I originally set out to write a short essay about unemployment and positive psychology. It’s not as if I haven’t written about these things before (like on the eve of Occupy Wall Street), but my return to an unemployed state (“job hunter”) this summer very nearly made me forget something important: the lack of living […]
(from The Joke by Milan Kundera, quoted in Smile or Die by Barbara Ehrenreich) I am not on the cutting edge of anything, which is why two important books that came out in the last year are suddenly on my mind now after a recent afternoon at The Strand: The Adventures of Unemployed Man by Erich Origen & Gan Golan and Bright-sided: […]
“I’m done making plans. I’m just gonna see where the wind blows me,” is what my boyfriend casually said the other night, a little sentiment loaded with meaning beyond simple existentialism or wanderlust. We are recovering from a brief separation where, in a fit of emotional exhaustion, I declared that we would be better off […]
I am taking a lap around the office building where I am scheduled to participate in a ceremony whose elusive nature inspires the kind of frantic self-inventory and confusion typically reserved for the morning after a drunken one night stand: the second interview. I am 35 minutes early and looking to demonstrate confident punctuality rather than […]