Howard Who?

This is my first blog post in a long time, and I feel as though some explanation is required.

As I’ve learned unemployment is a full-time job. The cliche is that finding a job is a full time job, but for me I’m having enough to do staying gainfully unemployed. There’s so much to do at home doing little Bob Villa fixer upper projects, playing “nanny” to my not-so-young brother and sister, buying a piano where 88 out of 88 keys actually make sounds, learning French, attending seminars, and trying to have a life around the schedules of people who get paid to go work for someone else (i.e. everyone).

It isn’t all hard knocks though…believe it or not, there are perks to being unemployed. There’s waking up late. There’s eating at odd non-regimented hours. There’s the late night let’s-go-visit people sprees. But best of all, there’s travel…his name is Paris.

The joys however are often obscured by a curious psychological phenomena. Having an infinite amount of time to do things actually has the exact opposite effect of making time seem so short. The reason is quite contrarian and simple. At any given moment, we can probably think of 20 things we should or would rather be doing. And given the time, if one were to do 5 of these things (say, going to a movie, reading a book, exercising, looking for jobs, and volunteering), life would soon feel just as cramped if not more cramped than before. Yet, the mind doesn’t necessarily feel satisfied by the completion of the 5 things and pays attention to the 15 things left in the air. This is the fullness of the empty life.

Furthermore, unemployment has a way of expanding one’s duties with little focus. The benefit of employment is doing one thing, dealing with the same people in the pursuit of the one thing, and getting paid at the end. When someone asks what you’re doing, you say, “Working, you know, same old.” By contrast, the unemployed have no easy answer and must reply with tasks that are varied, “Well, I saw a movie, exercised, read a book, went job hunting, and volunteered.” Those tasks don’t have the gravity of career advancement or professional industry insidership. Even though the cumulation of the five tasks could equal something in your own career equation, people have the option (and tend to) view it as dilettantism. That is the emptiness of the full life.

Well, life is not so simple as that, and things are moving forward. What better way to mark the occasion than to reignite this blog with a statically happy song…

Snow in Berlin - Zookeeper

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 5:35 am and is filed under Uncategorized, Pop Music, Howard Who?, France. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.