashion-forward" quite like Reynold's Wrap.

So if you're unemployed, think about making yourself FUNemployed. It's about infinity times better than wallowing in despair and nursing the wounds of your ravaged self-esteem. Plus, your grocery store experience will be a LOT more fun.