Day 7

On Day 5 I was in Tennessee, in a bar shortly after noon throwing darts with my fiance's best friends. At first I felt weird being in a bar on a workday, but it didn't take me long to think to myself, not my workday! And I ordered a White Russian. It came to me in a glass the size of a water glass. They must have known.

After we finished up there, we went to a place in Nashville called the Basement, which is a bar-sized live music venue. Somehow, we lucked out and it was smoke free which is almost a miracle in Tennessee. All the way there I was coached about how live music was a whole new experience in Nashville, and that there are "1 million residents of Nashville and 3 million are musicians" trying to make it. Reverend Peyton's Big Damn Band played first, and it was actually a small damn band consisting of a drummer who was the guitarist/lead singer's brother, who was married to the washboard player. Yes. The washboard player. I was already amazed enough with the weird way the guy sang and played the guitar, but to watch this sweet looking woman's face change into a demonic glaze as soon as her hands hit the washboard was so odd it was almost scary. She was wearing baseball gloves to which she had fitted metal points, and she played that washboard like it was going to go out of the style it's never been in. I loved it. They were nuts. My favorite song and the only one I could understand any words to were "Birdy's Cousin's on Cops," which was written after Birdy's cousin (Birdy=washboard player) was seen on Cops. Next was a cool group with an awesome violinist called Hopsing Project. The headliner, Ballhog, needed to pass the ball. They were missing members and totally wasted and self indulgent. What, play for an audience? No - we play for ourselves!

Anyway, to make a long story short, we were supposed to come back on Sunday. We started driving (I kept thinking "road trippin' with my two favorite allies/fully loaded we got snacks and supplies/it's time to leave this town it's time to steal away/let's go get lost anywhere in the USA...") and stopped off at the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, just because there was a sign and we could. It was another stupid thing America did: they built a huge marble shrine around the tiny cabin he was born in. And to make it even better, the shrine was closed. Lame. We eventually made it to Louisville, Kentucky and stopped at the visitor center which wasn't supposed to open until Tuesday. But, in good southern fashion, the woman in the center let us come in and take a brochure and called some restaurants to see if they were open for us. We ended up at Proof on Main, a majorly snooty restaurant/art gallery/hotel. My arugula salad, octopus, and dark chocolate gelato was divine but the waitstaffs' noses were all so upturned that if they sneezed they'd blow their hats off.

But here is the true Gainful Unemployment Moment of the Trip: at dinner, TM and I managed to talk BA into stopping in Indy to crash with my brother, and blow Monday off. I was such a giddy unemployed git, absolutely bursting with the happy fact that I didn't have to rearrange a damn thing! My brother seemed slightly miffed that he had to rearrange his night, but he was a good sport in the end, like all good brothers end up being. How free! How wonderful!

I did go and listen to Wangari Maathai speak tonight, the first female Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the Green Belt Movement in Africa. The thing I got out of it the most: I tend to be furious with the government a lot, and she did point out that governments are supposed to be the custodians of land and take care of it. But she went on to say that our laziness is just as big a contributor to continued environmental degradation as anything else. She also talked about tribal conflict in Africa, and how to the West it seems almost baffling that people can't get along, but she summed it up well after talking about how the environment is used and mishandled and parced out: when you have a large number of people competing for scarce resources, there will be conflict. It was her warning for the evening.

And today? I'm not doing a whole hell of a lot. I sent some emails and am waiting to hear back. I'm going to sign up for a YMCA family membership tonight. That's the extent of my plans.

Day 4

Today I leave for Tennessee. I decided last night that I would go with TM and BA on their trip to see the third part of their best buddy triumvarate. It was that easy - do I want to go? Am I invited to go? Yes and yes. Do I have to call anyone to get the time off? No! Do I have to plan for it any more than making sure I have enough undies and a toothbrush? No! So I'm heading out for the land of a smokers, vines, and country music in a few hours with not a care in the world. Really.

I am being a bit of a Domestic Goddess this morning...taking a quilt to the cleaner's, washing up dishes and scrubbing the counter, etc., etc. I was thinking about this the other day and came to the realization that I could easily slip into this kind of busy-ness crap during my unemployment, turning it from Gainful Unemployment to Keep-Myself-Busy Unemployment. There are all kinds of silly little things like this that I could spend hours doing. My files really need to be organized, it's a shame that the fridge is so dirty, maybe I can go through my mountains of pens and pencils to test the ones that work and the ones that don't.

But...this is not what my gainful unemployment looks like. I'm not a messy enough person to have organizing be something I do in order to help my life be more fulfilling. Besides, if I do all my organizing when I'm not depressed I won't have anything to do when I slip into a mood and need to be an Emotional Cleaner to soothe myself. Forward ho with projects, thinking, meetings, writing, enrichment!

But before all of that, I need a cup of tea.

Day 3

Today I felt like I *did* something. It was productive in the usual sense of the word. I got up with TM instead of sleeping until close to 11 in the morning and went to my first meeting. It was with a member of GRIID (Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy) and we met at the Wealthy Street Bakery, often mentioned by Rob Bell at Mars Hill. That's a whole other topic. I think I have a digression problem.

Anyway, over the best bran muffin I've had in Michigan (although sadly still not of NYC caliber) I had a great conversation with this guy about media literacy, media reform, consolidation of media, news analysis, coverage of the Iraq War, anti-academese language and most importantly - how I could get involved! This could be the first community involvement I do since I graduated from college, and I was really excited by it. I was also really heartened by discovering the tip of the iceberg that is the progressive community in Grand Rapids and West Michigan as a whole. I've seen pieces of it at Mars Hill when I go with TM, but because of my stereotypes that I have, it's hard for me to see faith communities as progressive. (Don't lambast me; I know that this is my own "junk" and it's part of what I'm hoping to work on while I'm here. Admission: I carry around a lot of anger based on past experiences with churches and the like.) Grand Rapids has this ultra conservative reputation of a boring small town city that worried me when I was getting ready to move here, but I have to say I haven't run into it yet. Sure, Sundays are dead but when the city opens back up on Monday, there's a whole lot of progressive stuff going on.

After I got back from this meeting, I got online and went to www.mediamouse.org, in which GRIID is situated, and spent hours surfing the Progressive Directory. I have a CSA picked out for the summer, coops to shop at, and new ideas for people to meet and talk to.

My second meeting of the day was with a fellow gainfully unemployed person who is taking a lot of time to travel around. I met with her at Global Infusion, incidentally, this is where I became an engaged person, and had a lovely cup of jasmine tea. We had a great conversation and she gave me lots of new people to talk to and places to go. I was pretty sure that I was going about this thing correctly, but it still felt really affirming to hear someone tell me that this networking stuff was exactly what I needed to be doing. It's just so contrary to the [ineffectual] way I've gone about getting a job before: plopping out the resume. I'm really hoping this works.

Day 2

Today I took even more time getting up after my unsettling day yesterday. TM got home and my mind cleared out a bit and we went for coffee and chatted about our upcoming wedding and how we need to make a plan sometime soon. But this morning when I woke up and ate another cinnamon roll, yesterday's panic and disquiet came seeping back in.

I checked my email and happily confirmed two appointments for information interviews for tomorrow and worked on a couple more from contacts I'd emailed last week. That made me feel better. Then I headed out to TM's work to take him out to lunch (sort of). We went to the Real Food Cafe and he gave me directions to today's destination: the Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts. The exhibition they have up right now is called Drawing No Conclusions...it's a drawing exhibition. I was blown away. There was some truly amazing art in this exhibit. One was a huge drawing called (An)other way to fail (or something like that) and it took me a little bit of looking to see it. It was of a woman's womb, painted a ghostly white. I don't know if it was about abortion, a miscarriage, or infertility, but it was beautiful and heartbreaking. There was a drawing called Roots done with a fine tipped ink pen and it was also huge. In the top right corner you can see a tiny bit of trunk, and then the rest of the drawing are the roots, which are coiled and moving and shifting and dancing all over the paper in tight circles. When you stand far away you can't see the detail, but you can see these shifting patterns of light and dark all over the paper. The artist must have gone through 50 pens. Then there was this small piece called Hair Follicle that looked really boring from far away, like a grey blob on paper. But when you got close you could see that it was drawn in spirals from the inside out, and the distance between the pencil lines was only a pencil line thick, and it was perfectly done. The neuroses and concentration it must have taken to finish this jumped out from the paper; there were parts where you could see the artist's hand must have started shaking.

After I left UICA, I headed to a place with a WIFI connection. Since I'm new to the area, I just stuck with a place I knew: the new Big Boy off the Pearl St. exit. But the wankers don't have any place to plug a computer in! I was frustrated at first, but I whipped out my journal and started writing about yesterday and some of the other things in my life that are going on. Since this is a public blog, all you get to hear about are the topics relevant to the blog: gainful unemployment.

Why is it so scary not to be working, after I had been so excited at the luxury and opportunity I had to do whatever I wanted on my own timeline? Why was I afraid I'd be bored and lazy? I think I was hit in the face yesterday with the truth that, at least for me, employment is like a crutch. I haven't been unemployed since I was 12 years old, and my last 2 years at my job-out-of-college was the first time I'd only had one at a time. Employment limits the freedom of time we have, but it gives the seeming freedom of income. But as it's been pointed out by Juliet Schor, we work a lot of hours to make a lot of money so we can buy a lot of things which means we don't have a lot of time nor do we really have a lot of freedom. Finding another way to live is part of my gainful unemployment.

The challenge I am faced with, the challenge that I've created for myself, is to learn how to be productive for myself and not for anyone else or for any boss. The challenge is to get in touch with my own rhythm of sleep, hunger, desire to be busy, need for rest, etc. -- and to do those things when I want to without guilt or compulsively. The challenge is not to be stressed about income and money, but to be more conscious of spending wisely and frivolously and reassess what that actually means, and to get further away from the make/save-make/save-make/save cycle of hoarding money for the sake of security and living on What Ifs instead of a model of wondering (I wonder what would happen if I tried...I wonder if I could accomplish...I wonder what this would be like...I wonder what this place has to offer...), which sounds like a much more interesting and engaged life than living like an armored car.

Day 1

Today was my first day of Gainful Unemployment, but it took me all day to figure out that this is what I'm doing. Friday was my last day at WKKF and even though I felt reassured all the way up until I walked out the door that this was the right decision, I still felt a little odd leaving and turning in my key card. This was really it.

I was good and distracted all day on Saturday with moving, which was a test in itself of my willpower and of TM's patience (TM= wise and supportive fiance!). I've only ever moved from college so was not prepared to move for the first time from a "Real Life Apartment." It takes longer than 2 hours...and I did not know this until about 2 hours into packing. We eventually

Sunday I was still good and distracted, hanging out with TM. It was an amazing feeling to know that I didn't have to get up in the morning on Monday and make a 1.5 hour commute to work and then carry on a long-distance relationship for the rest of the week. It was a not-so-amazing feeling to look around and see my crap everywhere and know that there is just no good place for it for at least a couple weeks.

Today dawned and it was fun in the early morning to see TM and his roommate off to work, warm and fresh homemade cinnamon rolls in hand, and then crawl back into bed until I was damn good and ready to get up. When I finally did rouse myself, I read in bed for a while and ate a second cinnamon roll. I decided I should make myself useful since I am crashing the place, so I cleaned up the dishes and some other crap. Made lunch. Called my mom and returned my friend CH's call ("Hey, it's my day off and it's noon and I'm having a freakin' beer; call me back!" was the message I got) and then did an hour of yoga. And then started to wander around the house and on my third pacing I thought to myself, holy shit: I need to get a job. What if I wait around too long and then can't find a job and my money runs out? What if this "information interview" stuff doesn't work out? But most of all, what am I going to do with all this TIME? I have no tasks, nothing to accomplish, no deadlines. I will spend all of my day alone until TM or his roommate return...until I move to my own place and then what if I see NOBODY for DAYS?!?! What have I gotten myself into?

I had thought that quitting my job and moving were the hard parts and the hard parts were over. This was my choice; this was voluntary. I had said from the outset that I didn't want to be back in the workforce until late February or early March-ish at the earliest. I have always felt like I didn't have enough time when I got home from work to do the things I wanted, to write and explore the world and my mind, to get involved in community...and now I am feeling panicked enough to go right back to employment (or at least try!). What's the deal?