Days 10 & 11

Day 10 I'm sort of skipping, because all I did was get up late, go and take my sweet fiance out to a lunch that he paid for (I am gainfully unemployed, after all!) , and then come home to nap and read. Then I geared up for the real work of the day: finding a place to grocery shop that had a good mix of local and organic foods. I am also learning how to bake bread which is simultaneously easier than I thought while being just as difficult as I imagined. I have to admit that one of my favorite parts, aside from the therapy of kneading, is making the little divot for the yeast to sit in.

Day 11, our dear friend Monday, was another day all to myself. We got snowed in here in Grand Rapids over the weekend and the roads were still treacherous. The Blizzard of 2007, as our catchphrase crazy media dubbed it, froze up after dumping snow so the salt wasn't melting anything on the roads. I don't know what the news crews are going to do if there's another blizzard in 2007 but hopefully they'll be able to be creative enough to make up another name. My favorite headline was today's, "No relief in sight!" And this is after everyone has bitched about there not being any snow and how unnerving it was to be so warm and mild in Michigan this time of year. I wonder if journalists sit around and ask, if we aren't complaining or alarming people, are we going to run out of things to write about? I wonder if us media consumers like to take part so much in the mass gossipping and fear-mongering that our consumption patterns make news writers believe this is what we want. I wonder how much longer I could rant about the media on a blog that's suppose to be about gainful unemployment, not media reform.

Back to the topic. I decided to brave the icy roads and drive to meet my dear friend for a cup of coffee just west of Lansing simply because I miss her terribly. I miss all of my friends terribly, to be quite honest. One of the things I've discovered about being gainfully unemployed in a new city is that it can be awfully lonesome. If I was working somewhere right now, I would automatically be assured a good dose of human interaction for about 8 hours a day. Right now, I really have to work hard at being ok with having so much alone time, and really have to make my human interaction time a priority instead of something that is just there. It's another thing I've learned that I have taken for granted in the past. Even if there were some people at my previous workplaces whose status of "human being" I was unsure about, generally there were at least a few people whose company I enjoyed. It's become obvious to me how important conversations, shit-shooting, relationships, soap boxing, and general everyday chit chat really are to me...and I'm also realizing that it's important to have this with a range of people. I am guaranteed right now to have face to face interaction with 2 people a day (the people I live with). But I really think I need more than that, even though I love those 2 people dearly. I think I may like people and hearing what they have to say more than I thought. I may be a tidge less of an introvert than I thought. How odd.