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.