The Etiquette of Unemployment Revisited

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For the fourth hour of the Today Show, this is shockingly informative! And it kind of complements my prior musings.

Unemployment According to Vogue

As a general rule, I try to avoid buying magazines that will inspire only rage — such as any issue of Maxim — but the May issue of Vogue called out to me from its impulse-purchase post in the grocery check-out aisle. It was the coverline reading “You’re Fired! Surviving and Thriving After the Pink Slip” that got me.

I thought that maybe I’d kind of be able to relate to the article’s author, a recently laid off Village Voice reporter/editor. But either alternative dailies pay a LOT better than I would’ve thought, or this woman has some other huge source of income that she isn’t disclosing. I can’t figure out if Vogue thought it was providing service journalism or material for a future chick lit novel with this article, but it definitely did not succeed on either front since I could not a) relate to the author or b) feel even the least bit bad for her. Here’s why:

1. For starters, it’s poor form that she even mentions her former company by name. I may not live in Manhattan, but I know the New York media world is small and most people can’t afford to burn bridges like that.
2. The author probably thought she was humbling herself when she said “After the shock wore off I realized I was in much better shape than a lot of other Americans,” and then goes on to admit that she already has a flourishing freelance career. But if that’s the case, why is this article even worth publishing? Finances can’t be that bad if she doesn’t even have to file for unemployment.
3. The author reveals that her low point was the day a fashion designer advised her to attempt to live only off of her freelance income and have her severance payments direct deposited. “I hated this idea. Previously I had kept the money in one big lump and just bought whatever I wanted.” She then suffered the indignity of being told by a banker that after considering fixed expenses, such as her mortgage, maintenance, cable, etc., she should endeavor to spend only $50 a day for everything else.
4. Because she’s a mathematical genius, her BlackBerry’s calculator indicates that she needs to earn a minimum of $92,000 annually to survive. Her attempts at economizing include not spending $900 for a sweater, and buying a stamp pad to make her own business cards instead of having them done at Tiffany like all her friends suggested. She also opts for a $118 silk blouse from Anthrpologie instead of a $1,000 designer version.
5. For an alternative newspaper reporter, this woman is shockingly out of touch with the price of things, especially considering her self-professed shopping addiction. She expresses such sticker shock whilst shopping for home-office supplies: “So we were at Staples, where to my amazement I learned that a combination printer/copier cost only $99, or far less than the cheapest Marc Jacobs T-shirt.”
6. Another pearl of wisdom: “I finally abandoned the budget business entirely. Instead, I concentrated on getting assignments. I stopped being snobby about writing for the Internet.” Oh, the horror!
7.  Finally, Vogue readers are supposed feel uplifted by the author’s moment of clarity by way of the First Lady’s fashion sense: [ed. note: I’m sorry you got dragged into this, Michelle] “On January 20, when Michelle Obama turned up in her glorious Isabel Toledo ensemble, it was impossible to be depressed. If Toledo, the consummate downtown designer who’s had plenty of ups and downs herself, can triumph, I thought, then maybe so can I.” Empowered, she runs back to reclaim an antique sapphire and diamond ring she had to return to the dealer after she was laid off.

Wow, thanks, Vogue. I feel a bit better about myself already!

Read here too.

She Had Me At “I want to be a neurologist when I grow up.”

For the past few weeks now I’ve been working as an on-call babysitter for a nannying agency to tide me over until I find a shiny new full-time job. It may lack benefits, financial security and predictable hours, BUT it’s flexible, doesn’t involve cubicles and always manages to get my mind off of myself. And while I still waffle between “Yeah, I love hanging with the shorties” and “I’m getting my tubes tied immediately,” I have managed to learn a few things:

1. Rocking a baby or toddler to sleep is incredibly soothing -- when you're not the one being rocked -- even if it means leaving someone’s home wearing a cardigan covered with white, crusty baby drool.
2. Potty training — good! Four-year-old diapers — very, very bad.
3. It’s still so funny to me that the same five year old who uses the phrase “Like the pot calling the kettle black,” and says she wants to be a neurologist (and offer a good description of what a neurologist studies) when she grows up still dissolves into tears within seconds of having a Barbie snatched from her lap.
4. I’ve decided my childhood could have been at least 20 percent more fun if I had one of these to ride when I was 5 or 6 (and it's still pretty fun at age 29) instead of Big Wheels: 

5. Child care is exhausting; being an editor is not.

A Day in the Life

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts this Easter weekend I was finally confirmed in the Catholic Church, after many years of procrastination, skepticism and doubt. And as I’ve also mentioned, I decided to use St. Teresa of Avila as my saint name. Saint Teresa is a popular figure at St. Nick’s, and now I can see why. She’s the patron saint of headaches and writers, and is one fiery little woman. As a confirmation gift, my sponsor, Mary, gave me a St. Teresa doll, fashioned by a company that will make any doll if someone sends them a picture of the character they want created.

So, it only seemed appropriate to bring St. Teresa along for my first day as a fully initiated Catholic.

Teresa started her day with a little quiet prayer and reflection. 

Next, Teresa decided that since she had such a long night at the Easter vigil service, she would need a little jolt of caffeine to get through the first part of her day.

Unfortunately, because of the busy weekend and lack of sleep she endured, Teresa developed a migraine, which is fitting considering that headaches were a big part of her life. As she wrote:

No sooner does our head ache than we stop
going to [prayer], which won’t kill us either.
We stay away one day because our head ached,
another because it was just now aching, and
three more so it won’t ache again.

Teresa was also a voracious reader. To my surprise, Teresa and I have a lot of the same books on our shelves!:

Here, my two favorite ladies chit-chat about their shared history of headaches and love of writing.

Teresa approves of this book too (even though it's on loan).

Teresa likes to read up on modern nuns (especially the Carmelites) in the book Unveiled: The Hidden Lives of Nuns.

However, Teresa has one interest that I don’t share, and that is her taste in music.

After a busy morning of chatting about books and drinking coffee, it was time for me and my parents to go to Ryan’s dad’s house for dinner. Teresa kept us safe on our drive up to Lake Forest from her post on the dashboard.

Here, Teresa displays her notable appreciation for fun and whimsy.

For desert, Ryan’s grandfather made his famous whiskey cake. And guess what? Teresa liked it too!

Finally, Teresa and I brought our long day to a close.

Happy Easter!

The Cheese Stands Alone

Last spring I wrote an essay for Telling Stories but wasn't able to be in Denver to read it myself. The theme for this particular Telling Stories show was "Table For One." When I was spring cleaning my hard drive this afternoon, I saw that it needed some cleaning up too and decided to post it here. 

The Cheese Stands Alone

Whoever coined the phrase “God works in mysterious ways” didn’t know the half of it. My own connection to God, or any deity, is flimsy at best sometimes, so there’s a pretty good chance that I’ve missed a lot of the hints that the universe has been trying to send my way. In fact, it’s possible that I’ve become so closed off and so oblivious that one day God finally got sick of it and decreed: “Mary, I couldn’t possibly be more obvious – if you miss the symbolism this time, I’m sending you back to high school English.”

Life changing revelations, I’ve learned, don’t present themselves all at once. Rather, they are small and cumulative, and if examined individually, don’t amount to much. But sometimes they come on so fast, and so quickly, you almost miss them.

**

In October of 2005 I was 25 years old, living at home with my parents in my small, rural Illinois hometown. I had been there since I graduated from college -- with delays -- in 2002, and there were very few signs that this arrangement would be changing any time soon. Although living with one’s parents after college reeks of laziness in healthy people, for me it felt like anything but. When I lived by myself for my last year and a half in college, it took all the energy I had to make it to my classes on some days, so there was precious little leftover for basic cleaning and grocery shopping and multiple doctor’s office visits. Moving back in with my parents didn’t feel like defeat — it felt like a relief. A relief to not have to worry about getting everything done by myself. And it gave my parents some peace of mind too. Being a four-hour drive away took its toll on them, so they were more than happy to be able to keep tabs on me.

So by October of 2005, I had been trying for over a year to qualify for a very experimental surgery that offered some hope for helping the migraines that sidelined me. After a grueling screening process at the hands of a highly selective neurosurgeon, I had finally been given the green light from him, but then faced an even bigger monster: an insurance company that didn’t recognize pain management as “medically necessary.”

The months leading up to the insurance company’s refusal to comply had been so bleak that my parents thought it might perk me up to take me along on my dad’s business trip to San Diego. Even though migraines aren’t conducive to the unexpected hassles of air travel, or the invasions of privacy involved in sharing a small hotel room with one’s parents for five days, I relished the thought of a change of scenery. This would be my first trip to California, the west coast and the Pacific, and maybe a chance to experience the famously laidback culture in a way I could bring back with me.

Instead, what should have been a restorative, worry-free trip became just the opposite. I was too ill much of the time to enjoy or participate in any of the sightseeing, and when I wasn’t sick I moped, felt sorry for myself and burst into tears in restaurants, convention halls, gift shops, the San Diego Zoo, hotel lobbies. Two of my dad’s relatives from L.A. came down to meet us, and despite my protests that I would be a huge buzz kill for the rest of the afternoon, they convinced me to come along on a trip up the coast to La Jolla, a place I only associated with reruns of “My Super Sweet Sixteen.”

I did manage to take at least some joy in parts of the trip – the sun, sailors (it was San Diego’s Fleet Week after all), having mountains and foothills on one side of me and an ocean on the other; even the Santa Anna winds weren’t unbearable. But mostly, the trip just served as a reminder that I needed someone else’s help to get through something as easy and run of the mill as a vacation. My silly, self-pitying self wondered if I would’ve been able to navigate the airports, keep track of my boarding pass, negotiate transportation, make reservations — all the minutia that planning even something fun involves – on my own. How was I much different than those insufferable Sweet Sixteeners I scorned? But mostly, on that trip, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was a third wheel, and that what my parents really needed was a vacation from worrying about me. I had never been so anxious for a vacation to end, and I suspected my parents thought the same.

**

Flash forward about two and a half years.

It’s the second week of January 2008 and I was about to embark on a business trip. It’s been a year and a half since I finally procured the aforementioned experimental surgery.  I still have migraines but am outfitted with a tiny titanium battery implanted in my lower back, attached to wires that snake all the way up my neck and back, to my head, where electrodes are attached to a nerve under my skin and held in place by some trusty scar tissue. The system isn’t perfect, but it’s much better.

In December my boss asked if I would mind attending the Winter Fancy Foods Show, which is put on twice a year by the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade. The show takes place in a massive convention center packed with 1,100 or so exhibitors showing off only the finest specialty/gourmet foods that, quite literally, the world has to offer. The show is usually held in San Francisco, but this year it was moved to San Diego.

When I started to make my travel arrangements I had no intention to plan a trip that so closely paralleled the one with my parents, so it was mostly a coincidence that I picked the same Holiday Inn I’d stayed at with them. It helped that I subsequently knew the lay of the land, and which direction the convention center was from the hotel; of course the show was in the same convention center that my dad’s had been.

To some degree I was worried that all the leftover bad karma from the first trip would contaminate the second — that the whole déjà vu feeling would trigger some sort of meltdown. It didn’t. I even kept my cool when I had to endure the full body pat down by the TSA agents in the airport, as I can’t go through metal detectors with my device. Actually, I suspect the agents were more uncomfortable than I was whenever they assured me that they were using the backs of their hands when they reached a “sensitive” area.

The room was almost identical to the one I shared with my parents, but I was almost giddy with the contentment of having it all to myself. I loved the foghorns, the tacky paint job on the Holiday Inn’s exterior, the rude concierge and the irritated Chinese delivery guy. I didn’t even care that the takeout was crap since I knew the next three days would make up for it.

It wasn’t until the next morning when I stepped out onto the room’s patio in an attempt to soak up some much needed California sun and fresh air that I started to sense that I didn’t need to worry about the rest of the trip being a repeater of the first one — that it might be possible to replace the bad memories with the better ones.

The rest of the day is a blur of high-end chocolate, champagne, gelato, fair trade tea, specialty cheese, and gourmet popcorn. I got over my fear of talking to all the exhibitors about their products, and in some cases invented ridiculous reasons to stop by some booths for more samples, even though I had already been by once that day.

For dinner that night, my dad’s relatives came down again from L.A. to see me, and I picked a spot in Little Italy that my parents and I had been obsessed with. When we found each other in the hotel lobby, we all immediately remarked on how different the reunions were and marveled about it the rest of the night.

The next day, my second day of the show, was much like the first except that I was attending a press trip to La Jolla, sponsored by a dairy industry association. The restaurant we were going to even had a startlingly similar name and was only a few doors down from the restaurant my parents and I had been to with our relatives.  

When we got to the restaurant, I immediately gave away my newbie status when I tipsily wondered out loud if it would be tacky of me to pull out a notebook and write down everything I ate, and its price, so that I could remember later. Turns out, a month or two later, I still remember.

**

A few days ago at work I received two big hunks of suitably aged — and correspondingly smelly — Wisconsin cheese in the mail, courtesy of the association, who apologized by saying the cheese wasn’t at its prime when we sampled it in La Jolla. When I opened the Styrofoam cooler that held the cheese and ice packs, I got the feeling that the noxious fumes were another sign, or reminder from the universe — or whoever it is who’s in charge of dropping hints — that I’m more than capable of taking care of myself now. What’s even more absurd is that I ever doubted I could. On that trip, I was so content to fly solo that I almost regret that I never had the opportunity to ask for a table for one.

The Etiquette of Unemployment

For the newly laid off, one of the coldest comforts is that in this economy being laid off doesn’t carry the stigma it used to. And chances are good that if you lost your job, you don’t have to look very hard to find someone else in your situation. In fact, if anyone were to ask me for advice on handling unemployment, I would tell them to immediately begin looking for a layoff buddy, whether that person is another victim from your company or industry, or even someone who’s currently employed but has been through it before. This is important for me partly because I can’t seem to find any clear cut etiquette guidelines for being unemployed. I keep hoping someone else will teach me the ropes.

Before this recession started to affect me and my friends and colleagues, I might have advised against discussing the layoff at length in public forums such as this blog. But since unemployment is cutting across so many income levels and tax brackets in this recession, talking openly about it seems like a win-win for everyone.

But this new openness has its drawbacks too. I was relieved to find out that another one of my friends has been struggling with the same etiquette-related conundrums I have been. One of our biggest bugaboos is trying to figure out how much whining and complaining is allowable and expected.

It’s only natural to react strongly to losing your job early on, as you figure out what you have to do to make ends meet and launch your new job hunt. But at what point, or after how long, does your worrying become excessive and wearying for others? The statistics seem to report that American workers are facing longer bouts of unemployment than in the past. It’s fine to confide your worries and frustrations to friends and family, but it’s hard not to feel guilty about dragging them as well. But, at the same time, like my friend said “I know I’m not exactly starving to death in Darfur, but I need to vent too!” There must be a socially acceptable happy medium.

And then there is the delicate issue of what to do with your social life when you lose a big chunk of your livelihood. Your friends — who most likely are facing economic worries of their own — aren’t going to be able to buy you drinks for the duration. And you shouldn’t want or expect them to. Sure, you can entertain at home more, but having the spare time to catch up with friends for lunch or drinks is one of the upsides to not having a 9-to-5 job anymore — at least in the beginning.

So, again, the layoff buddy comes in handy for these kinds of troubles. But the one area of unemployment that you kind of have to navigate on your own is the tricky business of figuring out what to do with the residual anger that latches on to you when you lose your job. After all, nothing is more impolite than walking around with a chip on your shoulder. Commiserating about the circumstances of your layoff ad nauseum won’t help you much in the long run, either. Doing this can lead to an “us-versus-them” mentality, which can sabotage your efforts to land a new job.

One of my tricks for combating this is by practicing what I call Therapy By Proxy. When money is tight you’re less likely to run out and hire a therapist to guide you through the recession. But that doesn’t mean you can’t listen to the advice your friend’s (who may or may not be your layoff buddy) therapist gives her! For example, a friend’s therapist advised her to journal all of her angry thoughts, telling her that once she gets them all out of her head, she’ll figure out what to do with them.

 I decided to do something similar. Since I’m planning to be confirmed on Easter, one of the hurdles I had to clear was going to confession for the first time in many, many years. I thought that if I was able to vocalize to a priest all the anger I felt towards my company, I could be free from it. I kind of expected to experience a flood of relief after he assigned my penance, or that I would feel “shiny and new” as one friend put it. But it wasn’t that dramatic at all. I finally just realized sloughing off all the resentment is more of a process than I thought.

So I guess the moral of the story is this: don’t feel guilty for having a very emotional reaction to losing your job, and don’t feel like you must be a robot if you find yourself feeling kind of detached. Also, flood “Dear Prudence” and “Ask Amy” with emails begging them to write an etiquette guide for the newly unemployed. Someone’s got to do it.

*I wrote this for Hard Working too, hence all the layoff-related posts.