It�s just past noon and I�ve returned from my lunch break. I�m nourished and ready to pick up where I left off: I turn to the Spy vs. Spy page in my Mad Magazine to continue reading. I�ve finished this week�s Time and Newsweek and this month�s Vanity Fair. When I�m done with Mad, I�ll get online to read The Huffington Post, The Onion and then Google my name before I get sucked into the wormhole of Wikipedia. I think I�ll start my search with Pablo Escobar and see where that takes me in 25 clicks.
Yep, it�s another busy day at the home office.
Even though I�ve been sans a steady day job for almost a year, I do my best to stay productive. I wake up at 5:15 a.m. with my girlfriend. She goes for a short run and I roll over and go back to dreaming of the 401(k) I don�t have. She heads off to her job around 7:30 a.m. when I shave and take a shower. I�ll watch a little of �Today� and listen to how high gas prices are, how Ben Bernake has no faith in the economy and count how many times Ann Curry says, �Good morning� in a minute. I usually check my e-mail then finish getting dressed. Even though I know I�m not leaving the house, I still throw on pressed slacks and an ironed oxford with polished wingtips because, in a way, I�m still going to work. And I have to be ready for an interview at any moment.
I check CareerBuilder and Monster.com and find that all of the available jobs in my field (journalism, marketing, advertising and broadcasting) are all at the intern level. However, I did get an e-mail from CareerBuilder alerting me to a great job match � Avon Lady � so I look into that. I look through the Excel spreadsheet I keep of the jobs I�ve applied to over the last year. There are more �We�re not hiring at this time� responses than rejection letters, so I�m optimistic that my college education wasn�t a loss. It�s just my choice in what I was educated in that was useless.
I�m making ends nearly meet by freelancing so I e-mail and call any and every editor who will let me kiss their ass. Because freelancers are typically temperamental creative crybabies, the editors often take my story ideas and reject them. Then, I�ll see my story-idea-turned-reality on the cover of some periodical that one of the three staff writers wrote. I�m happy to be adding something to the creative process.
By 9 a.m., I�m on the couch watching The Sopranos, eating a bowl of Fruit Loops. I do the laundry an hour later then nap on the freshly dried, warm clothes until noon when I have lunch. This makes my pressed slacks wrinkled, so I now have to iron them. But I�ll do that after I get out of my Wikipedia wormhole. And while I�ve got the iron out, I might as well iron all of the clothes that needed to be folded but served as my pillow and are also wrinkled and creased.
After that, I�ll I putter around the apartment, window shopping online, planning what I�ll buy when I start making money again in an effort to ignore the mounting credit card bills on the kitchen counter. I owe the government taxes, but I�m not really using any of their services since I rarely leave the house, so I�m not going to pay. By 5 p.m., I�ll be exhausted from my day at the home office so I�ll pour myself a scotch to relax and reflect on the day. Four glasses later, my girlfriend will be waking up at 5:15 a.m.
